What’s Been Done to Lee Is Outrageous

The good news for Dr. Wen Ho Lee is that new evidence effectively exonerates the scientist as a suspect in China’s theft of U.S. nuclear weapons secrets. Late last week, the FBI leaked reports that the trail has now led them away from Lee and Los Alamos, where he worked, and into quite a different direction. Lee is now out of the loop, and the search for a culprit centers on the Sandia National Laboratories, Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Navy.

The bad news is that Lee can’t account for every single computer diskette he might have ever purchased, so the government may rap his knuckles with a charge of “gross negligence” regarding classified data.

The fact is, the gross negligence in this case was perpetuated by the FBI, CIA, congressional investigators and the leading news organizations that branded Lee a traitor when it is now amply clear that there is not a scintilla of evidence connecting him with a single act of espionage. That much is now admitted in the same highly confidential leaks from government sources that for most of this year have blithely defamed Lee as having profoundly threatened the security of the entire nation.

If there was any danger to national security, it was caused by the FBI, which wasted four years going after the wrong man for a potential act of subversion that occurred when Ronald Reagan was president. The Clinton administration has had to admit that its preoccupation with Lee led them to ignore the real possible sources of leaks for the miniaturized nuclear warhead for the W-88 missile, which was at the center of its investigation.

Last week, FBI leaks confirmed that the technical data on the weapon that was allegedly stolen were developed at other facilities after the weapon had passed through the Los Alamos design phase. Lee never had access to that data and therefore is in no legitimate way connected with this spy scandal.

This whole brouhaha goes back to what is known in the spy trade as a “walk in” document turned over to the U.S. in 1988 by a Chinese official whom the CIA quickly concluded was acting as a double agent. Nonetheless, the document suggested that the Chinese had obtained classified information on the W-88 weapon. As it now turns out, the information contained in the document was technically wrong and would not have allowed the manufacture of this weapon.

But those signature errors did not occur in the original design of the weapon at Los Alamos, where Lee worked. They show up instead later in the process and thousands of miles away at those facilities run by the Sandia National Labs, which builds prototypes of the warhead, and at Lockheed, which connects the warhead with the missile. Those revealing errors concerning the radius of the nuclear trigger device in the weapon in essence exonerate Lee and Los Alamos.

Murky, I know, but that’s a spy scandal for you. However, what is amply clear is that an innocent man has been defamed and that instead of apologizing to Lee, the FBI is looking to dig up any evidence of malfeasance, no matter how petty, unrelated and bureaucratic in scope, to stick him with a crime; any crime will do.

Give the guy a break. Lee has to be the most investigated scientist in U.S. history since the days of Robert Oppenheimer, with FBI agents snooping into the minutiae of his and his family’s life. If the FBI can’t find anything more against him than the charge of doing classified work on an unclassified computer, then he must be the most trustworthy guy in the country.

Not so trustworthy are those in the government and the media, led by the august New York Times, who so cavalierly smeared a man who devoted his life to the security of his adopted country. The new information in this case was carried prominently by the Washington Post and other newspapers (not including the Los Angeles Times, which had not sensationalized the case against Lee) last Friday, but surprisingly not even noticed, as of this writing, by the New York Times.

That paper first broke the story, based on anonymous government sources, that an unnamed scientist at Los Alamos was the key suspect in the theft of the W-88 secret. In response to the New York Times story, the Clinton administration last March named Lee as that suspect; he was fired, and the scientist and his family have been harassed since.

That is the true scandal in this story, and those in the government and the media who smeared an innocent man should not be allowed to get off the hook by conveniently shifting focus to the possibly careless computer work habits of the victim.