No espionage case in recent decades has been anything like the Wen
Ho Lee affair. As Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman describe in "A
Convenient Spy, " an astonishingly inept investigation of a crime
that may never have occurred ended in a national disgrace. A
weapons-code scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lee was
hunted as a spy for China, indicted on fifty-nine counts, and held
in detention for nine months as a threat to the entire nation. But
after pleading guilty to just one count, he went home -- with an
unusual and emotional apology from a federal judge. Prosecutors'
claims that Lee had stolen America's "crown jewels" of nuclear
security simply evaporated. Yet Lee's motives have never been
satisfactorily explained, and his often-repeated excuse that he was
just backing up his work files does not stand up to scrutiny.
As Stober and Hoffman report, Lee's lies and his unexplained
connections to foreign scientists spanned eighteen years. He was a
security nightmare. Tapping at his keyboard, he assembled a private
collection of the computer programs used to design America's
nuclear weapons, then left them vulnerable to hackers and foreign
intelligence services for years. The FBI's belated discovery that
he had also put the codes on portable cassette tapes launched a
frenzied worldwide search that eventually carried agents to the Los
Alamos landfill. And yet today, the tapes have never been
found.
In 1995, Lee was just another American, a Taiwanese immigrant
striving to support a family he cherished and to make a name for
himself in scientific circles. Unknown to him, however, scientists
working in the secret world of nuclear-weapons intelligence
examined purloined Chinese documents, studied spy reports, and
wondered: Had China stolen the secrets of the W88, America's most
advanced nuclear weapon? Scientific hunches rapidly evolved into a
criminal investigation aimed at Lee. He had been overheard by the
FBI while telephoning a spy suspect, and he was warmly embraced by
a high-ranking Chinese nuclear-weapons official whom he wasn't
supposed to know. The FBI noted that he was "ethnic Chinese." And
in this uncertain period after the Cold War, many politicians
played up China as a threatening new enemy. Energy Secretary and
vice presidential hopeful Bill Richardson was eager to fire Lee and
appear decisive in protecting national security.
In this stormy confluence of intelligence and politics, Lee
became a convenient spy. But was he guilty?
Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman tell the story of the Wen Ho Lee
fiasco dramatically and authoritatively, providing an objective
account that no partisan version of the story can match.
General
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