Lee Refused Bail in Nuclear Secrets Case

Calling Wen Ho Lee a “clear and present danger to the United States,” a U.S. magistrate ordered the nuclear physicist held without bail Monday while he awaits trial for allegedly removing a vast computer compendium of America’s most valuable nuclear weapons secrets from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Earlier in the day, Lee had pleaded not guilty to the 59-count indictment in a hearing before U.S. Magistrate Don Svet in Albuquerque. Federal prosecutors argued that Lee might attempt to flee and requested that bond be denied.

Svet’s decision came as U.S. officials disclosed disturbing new details suggesting that the government’s case against Lee may be stronger than widely assumed, even though investigators were unable to find evidence to support initial FBI and Energy Department suspicions that he was a Chinese spy.

The charges focus on Lee’s alleged transfer of massive amounts of top-secret nuclear weapons data into an insecure internal computer network and then to 10 portable data tapes. The FBI found three of the tapes in Lee’s office, but it has been unable to locate the other seven.

Stephen Younger, head of the nuclear weapons program at Los Alamos, highlighted the danger, should the missing data fall into the wrong hands, the Associated Press reported. “These files were crucial to nuclear weapons design and represent centuries of work,” he told the court. “They represent the complete nuclear weapons design capabilities of Los Alamos at the time.”

In Washington, a U.S. official familiar with the evidence said that Lee was “deliberate, methodical and spent countless hours” organizing the download. The official added that the high-volume tapes contain a broad array of highly classified weapons-design data and other secrets that are not in Lee’s area of expertise, the hydrodynamics of nuclear weapons.

“These are not just things he worked on,” the official said. “He went far outside his area” to download data.

Another official called the data on the missing tapes “extraordinary,” adding that they contain “the tools that nuclear designers use.”

The tapes’ existence was first revealed when the indictment was handed down Friday. One of Lee’s lawyers, John Cline, told the court Monday that the tapes had been destroyed but he did not elaborate. “There’s no evidence [Lee] has the tapes, disclosed the tapes, attempted to disclose the tapes,” Cline said.

Although Lee was not charged with espionage, the indictment repeatedly alleges that he acted “with the intent to secure an advantage to a foreign nation.” None is identified, however.

U.S. officials close to the case said that the legal language reflects, in part, frustration over failing to find the missing tapes and the inability to identify a reasonable justification for Lee to copy so much secret data.

“If he didn’t give the tapes to someone, where are they?” asked one official. “That’s the chief concern right now.”

Lee previously has said that he moved classified data into the insecure network to safeguard it in case the lab’s mainframe computer crashed. But an official close to the investigation said that the insecure system could be accessed--or hacked--via modem from outside with a password. The system also could transmit data to an outside computer. The indictment does not allege that any secrets were lost from the insecure system, however.

Lee, a native of Taiwan who became a naturalized American in the early 1970s, held a “Q” clearance, which gave him access to the most closely guarded nuclear secrets at the lab. He worked in the lab’s X Division, where nuclear bombs and warheads are designed, from 1980 until last Dec. 23. He was fired last March for security violations after he failed to disclose potentially compromising contacts with Chinese scientists.

Until a new system was installed in 1995, the lab’s Cray mainframe computer held all classified and unclassified weapons programs and data in a single archival data storage system. The common file system had four levels of access, including a red-coded system for classified material and a green-coded system for unclassified and public material. In theory, someone with access to the red system could move classified material into the green, or “open,” area.

Prosecutors said that is what Lee did. In 1993 and 1994, they alleged, Lee improperly compiled 19 separate archival files containing scores of “secret restricted data” files--the most highly classified.

According to the indictment, Lee illegally downloaded “human readable . . . instructions” that can be given to a computer to calculate such nuclear physics data as “detonation, high-explosive burn, hydrodynamics, radiation transport, neutron transport, thermonuclear burn and weapon aging and degradation.”

Other material he allegedly transferred included computer programs to set up a simulated nuclear explosion, including “exact dimensions and other geometrical information about a particular nuclear weapon” before detonation. Also removed, the indictment charges, was information “that describes the size and shape of the components of a nuclear weapon” and graphic images from the primary and secondary stages of simulated nuclear explosions.

After he failed a polygraph test early this year, prosecutors said, Lee sought to erase the 380 files that he had created in the open network, including the 19 with secret data.