FBI Agents Told Scientist He Failed Polygraph Test

FBI agents misled physicist Wen Ho Lee into believing that he had failed a Department of Energy polygraph test as they pressed him during a lengthy interrogation last March to confess to passing nuclear weapons secrets to China.

Lee insisted throughout the tape-recorded session that he was telling the truth, unaware that polygraph examiners actually had given him an extremely high score for honesty.

“I don’t know why I fail,” Lee told the agents, according to a transcript obtained by the Washington Post. “But I do know I have not done anything. . . . I never give any classified information to Chinese people.”

The interrogation on March 7, 1999, the day before Lee was fired from his job at Los Alamos National Laboratory for violating security rules, was highly adversarial and ended only after Lee repeatedly asked to leave.

“I’m an honest person and I’m telling you all the truth, and you don’t believe it,” he said at one point.

Lee’s family and supporters view the transcript as a vivid demonstration that the FBI was unfair and even devious in its investigation of the 60-year-old, Taiwan-born scientist, who is being held without bail on charges of copying a vast trove of classified nuclear data to computer tapes, seven of which are missing. Prosecutors, however, deny that the investigation was biased or unethical in any way.

The March 7 interrogation came at a critical juncture in the FBI’s attempt to determine how China might have obtained secrets about the design of the W-88 warhead, America’s most sophisticated nuclear weapon.

Lee had become the government’s prime suspect, having acknowledged--immediately before taking a Department of Energy polygraph in December 1998--that Chinese weapons scientists asked him about the W-88 when he was in Beijing 10 years earlier. The polygraph examiners concluded that Lee was telling the truth when he said he had never passed classified information to China. But two months later, FBI polygraph examiners concluded that Lee was being deceptive when he was asked the same question.

Throughout the March 7 interrogation, FBI agents pressed Lee to admit that he had passed secrets to Chinese scientists at his Beijing hotel in 1988. The agents suggested that unless he confessed, he would be arrested and possibly executed.

“Do you know who the Rosenbergs are?” one of the agents asked Lee. “The Rosenbergs are the only people that never cooperated with the federal government in an espionage case. You know what happened to them? They electrocuted them, Wen Ho.”

“Yeah, I heard,” Lee replied.