Accused Physicist to Sue Government

Jailed nuclear physicist Wen Ho Lee and his wife, Sylvia, will file a lawsuit today accusing the federal government of violating their privacy through improper leaks to news organizations reporting on alleged Chinese espionage at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to Lee’s lawyers.

Brian A. Sun, one of Lee’s lawyers, said Sunday that the suit will accuse the Energy Department, the Justice Department and the FBI of illegally disclosing confidential details of the Lees’ employment at Los Alamos, their financial records and results of polygraph tests since early this year.

The suit will allege that the disclosures were designed to create a “trial-by-media atmosphere” to convince the public that the Lees were Chinese spies, and to divert attention from problems in the government’s investigation.

The suit will argue that numerous news organizations, including The Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine and others, benefited from selective leaks.

“The Lees see themselves as victims of numerous unlawful leaks, many of which have been inaccurate,” Sun said Sunday. “They believe they are victims of this culture of arrogance, and that people should be held accountable.”

Each violation of the 1974 Privacy Act carries a potential fine of $1,000. Two large law firms--O’Neill, Lysaght & Sun of Santa Monica and the Washington office of Sidley & Austin--are handling the suit on a pro bono basis.

Lee, 59, was fired from Los Alamos in March. By then, he had been the target of a three-year FBI investigation into allegations of Chinese spying. But authorities ultimately concluded that no evidence linked the Lees to China’s apparent acquisition of classified design data from America’s most modern thermonuclear warhead, the W-88.

Lee instead was indicted and arrested on Dec. 10 on 59 unrelated counts of mishandling nuclear secrets at the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico. A federal magistrate ordered him jailed until his trial after Los Alamos officials testified that he might have compromised some of America’s most closely held nuclear secrets by copying a huge archive onto an insecure computer network and then onto cassette tapes. Seven of the 10 tapes that they say he made are unaccounted for.

Sylvia Lee has not been charged with a crime.

The magistrate, Don Svet, ordered last week that defense lawyers submit all classified material to a special review before it can be used as evidence. A federal law seeks to prevent defendants in national security cases from using the threat of revealing secrets in open court in an attempt to force the government to drop charges.

The lawsuit reveals several previously undisclosed details of the Lees’ background.

Lee was born in Nantou, Taiwan, in 1939 and graduated from Cheng Kung University there in 1963 with a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering, according to the suit. He came to the United States in 1965 and began graduate studies in mechanical engineering at Texas A&M; University, where he received a doctorate in 1969.

He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1974 and was hired at Los Alamos in 1978, where he worked in applied mathematics and fluid dynamics until he was fired.

Sylvia Lee was born in Hunan, China, in 1943. She emigrated to the United States in 1969 and became a naturalized citizen in 1977. She joined Los Alamos in 1980, working two years as a secretary and 13 years as a data analyst.

Both Lees possessed “Q” level security clearance, the highest level clearance issued by the U.S. government.