Prosecutors Raise Stakes in Nuclear Secrets Case

Jailed Los Alamos physicist Wen Ho Lee transferred some of America’s most valuable nuclear weapons secrets into a computer network so accessible to the outside world that they were “open to not very sophisticated hackers on the Internet,” a government witness said Monday.

The testimony at a federal court hearing in Albuquerque came as U.S. prosecutors alleged for the first time that Lee stole computerized nuclear weapons development, testing and design secrets “sufficient to build a functional thermonuclear weapon.”

The government thus dramatically raised the rhetorical ante in a case that has sparked controversy, confusion and concern since U.S. officials first publicly identified Lee in March as a possible Chinese spy. Lee’s supporters, including some who rallied at the courthouse Monday with signs reading “Free Wen Ho Lee,” insist he has become a government scapegoat for lax security at Los Alamos and ineptitude at the FBI.

One of the largest FBI investigations in history found no evidence that Lee passed secrets to China or anyone else, and the FBI probe into Chinese spying was restarted from scratch in September. But Lee was arrested on Dec. 10 on 59 unrelated counts of mishandling secret nuclear weapons computer programs and data at Los Alamos. If convicted, he could face life in prison.

Lee’s lawyers asked U.S. District Judge James A. Parker at the hearing Monday to overturn a magistrate’s earlier ruling and release Lee on bail until his trial, which may be more than a year away. They said they are holding his passport in a safe.

“There’s clearly no evidence to show that he’s a flight risk or a danger to the community,” said Brian Sun, one of Lee’s lawyers, in a telephone interview. He said the government case is based on “circumstantial evidence, innuendo or inference.”

Lee was born in Taiwan but is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He joined Los Alamos in 1980 and was moved to the top-secret weapons design division a year later.

Lee was fired in March for alleged security violations, including erasing or cutting off “top secret” markings from three highly classified documents and failing to report unauthorized contacts with Chinese officials. The FBI, which interviewed Lee six times from Jan. 17 to March 8, unsuccessfully sought to persuade him to confess to spying for Beijing. He denied any wrongdoing.

But after Lee’s dismissal, investigators said he had moved vast amounts of “secret restricted data,” including the so-called “source codes” of most of America’s nuclear weapons, into an unclassified computer system. Prosecutors say Lee spent more than 40 hours moving the files on nights and weekends in 1993 and 1994 and repeatedly deceived his colleagues about his intentions.

“The files were open to not-very-sophisticated hackers on the Internet,” Cheryl L. Wampler, a computer expert at Los Alamos, testified Monday.

John J. Kelly, the U.S. attorney for New Mexico, argued that the classified material amounted to a virtual blueprint for construction of a modern nuclear weapon, a contention that appeared to go further than previous assertions by Energy Department officials.

At Lee’s Dec. 13 arraignment, Robert Messemer, the FBI agent in charge of the case, testified that Lee effectively had declassified the equivalent of more than 400,000 printed pages of highly classified computer data.

Messemer said FBI agents searching Lee’s home with a warrant on April 10 found a notebook that meticulously listed in Chinese all the classified and unclassified files that Lee had moved. The notebook also indicated that Lee had put the data on at least 15 high-density portable data tapes. Six were later located in Lee’s cluttered office, and two others were determined to contain unclassified data.

The other seven tapes, including one that Lee downloaded directly from the classified computer system in 1997 and that contains America’s latest nuclear weapons secrets, now are key to the government’s case.

Sun said Lee transferred the files in order to protect the data in case the main Los Alamos computer crashed, as well as to make his work easier. “A lot of people do this,” Sun said.

Messemer said, however, that interviews with more than 300 of Lee’s colleagues at Los Alamos found none who had done anything similar, or who could explain his actions.