Chinese Americans Raise Funds for Target of Probe

Retired Orange County computer executive Roy Chang has never met Wen Ho Lee, a former physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory charged with transferring some of the nation’s most vital nuclear weapon secrets into less secure computers.

Chang says he doesn’t know if Lee is guilty or innocent. But he is raising money for the defense nonetheless because he fears that the rights of Chinese Americans are being threatened by the federal government’s aggressive prosecution of the scientist.

“We have to do something to make sure there is justice,” Chang said Sunday as he delivered almost $4,000 in checks to organizers of Lee’s legal defense fund.

Chang was just one of a group of Chinese American businessmen meeting at a Cerritos hotel who appealed to Southern California’s vast Asian community to come to Lee’s aid. “We have to help him because it’s kind of like the whole government going against an individual,” Chang said. “In order to prove his innocence he has to find the best lawyers he can find.”

Lee is being held without bail in Albuquerque, after being indicted late last month on 59 counts of violating the Atomic Energy and Espionage Acts for allegedly transferring data on the nation’s newest nuclear weapons to unsecured computers and to seven computer tapes, which the government says are missing. Lee, who was fired from his Los Alamos job last March for security violations, has pleaded not guilty.

After a highly publicized federal investigation, Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Taiwan, was not accused of passing classified information to any foreign government.

U.S. District Judge James Parker has denied Lee bail and expressed concern about possible “enormous harm” to the country if he is freed. Parker’s decision is being appealed.

Backers of the 60-year-old scientist argue the charges, which carry a maximum sentence of life in prison, are extreme and are having a chilling effect on Asian Americans.

“The situation is very bad,” said Charlie Sie, vice chairman of the Committee of 100, an influential nationwide group of Chinese American leaders. He told reporters that months of leaks from the FBI and Department of Energy about Lee has spawned an atmosphere of “mistrust and suspicion” about Asian American engineers and scientists at Southern California aerospace and defense contractors and in other industries.

Brian A. Sun, one of Lee’s lawyers, said the scientist is a victim of scapegoating of Chinese Americans by government officials stung by reports of lax security at the nation’s nuclear labs. Such an atmosphere is not Lee’s fault, he said.

The Santa Monica attorney likened the government’s pursuit of Lee to the “kind of hysteria” seen “whenever you raise the specter of national security.”

He noted a long history of actions against Asian Americans from the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, to distrust and fear of Communist China and recent allegations of Chinese attempts to influence the American political process and steal American nuclear secrets.