Guilty?

...The combination of "lab culture," organizational disarray, managerial neglect, and sheer arrogance created, in the words of one 1999 govern -ment report, "an espionage scandal waiting to happen...

...In the end, neither book provides a satisfactory answer to the question of Chinese nuclear espionage and the extent of Wen Ho Lee's participation...

...His systematic gathering of files containing classified information from his unsuspecting colleagues remains unexplained...

...Months later, the FBI was seen digging in the huge landfill outside of Los Alamos...

...But in their telling, the real victim is the Los Alamos National Laboratory and America's nuclear-weapons complex—a world of happy, hard-working scientists wrecked by suspicion, ham-fisted investigation, and political expediency...

...Of the fact of espionage there is no doubt: The American intelligence community twice in 1999 publicly declared that the Chinese had acquired nuclear-warhead secrets by espionage...

...How it happened remains a mystery...

...And where are the computer tapes...

...Lee was widely portrayed as part fall guy, an innocent man on whom decades of mismanageThe First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused of Being A Spy by Wen Ho Lee, with Helen Zia ment at the nation's laboratories could be blamed, and part victim, a scapegoat on whose head descended the political hysteria about China that swept through Washington in 1999...

...But in depositions given in a lawsuit just weeks before his book's publication, Lee contradicted the claims about racial profiling he makes in My Country Versus Me...

...A key ingredient in Lee's defense strategy was the allegation that he was selectively prosecuted because he was Chinese...

...Stober and Hoffman report the 1988 meeting with Hu and even claim that Hu asked Lee some very pointed questions about the W88 warhead...

...Unfortunately, the FBI's bungled investigation of the Lee case has left the United States no closer to discovering the sources of that espionage today than it was in 1996...

...Lee says that he destroyed the tapes by tossing them in a dumpster inside the security perimeter near Los Alamos's Main Administration Building...

...Fall guy and victim: That's certainly how Wen Ho Lee sees himself...

...In 1996, Wen Ho Lee had already been the subject of two previous FBI investigations...

...There is this much truth to Wen Ho Lee's claim: The woeful record of security problems at America's nuclear labs goes back to at least the late 1970s, and the Department of Energy has a long record of mismanagement and neglect of security...

...By 1998, the impending report of the Cox Committee on the Clinton administration's failure to cope with Chinese espionage motivated the FBI to finish the Lee investigation as quickly as possible...

...Why was he so secretive about them...

...By 1995, Energy Department policies that encouraged "openness," a flood of sensitive-country visitors into the labs, and severe budget cuts had brought security at the labs to a crisis point...

...A government report in 1998 listed 324 outside attacks on lab networks in just a few months during 1997 and 1998...

...The real story of Wen Ho Lee is far murkier and more disturbing than that portrayed in My Country Versus Me or A Convenient Spy—to say nothing of the media's endless morality plays...

...His book on spying at American labs, Code Name KINDRED SPIRIT: Inside the Chinese Nuclear Espionage Scandal, is forthcoming from Encounter Books...

...Another 1999 government report concluded that security at the Energy Department nuclear laboratories was so bad that "sensitive nuclear weapons information was certainly lost to espionage...

...Stonewalling and denial—of both past events and continuing risks—best sums up the attitude of the Energy Department and the labs it is supposed to be running...

...Among the many unanswered questions about the case, none is as striking as those surrounding the FBI's handling of the case in late 1998 and early 1999...

...The first was back in the early 1980s and involved his contact with another espionage suspect at Liv-ermore National Laboratory, together with a history of unauthorized interactions with Taiwanese scientists and intelligence officers...

...Why did the FBI allow a private security firm to polygraph Lee, even though Lee had been under FBI investigation for nearly four years...

...Los Alamos's monitoring systems could detect intruders logging on to the network, but were unable to tell which files were accessed during the intrusion...

...How did Lee get back into a highly secure lab facility and gather up tapes and other incriminating materials at 2:45 a.m.—after his clearance had been revoked and his access to this facility suspended...

...After dragging its feet for three years, the FBI uncovered evidence of unreported contacts with very senior nuclear officials from the People's Republic of China...

...It seems that for more than a decade, Wen Ho Lee had been building a personal library of nuclear-weapons codes, classified details of nuclear-warhead designs, and files containing all the classified data from the more than a thousand nuclear tests conducted by the United States over the past four decades...

...More to the point, why did Lee collect other scientists' data...

...Lee did nothing wrong, or at least nothing that many other non-Chinese scientists at Los Alamos hadn't done before and probably since...

...Under oath he said that he doesn't think that he was indicted because he was Chinese, that he never told his lawyers to allege that he was investigated because he was Chinese, that he didn't agree with Vrooman's allegations, that he had never experienced racism, and that he didn't even understand the term "racial profiling...

...Lee failed a polygraph administered in February 1999, specifically on questions related to the W88 warhead and the provision of weapons codes to unauthorized persons...

...In My Country Versus Me, Wen Ho Lee claims, "Had I not been Chinese, I never would have been accused of espionage and threatened with execution...

...After a defense strategy aided as much by a bungling prosecution team as its own legal maneuverings, Wen Ho Lee accepted a plea bargain...

...When it finally got around to interviewing him, Lee told the Bureau that he been assisting the Chinese in improving their nuclear-weapons codes...

...It was known by 1996 that China was after exactly the type of nuclear-weapons codes and testing data contained in Wen Ho Lee's tape collection...

...Why did the FBI neglect to establish surveillance on Lee after the polygraph, thereby missing his destruction of incriminating evidence...

...After a brief interlude, lab doors are open once again to sensitive-country visitors, including those from countries on the terrorist watch list...

...In fact, there were good reasons the government focused on Lee, and why in 1996 Lee became the FBI's main suspect in the loss of secrets to China about the W88 thermonuclear warhead, the smallest and most advanced in the United States' nuclear arsenal...

...Lab computer networks remain vulnerable to insider threats...

...Stripped of the cover of racism, the defense of Wen Ho Lee loses most of its steam—and the nagging questions about his activities return...

...Wen Ho Lee and,JhmMs of America's nuclear secrets BY NOTRA TRULOCK III Was Wen Ho Lee a spy who passed American nuclear secrets to the People's Republic of China or a victim of a racial witch-hunt by the American government...

...Lee says that he doesn't regret making the tapes and his only mistake was using an unclassified computer to do it...

...Nearly every other participant in the case testified that racism or racial profiling played no role in Lee's selection as a FBI espionage suspect...

...But if the investigation began again today, Wen Ho Lee would still be a prime suspect...

...The combination of these two made the Chinese espionage successes possible...

...The Justice Department and the FBI have only Wen Ho Lee's word that the tapes were destroyed and not acquired by the Chinese...

...A check of Lee's travel reports showed that Lee had failed to include Hu among his reported travel contacts...

...Not long ago, Los Alamos "misplaced" yet more sensitive nuclear-weapons design information, but then quickly claimed it had "found" the lost data...

...President Clinton questioned the fairness of his own Justice Department's strategy of holding Lee in solitary confinement (a strategy devised in the White House situation room in December 1999 in the presence of Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger...

...And what of the tapes themselves, including one made in 1997 containing the latest design details of the W88 warhead...

...What transpired during Lee's meetings with Chinese nuclear scientists...

...The case created a backlash in the media against the FBI, the Justice The former director of intelligence at the Department of Energy, Notra Tulock III was a senior official involved in the investigation of the loss of nuclear secrets...

...Ethnic profiling was much in the news then, and Vrooman's allegations got widespread coverage...

...Security problems continue to fester...

...Lee says he did meet Hu Side in 1988, but was afraid to tell the FBI for fear that he would get in trouble, and that he has no memory of the 1994 meeting with Hu Side...

...Despite mounting evidence pointing to espionage, federal prosecutors decided to focus instead on Lee's illegal computer activities...

...His book about his troubles, My Country Versus Me—with a cover showing a sad-faced Lee standing before the Stars and Stripes, a spare desert landscape in the distance—rarely misses an opportunity to argue that none of this would have happened to him had he not been Chinese...

...They indicted him on fifty-nine counts of mishandling classified information and persuaded a federal judge to impose "special administrative measures" on him, including solitary confinement in the Santa Fe County Detention Facility...

...Lee declined to seek help from the lab's computer experts to preserve his own data and broke any number of security regulations in making his own tapes...

...They dismiss his assistance to China's nuclear-code writers as "harmless," with many benign applications besides the development of nuclear weapons...

...A Justice Department report released in 2002 concluded that racism was never a factor in this case: Wen Ho Lee was investigated because of his failure to comply with his security obligations and substantial indications that he had been helping the Chinese nuclear-weapons program since the mid-1980s...

...The vulnerability of the network, on which Lee stored these files for more than a decade, led many to fear that all our classified nuclear-warhead secrets were compromised...

...He also admitted the government had valid reasons for investigating him...

...It took the FBI some time to become serious about this second investigation, but eventually it learned that Lee had not only failed to mention his meetings with Hu but had lied repeatedly about his contacts with China's nuclear scientists—telling his superiors nothing about what information the Chinese had sought from him and what assistance he had provided...

...The other new book on the Wen Ho Lee scandal, A Convenient Spy, goes further still...

...The FBI's inept handling of the case opened the way for Lee's defense team to transform the issue from espionage to racism...

...Then the FBI made an astonishing discovery...

...Hu was overheard to say that Lee had helped China with computer codes and software...

...They fail to note, however, that had Lee reported this 1988 meeting with Hu Side to the FBI (which was sponsoring his trip and picking up his expenses), the United States would have learned of a security breach involving the W88 years before the American intelligence community finally determined that the Chinese had acquired secret details about the warhead...

...He had stored this library on a notoriously vulnerable unclassified computer network at Los Alamos National Laboratory and also on several portable computer tapes...

...Explaining his actions as merely the typical ones of a scientist interacting with international colleagues, both books reject the notion that Wen Ho Lee actually aided the Chinese...

...Ian Hoffman, who reports on Los Alamos affairs for the Albuquerque Journal, and Dan Stober, who covers Livermore National Lab for the San Jose Mercury News, insist that Lee was wronged by his government...

...The defense stressed that many other non-Chinese lab scientists and even a former CIA director had done almost the same thing and weren't spending their days in solitary confinement...

...Department, and the Department of Energy (which oversees the labs in which Lee worked...

...Even Los Alamos counterintelligence official Robert Vrooman would skeptically record in his 1988 journal that Wen Ho Lee was apparently the only Los Alamos scientist to have visited China twice and not been asked for classified information...

...But the process was botched, and, with Lee steadfastly denying wrongdoing, FBI agent Dave Kitchen pronounced Lee "not guilty" of nuclear espionage...

...He had lost important files in the past and didn't want to go through that again...

...Robert Vrooman came forward with charges that Lee had been selected back in 1996 as a W88 espionage suspect solely on the basis of his ethnicity...

...In fact, he says that he was doing the country a service "by keeping his codes safe and secure in a version that could be restored, . . . I believed that I was doing something good for America...

...But his claim is contradicted by lab computer officials, who testified that the lab's computer network was stable by 1993, when Lee started his tape collection, and that Los Alamos routinely backed up and stored copies of each weapons code and data file, so Lee and other scientists wouldn't lose their work in the event of a system crash...

...But perhaps more distressing is the fact that little has changed at Los Alamos and America's other nuclear-research institutions...

...Even after the Wen Ho Lee scandal, another espionage case at the nation's nuclear laboratories seems waiting to happen...

...the Bureau found some tapes, but these weren't from Lee's collection...

...They accept Lee's claim, for example, that his assistance to his Chinese counterparts was minimal, all of it based on unclassified data, and, in any event, had been approved by Los Alamos...

...The second was opened in 1994 after Hu Side, the chief of China's nuclear-weapons program, was spotted greeting Lee like a long-lost brother at a Los Alamos meeting...

...Lee walked out of a federal courtroom on September 13, 2000, a free man and even a hero for seeming to stand up to a heavy-handed government prosecution...

...An offer made this year of limited immunity to Lee's wife in return for her help finding the computer tapes indicates that the Justice Department and the FBI aren't satisfied that Lee's account of the final disposition of the tapes is the last word...

...In fact, he claims, the only reason he made the tapes in the first place is that he was afraid that he would lose all his hard work when the Los Alamos computer system "crashed...

...Meanwhile, press reports about Chinese nuclear-espionage efforts, coupled with the Clinton administration's questionable solicitation of funds for the 1996 election, had resulted in the creation of a congressional investigative committee under Representative Christopher Cox...

...The FBI eventually closed that investigation, probably after Wen Ho Lee and his wife offered to work for the FBI collecting information on the Chinese scientists they would meet in the expanding Los Alamos-Chinese laboratory exchanges...

...Trading information on the whereabouts of his computer tapes in exchange for his freedom, he pled guilty to one count of mishandling classified information and was sentenced to time served—227 days of solitary confinement—and a small fine...