Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos National Laboratory weapons scientist: Sentenced

 

Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos National Laboratory weapons scientist

Lee's daughter, Alberta, who has been one of his most tireless supporters, said the analysis fit a pattern, in her view, of the lab's management finding scapegoats to blame for broader management weaknesses at Los Alamos.

"I think it makes logical sense for their careers to say this about my dad," said Alberta Lee, who is now a law student at UC Davis. "I maintain that my dad was just doing his job."

Lee had spent years as a nuclear weapons designer when he was investigated on suspicions he had stolen the nuclear secrets and possibly handed them to a foreign government. At one time, federal officials had said they believed he might have provided the information to China, a claim that eventually fueled charges from his supporters that Lee was a victim of racial profiling because he is Chinese American.

Lee was indicted on 59 counts in December 1999. He was held largely in solitary confinement until the government agreed to drop all but one of the least serious charges. Lee pleaded guilty on Sept. 13, 2000, and was sentenced to time served and released.

But that was hardly the end of the matter.

The federal district judge who handled the case in Albuquerque, James Parker, delivered a blistering rebuke of the federal government at the plea hearing. He blasted the government for fighting to keep Lee in solitary confinement on what he said were misleading claims about the nature of the offenses. Parker singled out the senior federal officials responsible, questioned the seriousness of the charges in the original indictment, which potentially carried a life sentence, and then issued an apology for the way Lee had been treated.

Parker made it clear, though, that there was plenty of blame to go around.

"Dr. Lee, you have pled guilty to a serious crime," he said. "It's a felony offense. For that you deserved to be punished."

And in a recent interview with The Chronicle, the judge reiterated that his criticisms of the government were for the way it handled the case, not the fact that it had prosecuted Lee.

"This often has been overlooked," Parker said. "I said to Dr. Lee at the time, 'You did commit a serious offense for which you should be punished.' "

From all appearances, these would seem to be days of vindication for Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos National Laboratory weapons scientist whose politically charged fight with the federal government is still being waged four years after he settled charges he mishandled nuclear secrets.

A suit Lee filed claiming the government improperly leaked private information about him has made progress, with a federal judge ruling that five journalists must disclose the sources of damning information they printed about Lee. And his former employer, Los Alamos, has suffered from a string of security scandals that mirror comments he and his attorneys had made about lax procedures.

However, more quietly, new details about the crime Lee committed are emerging, and they are reviving some of the unanswered questions and ambiguities over why he downloaded a trove of nuclear weapons secrets.

Lee never denied that he had downloaded a virtual library of data on weapons tests and designs and placed some of the material on 10 portable cassettes that he took home, seven of which he said he had destroyed and were never found. He insisted, though, that he had not leaked the data to anyone else and that the downloading had been for work purposes.

In order to learn some lessons from a security standpoint, the federal government recently concluded a long and careful technical reconstruction of all Lee's actions at Los Alamos. Several experts and government advisers who received a highly classified briefing at the Department of Energy on the results of that forensic analysis said in interviews that its conclusions were extremely critical of Lee, showing an extensive pattern of deceptions on his part in circumventing computer security safeguards, some of which were disclosed at hearings in his criminal case.

None of the experts would disclose what Lee had allegedly done to defeat computer restrictions on handling classified data, but during those hearings, the government described how Lee had allegedly transferred data from secure to unsecure computers improperly or borrowed workstations from colleagues to download secrets to cassettes.

Of even greater concern, said the experts, who spoke on condition that they not be identified, the analysis also made clear that the information Lee downloaded included some highly sensitive secrets relating to warhead designs and performance that posed a national security threat if they had been leaked. In hearings in his case it was disclosed that the information related to computer-based testing of different warhead designs.

"I was very surprised at how bad this was," said one of the experts.

During a hearing in Lee's case, one senior official had called the information "the crown jewels" of the weapons labs, while Lee had once referred to most of it as flawed "garbage" that would be of little use in actually designing a warhead.

The experts who heard the recent briefing said that the truth was somewhere in between and that at least some of the information on warhead specifications was highly important and its loss would have been quite serious for the United States.

Brian Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the weapons labs, confirmed that the technical briefings took place earlier this year. He said that since the information was classified, he could not comment further, other than to say the analysis provided a step-by-step look at what had happened -- but did not address the question of why Lee had downloaded the material -- and that the aim was to improve security.

Lee's attorney, Brian Sun, said he would not comment on the analysis, adding that he would not go beyond what Lee admitted in his one-count felony plea agreement -- essentially, mishandling classified information.

However, he added, he believed the government had misled him about the threat that Lee posed. That may turn into just one of many unanswered questions.

Lee's attorneys had charged that Lee had been unfairly singled out for prosecution, known as selective prosecution, and that other officials who had committed similar offenses had been treated far less harshly. The defense won a motion demanding that the government hand over a huge volume of documents on the question of how others in a similar position as Lee had been handled. The government settled the Lee case just days before the deadline for providing that information. With the plea, the documents remained secret.

Lee's attorneys had also claimed that most of the information Lee had downloaded was actually available in scholarly journals and other unclassified sources. It appears now that that question will never be answered publicly.

Lee filed his civil law suit claiming his right to privacy was violated by deliberate government leaks to the media. He won a major victory when subpoenas to six journalists were upheld and then more recently when a federal judge cited five of the journalists for contempt for not disclosing their sources. The matter may now be settled in an appeals court.

Even then, Sun said, he is not confident that the reporters would actually reveal confidential sources. The leaks, he admitted, may always be a source of conjecture. He said that there had been some preliminary discussions with the government about settling Lee's civil case out of court, but that there had been no substantial progress.

Charles Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the government would have no comment on the litigation.