I Spy an Overzealous FBI

Wen Ho Lee lost his job at the Los Alamos National Laboratory but he hasn’t lost his watchers. Wherever Lee goes, as Times correspondent Bob Drogin reported earlier this week, FBI agents are hot on his heels, “24 hours a day” in the words of one official. It’s unclear just what this costly and wide-open surveillance is accomplishing, outside of harassing a spying suspect whom, the government admits, it does not have the evidence to bring to trial.

On Wednesday, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno all but conceded that in focusing on Lee as the sole suspect in possible nuclear espionage for the benefit of China, the FBI ignored other leads and possible suspects. The bureau now plans to expand its inquiry to look at more than 500 people who had the same access as Lee to key weaponry information. This broadening of a three-year-long inquiry, coming so late, reinforces the impression that this has been one of the most maladroit espionage investigations in memory.

At this point it’s not even certain that espionage on behalf of China occurred at Los Alamos. U.S. intelligence agencies inferred that it had after getting hold of a Chinese military document in 1995 that contained information about the American W-88 warhead, a compact missile-mounted nuclear device. Lee was one of those who had access to material about the W-88, and he had--openly and with the government’s approval--met with Chinese scientists both at Los Alamos and in China. This might have been a reason to put Lee on a list of suspects. But investigators went well beyond that. They convinced themselves that Lee was the only plausible suspect. Despite enormous exertion they have been unable to produce evidence to sustain that belief.

Three months ago, President Clinton’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board called attention to a fact the FBI and other intelligence agencies had apparently chosen to ignore: Information about the W-88 was available to hundreds of people, any of whom might in theory have passed secrets to a foreign country. The Defense and Energy departments as well as private contractors all had access to information about the W-88. In their rush to nail Lee, investigators failed to pursue these other avenues.

The bungling in this case doesn’t mean that espionage hasn’t taken place. That possibility remains, especially given what’s now known about the years of inexcusably lax security at the nation’s nuclear labs. But in concluding that Los Alamos was a key target of China’s espionage and that Lee was the prime suspect, the FBI committed itself to two crucial assumptions, neither of which it has been able to prove.

The wider inquiry that has been promised might produce something more definitive. But if nothing further can be discovered linking Wen Ho Lee to spying, then this alleged prime suspect is due an apology and restitution. This spying inquiry seems to have been characterized more by zealotry than by rigor. That is no way to run a counterespionage investigation.