Los Alamos Tunnel Vision

Wen Ho Lee, a scientist fired from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, spent 279 days in solitary confinement while the Federal Bureau of Investigation tried vainly to build a case that would convict him of espionage or, failing that, coerce a confession that he had spied for China. That the FBI made a mess of its three-year-long investigation into an alleged theft of nuclear secrets comes as no revelation. But a Justice Department review of the case, completed 14 months ago and now partially released in heavily censored form, details more clearly than ever how the Energy Department’s own bungled inquiry “misled” the FBI and “compromised and undermined” its investigative efforts.

The review faults the FBI for too readily buying into the conclusion of Energy Department investigators that Lee was the only person who had “opportunity, motivation and legitimate access” to the nuclear weapons information that might have been leaked to China. In fact, while Lee might reasonably have been considered a suspect, he was only one of hundreds of people, civilian and military, working for private contractors or the government who had access to data about the W-88, a nuclear warhead that may have been copied by Beijing.

The Energy Department’s investigation, the review says, “should have been a sieve resulting in the identification of a number of suspects.” Instead, “it ended up as a funnel from which only Wen Ho and [his wife] Sylvia Lee emerged.”

It was a textbook example of investigators fixating early on one suspect with one presumed motive and closing their minds to any alternatives. By focusing narrowly on Los Alamos as the only place from which secrets may have been taken and on Lee, a naturalized American of Taiwanese origin, investigators stalked and harassed a man against whom they found it impossible to construct a credible legal case. They may also, in their zealous single-mindedness, have let a spy or spies escape.

Loose-mouthed officials who tried to brand Lee as the master agent of Chinese nuclear espionage had to settle for far less when he was freed last September after pleading guilty to one count of downloading nuclear secrets onto computer tapes.

But while the Lee case is effectively over, it must not be forgotten. The government is capable of wielding enormous power over the lives of Americans. It is also fallible. In the Lee case it conducted a startlingly inept investigation that left it looking incompetent, foolish and--most disturbingly--implacably ready to go where it wanted to go, whatever evidence or possibilities might contradict its preconceptions.