Scientist in China Spy Case Offers a Defense

The lawyer for Wen Ho Lee, in his first detailed response to allegations that his client passed America’s most prized nuclear secrets to China, said Thursday that Lee is a “loyal American” who once carried out an undercover mission for the FBI in an unsuccessful effort to ensnare another suspected Chinese spy.

Lee’s Los Angeles attorney, Mark Holscher, also denied in a six-page statement that the former Los Alamos National Laboratory computer expert had “given classified computer files to any unauthorized person.” He said “no third party could have [accessed] or did access his protected computer files.”

But the statement did not answer the key question of why, according to federal investigators, Lee repeatedly transferred top-secret computer files from a classified system at Los Alamos into an insecure system between 1983 and 1995, and then tried to delete them shortly before he was fired for security violations on March 8.

The so-called legacy codes contain complex mathematical computations and other classified programs created by U.S. scientists over decades to develop, build, test and simulate successive generations of nuclear weapons. Loss of the archival files would represent a staggering blow to U.S. national security.

So far, the FBI has yet to determine if anyone other than Lee gained access to the highly classified material. “Nobody can show any information went to the Chinese,” a law enforcement official said Thursday. But he added that investigators are “very optimistic” that a prosecution is likely in the case.

Lee has not been charged.

Holscher said in a telephone interview that he would provide a “detailed confidential explanation” of Lee’s actions to the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, who is the chief prosecutor in the case. Holscher added that he does not yet possess the top-secret security clearances required to review the files.

“Our release of this information is certainly not to be viewed as a summary of our numerous compelling explanations,” he said.

Holscher said in his statement that Lee, like other Los Alamos scientists, was permitted to spend 20% of his time on projects unrelated to his classified work. Lee’s computer, he said, thus contained “dozens of non-classified codes” containing several hundred thousand lines of computer code.

“Dr. Lee’s changing of file names on non-classified computer codes to reflect improvements he made in non-classified codes is not only proper, it is accepted and recognized as standard procedure when revising computer codes,” he said.

But a scientist who has worked on the classified computer files that Lee transferred said Holscher’s statement “doesn’t even deal with classified codes. He talks about other things and what [Lee] did with unclassified codes. Those are distinctly different.”

Holscher, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles who is now a partner in the Los Angeles-based law firm of O’Melveny & Myers LLP, said that Lee, a naturalized American who was born in Taiwan, has “dedicated himself to the defense of this country for the last 20 years.”

He added: “His work, much of which is classified, has led directly to the increased safety and national security of all Americans, and he is responsible for helping this country simulate nuclear tests.”

In the years before he was fired, Lee was assigned to the lab’s “stockpile stewardship” program, which uses the world’s fastest computer and other highly sensitive equipment to model and simulate nuclear explosions. The goal is to maintain the reliability and safety of nuclear weapons without actually testing them, which would violate the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Holscher’s statement, titled “A Reply to Misleading Press Reports Concerning Dr. Wen Ho Lee--May 6, 1999,” also includes several startling new details about the FBI’s use of Lee and his wife, Sylvia, during the 1980s.

According to Holscher, the FBI sent Lee on an undercover mission to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco after an FBI wiretap in 1982 overheard Lee telephone a Livermore scientist “who was rumored to be facing disciplinary action for delivering a scientific paper in Taiwan.” At the time, Lee was considering delivering a paper in Taiwan.

The Livermore scientist, who has never been publicly identified, actually was under suspicion for passing classified information to China that helped Beijing explode a neutron bomb in 1981. The scientist later was fired from Livermore, but was never charged, and the case remains open.

“The FBI paid for Dr. Lee’s travel expenses” to Livermore, Holscher said. “Dr. Lee received instructions from the FBI before the meeting, met with the scientist and then briefed the FBI after this meeting.”

In a polygraph administered by the FBI after the trip, Lee’s answers indicated deception on seven questions relating to possible ties to foreign intelligence agencies and whether he had delivered classified information. After he was given a chance to explain his answers, Lee was retested and passed.

On Thursday, a U.S. official familiar with the neutron bomb investigation confirmed Lee’s role.

“It was another case where we tried everything we could, and didn’t make it,” the official said. “The suspect was very suspicious of us and wasn’t cooperating. . . . Lee didn’t know him, he came out of the blue, so we may have tipped our hand by using him.”

Holscher also provided new details of Sylvia Lee’s work as an unpaid FBI informant between 1985 and 1991. He said she attended a 1986 scientific conference in Beijing with her husband, “where she voluntarily provided background information on Chinese scientists” and briefed the FBI.

In 1988, she wrote a report for the FBI after she and her husband returned from a second scientific conference in Beijing. She forwarded copies of all correspondence with Chinese scientists to the FBI until 1991, when the FBI ended the relationship because it decided she wasn’t offering anything she hadn’t already given Los Alamos officials.

“In helping the FBI, Mrs. Lee put herself and her husband at risk, with no possible benefit to herself or her husband,” Holscher said. “Mrs. Lee never requested any payment from the FBI for her help, although the government paid her expenses to travel to mainland China with her husband and offered to pay her expenses for entertaining Chinese scientists who visited the Los Alamos Laboratory.”

In the interview, Holscher said the FBI gave Sylvia Lee a hot plate, a coffeepot and other gifts as “tokens of its appreciation for her work.”

The U.S. official disputed parts of that account, however. The official said the FBI never asked Sylvia Lee to go to China, didn’t approve or authorize her trips, and never paid her way. The official added that the FBI doesn’t hand out kitchen appliances.