Scientist Says Race Was Factor in U.S. Spy Case

A nuclear weapon scientist once suspected of spying for China says he was prosecuted because of his race in a book released Tuesday giving his side of the government case that ended with all but one charge against him being dropped.

“My Country Versus Me,” co-authored by Wen Ho Lee and journalist Helen Zia, argues the FBI and prosecutors singled out the Taiwan-born scientist because he is Chinese.

“Had I not been Chinese, I never would have been accused of espionage and threatened with execution,” Lee writes of an FBI interrogation session during which he says agents told him he faced the same fate as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in the electric chair in 1953 for spying for the Soviet Union.

Lee, 63 and a naturalized U.S. citizen, was fired from his job at the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in March 1999 amid allegations of spying for China. He was held in solitary confinement for nine months but never was charged with espionage.