-Caveat Lector-
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Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 12:42:36 -0500
From: Alexandra H. Mulkern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: SJMN: Scientist moved hundreds of classified files,
Posted at 8:09 p.m. PST Saturday, Dec. 16, 2000
Scientist moved hundreds of classified files, undetected for
years by Los Alamos officials
BY DAN STOBER
The Mercury News
Wen Ho Lee's troubles began in 1982, when he telephoned a nuclear
weapons scientist suspected of spying for China and offered to
find out who had ``squealed'' on him. The FBI was monitoring the
scientist's phone, and when agents asked Lee about his call, he
lied. Before the FBI investigation was over, he had admitted
passing sensitive, prohibited documents to Taiwan.
Although Lee's actions raised many red flags, no one acted to
revoke his high-level security clearance or to restrict his
access to classified data. It was a missed opportunity that
could have prevented everything that followed, said Edward
Curran, the current head of counterintelligence for the Energy
Department, which owns the Los Alamos lab.
Lee called the scientist, Gwo-Bao Min, at home in Danville in
Contra Costa County on the evening of Dec. 3, 1982. Min had
been dismissed from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
after suspicions arose that he had given China neutron bomb
secrets. The investigation of him was code-named ``Tiger Trap.''
Both Lee and Min were naturalized U.S. citizens, born in Taiwan.
It was a confused conversation. Lee had mistakenly assumed that
Min was in trouble for allegedly passing unclassified nuclear
reactor documents to Taiwan, not neutron bomb secrets to China.
He offered to use his contacts in Taiwan to find out who had
``squealed,'' but Min wasn't interested.
The FBI, listening in, opened an espionage investigation of Lee.
A year later, when agents approached Lee and asked him about the
call to Min, Lee stated, according to the FBI, ``that he had
never attempted to contact the employee, did not know the
employee and had not initiated any telephone calls to him.''
After agents confronted him with their evidence, Lee admitted
making the call. He had been providing documents about nuclear
reactors to the Taiwan government, he said, and he thought Min
was in trouble for doing the same thing.
Lee also acknowledged that he had passed specific documents that
Taiwanese officials in Washington had requested. Some documents,
while unclassified, were marked ``no foreign dissemination.''
Giving them to Taiwan was a violation of U.S. security rules.
``If they had told us, that would have been grounds for removing
his clearance permanently,'' Curran said.
But the FBI did not tell the Energy Department about its
investigation, which ended in early 1984. The FBI concluded that
Lee was not a spy and closed the case against him. Min was never
charged with any crime.
1985-1988 Lee and the Chinese
Wen Ho Lee arrived at Los Alamos, on a mesa in the high New
Mexico desert, in 1978. Before that he created safety software
for reactors at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental
Laboratory. He had come to the United States as a graduate
student in 1964, earning a doctorate in mechanical engineering
from Texas A&M University.
At Los Alamos, Lee was a code writer, writing software to
simulate the exotic physics of exploding nuclear weapons. He
didn't design weapons. Instead, he maintained the codes into
which the designers would feed electronic blueprints of their
latest bomb ideas to predict how the bomb might work. The lab's
supercomputers would crunch all night making the calculations on
a single problem.
Two years after Lee joined the lab, his wife, Sylvia Lee, a
native of China whom he met at the Rose Bowl in 1970, was hired
for a clerical position. They bought a ranch house and raised
their two children in White Rock, a suburban enclave of nuclear
scientists.
It was a time when Los Alamos scientists were encouraged to
develop close ties to scientists in the Chinese nuclear weapons
program. The United States wanted to learn more about China's
weapons program. And vice versa.
To outsiders, the idea of sending U.S. nuclear scientists to
China to hobnob with Chinese weapons specialists was an
astonishing and risky proposition.
``I'm more afraid of a visiting physicist than I am an
intelligence agent. I worry about a scientist who shares his
formula with the other guy because they have a wink, a smile and
a handshake, or they're going to save the world together,'' an
FBI counterintelligence agent in San Francisco once said.
Lee made his connections in 1985, at a conference at Hilton Head,
S.C. There, two Chinese nuclear weapons scientists befriended
him.
``They sat in the back row with Mao jackets,'' said Bob Clark, a
friend and co-worker of Lee.
It was obvious that they were interested in meeting U.S.
scientists, he added. ``You know what they're doing. Everybody
does. That's why they're there.''
One of the scientists was Li De Yuan from the Institute of
Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, China's equivalent
of Los Alamos. Li invited his American acquaintance to a
conference in Beijing in 1986. Lee, with the approval of Los
Alamos officials, accepted.
Lee's wife and children went with him and were warmly welcomed.
In an interrogation years later, an FBI agent would tell Lee that
his hosts had set him up to feel indebted: ``They took care of
your family,'' the agent said. ``They took you to the Great
Wall. They had dinners for you. Everything.''
In 1988, Lee was invited back for another conference. It would
prove to be an extraordinary trip.
In his hotel room in Beijing one night, Lee was visited by two
high-ranking Chinese scientists, Zheng Shaotang and Hu Side. It
was particularly remarkable that Lee, a low-ranking engineer,
would be visited by Hu, who would become head of the Chinese
nuclear weapons program six years later.
During the conversation, Hu asked Lee about the plutonium bomb in
the W-88, the warhead for the Trident missile and the most
advanced U.S. nuclear weapon. It was Lee's area of specialty.
Hu asked about the shape of the bomb -- an oval or egg shape,
rather than the more conventional sphere -- and how it was
ignited with two detonators, one at each end.
Hu's question was so basic, according to one expert, that he
probably already knew the answer. So why would Hu ask? It was a
classic espionage approach: Tempt Lee into taking the first step
into a forbidden discussion.
Lee's conversation with Hu was exactly the sort of interaction
that Lee was required to report to the lab upon returning. But
he did not.
In his written report, Lee did not include Hu on the list of
Chinese scientists he had met, and in a debriefing, he didn't
divulge the hotel meeting.
``I asked him if anybody had asked him for any classified stuff,
or made any approaches, and he said no,'' Bob Vrooman, the head
of counterintelligence at Los Alamos at the time, said recently.
``He could have admitted that. It was quite common.''
1980s Lees, FBI and CIA
Chinese weapons scientists were not the only ones getting close
to Wen Ho and Sylvia Lee in the '80s. The FBI and CIA were, too.
The agencies' relationship with Sylvia Lee grew out of a visit to
Los Alamos in the early 1980s by the head of the Chinese Academy
of Sciences. A translator was needed, and Sylvia Lee took on the
role. >From that beginning her responsibilities grew until she
became the semi-official liaison between the U.S. bomb designers
and their counterparts on the other side of the world.
Sylvia Lee was at the center of the back-and-forth flow between
the labs, a seat at the narrow part of the hourglass. She made
phone calls, translated documents, coordinated meetings.
In 1983, the FBI came calling to recruit her as an informant.
Dave Bibb, an agent stationed at the lab, was her handler. With
the permission of the lab's management, she kept him informed
about the Chinese scientists.
Around 1984, Bibb introduced her to a CIA agent, Dan Wofford, and
she supplied information to him as well. According to
intelligence sources, Wen Ho Lee joined his wife in meeting with
Wofford and Bibb before and after the Lees' first trip to China,
in 1986.
An example of her work can be seen in a comment she wrote on a
1987 note from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The note,
obtained by the FBI, listed three Los Alamos reports by their
laboratory publication numbers. She wrote on it: ``(T)he Deputy
Director of this Institute asked [for] these paper[s]. His name
is Dr. Zheng Shaotang. Please check if they are unclassified and
send to them. Thanks a lot. Sylvia Lee.''
This was the Zheng who a year later would accompany Hu to Wen Ho
Lee's hotel room in Beijing.
That year, 1988, Vrooman learned through a back channel of Lee's
1982 ``Tiger Trap'' experience with the FBI. At about the same
time, he said, he was becoming concerned that Sylvia Lee's
liaison role left her vulnerable to an espionage approach.
She had been invited to speak at a computer conference in China,
even though she was just a clerical worker. Her husband was also
invited. Vrooman and lab officials denied them permission to go.
In 1989, with a letter of thanks from lab Director Siegfried
Hecker, Sylvia Lee was relieved of her liaison responsibilities.
Despite the growing concerns that the Lees might be targeted by
the Chinese, no one looked at Wen Ho Lee's files on the lab's
computer network. If they had, they would have noticed that Lee
had begun doing a very curious thing in 1988.
He was moving classified files to the unclassified portion of the
network.
1993 Alarm bells at lab
The first evidence of Lee's improper computer activity came in
1993. But a lab official didn't understand its significance and
ignored it.
In 1993, computer specialist Sharon Wilhelmy was tending the
supercomputer network used by the bomb wizards to design nuclear
weapons. Each day she checked a report compiled by an automated
security program known as Nadir. Nadir sniffed around the secret
network looking for trouble.
On one particular day -- the exact date is classified -- Nadir
reported that it had detected unusual activity by Lee. He had
moved a large number of files from the classified, high-security
side of the network to the unclassified, low-security side, a
computer space with vulnerable connections to the Internet.
Nadir had caught Lee flagrantly violating cyber-security
regulations. But Wilhelmy ignored the warning. She assumed that
Lee's activities were innocuous, prompted by an overhaul of the
network. She did not ask him about his actions or even mention
the incident to her superiors.
What Lee was transferring were weapons design codes. Soon after,
he began downloading them to portable tapes about the size of a
paperback book. The files would remain on the network,
unnoticed. In 1994 and 1997, he copied hundreds more codes to
tape.
These tapes would form the heart of the case against Lee. But it
would take the FBI six years to discover what Nadir already had.
1994 Warm greeting
The FBI paid little attention to Lee for several years. Then, in
1994, an unusual event generated suspicion.
On Feb. 23, 1994, a high-level delegation of six Chinese weapons
scientists visited Los Alamos. They included Hu, the scientist
who had quizzed Lee in the Beijing hotel room six years earlier.
The topic was arms control and the proliferation of nuclear
weapons. It was an important meeting, the first in a new series
of lab-to-lab interactions. The hope was that the Chinese would
become more active in slowing the spread of nuclear weapons.
There were representatives of all three U.S. weapons labs: Los
Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia.
Lee, who was not invited to the meeting, walked in and asked to
speak to Hu. The Chinese scientist greeted him warmly, like an
``old friend,'' as the FBI would later describe it.
Some saw the greeting as a hug, others as more of an affectionate
handshake and a slap on the back. The greeting raised eyebrows
among the Americans, who wondered how Lee, a middling code
writer, knew Hu, a star among Chinese weapons designers.
``What's going on over there?'' one American wondered. He was
told that Hu had called Lee a good friend who had helped China
with computer codes.
This was reported to the FBI. There was no record of Hu and Lee
having met. Why would Lee conceal that? The FBI, thinking
espionage, opened its second investigation of Lee.
But for the second time, the FBI did not tell counterintelligence
officials at Los Alamos and the Energy Department, and Lee's
computer files and office were not searched.
1995-1996
Inquiry and motive
In 1995, two Los Alamos scientists, Robert Henson and Lawrence
Booth, were studying secret intelligence data about a
breakthrough in Chinese nuclear weapons development. The Chinese
had figured out how to make miniaturized nuclear warheads for
their missiles. U.S. weapons physicists had solved this riddle
in the late 1950s, leading eventually to the W-88. Now the
intelligence data suggested that China had tested something that
was a close copy of the W-88.
Was it due to espionage?
The report was passed along to Notra Trulock, the chief of
intelligence and counterintelligence for the Department of Energy
in Washington. Trulock sent an investigator, Dan Bruno, to Los
Alamos. After talking with lab scientists, Bruno said, he
immediately urged the FBI to open an espionage investigation.
``I thought it was like the Rosenbergs,'' he said.
The FBI declined, but encouraged the Energy Department to ``take
a look,'' Bruno said. On Sept. 28, 1995, he began an
administrative inquiry into the loss of the W-88. Then, the FBI
shut down its investigation into the 1994 ``hug'' between Lee and
Hu.
It was an unusual move.
As Bruno saw it, his job was simply to collect information for
the FBI, which would then conduct a criminal investigation. He
was simply a Department of Energy investigator, not a
law-enforcement officer.
Bruno named his inquiry ``Kindred Spirit.'' While the Russians
had directly recruited agents, the Chinese way was to solicit
information from them a piece at a time, without turning them
into spies in the classic sense. They would appeal to those with
sympathy for China, people who felt ``a kindred spirit with a
particular regime,'' Bruno said.
The inquiry was primarily a review of travel records and personal
security files. Conducting interviews would have tipped off any
suspects, he said. ``The FBI would say I ruined their case.''
>From a floor-to-ceiling stack of expense account reports and
other travel documents, Bruno compiled lists of people at Los
Alamos and Lawrence Livermore who had visited China on official
trips, and of Chinese scientists who had visited the U.S. labs.
Seventy Los Alamos employees and 49 from Lawrence Livermore had
gone to China, Bruno said. He checked his list to see who had
access to information about the W-88. He came up with 70 names.
He also drew up a list of the roughly 115 Chinese scientists who
had visited the U.S. labs. Bruno said he expected the FBI to
check those Chinese names for any known intelligence agents.
Next, he reviewed the security files of the 70 U.S. scientists,
looking for ``abnormalities,'' and narrowed the list to nine:
three from Los Alamos and six from Lawrence Livermore.
In one of the more unusual twists of the case, Trulock, Vrooman
and federal prosecutors all say the list, which is classified,
had 12 names, not nine. In addition, Vrooman said all the names
were from Los Alamos, while Trulock agrees with Bruno that some
were from Livermore.
Bruno said ``about three'' of the nine on his list were
Asian-Americans; the others said six of the 12 names were Asian.
Years later, the prosecution of Lee would prompt charges from
Asian-Americans that he was singled out because he was Chinese.
Bruno denies that racial profiling was a factor. Bruno, an
Italian-American with roots in Sicily, said he has endured jokes
about the Mafia and is especially sensitive to racial profiling.
``I take that as a personal affront,'' he said.
Trulock also says race was not a factor. Everyone on the list
had some ``indicator'' of a security problem, he said. One, he
said, was a ``self-proclaimed pro-Maoist who hated Taiwan, had
written Taiwan belongs to China.''
Even Vrooman, who was the first later on to charge that ethnicity
played a role in determining the suspects, has maintained all
along that Lee belonged on the list.
To Bruno, it was clear that Wen Ho Lee and his wife, Sylvia Lee,
were the chief suspects, even though the evidence against them
was circumstantial at best. Lee had access to the W-88 design.
He and Sylvia, who had been the lab-to-lab liaison, had visited
China and had hosted Chinese nuclear weapons scientists in their
home. And there was Lee's 1982 phone call to Min, which Bruno
found reference to in Lee's security file.
``Wen Ho Lee appears to have opportunity, means and motivation''
to have compromised the W-88 information, Bruno wrote. The
motive was Sylvia Lee.
The theory, summarized later in a congressional study, was that
Wen Ho Lee ``had access to the relevant weapons data, while she
had access both to him and to visiting Chinese delegations.''
Sylvia Lee was also described as more volatile than her husband.
``Her personnel file indicated incidents of security violations
and threats she allegedly made against co-workers,'' according to
a Senate report.
When she was laid off from Los Alamos in 1995 during budget cuts,
she threatened to ``get even,'' said one lab employee who asked
not to be identified.
Sylvia Lee was born in Hunan province in 1943. In 1986 and 1988,
she traveled to China with her husband and the two toured the
country after attending conferences in Beijing.
Bruno also found it ``profound'' that she had attended Taiwan
National University in 1961 at the same time as Peter Lee, a Los
Alamos scientist who was being investigated for passing
classified information to Chinese scientists in the 1980s. He
was convicted in 1998. Coincidentally, Gwo-Bao Min attended the
university at the same time.
But Sylvia Lee's lawyer, Brian Sun, responds, ``Taiwan National
University is the big school in Taiwan. It's ludicrous, just
because she may have gone to the school at the same time, to draw
these outrageous conclusions.''
As much as anything, though, Bruno's suspicion was aroused by
Sylvia Lee's close contacts with the visiting Chinese scientists.
What Bruno did not know was that in aggressively including
herself in the scientists' activities, Sylvia Lee was acting with
the encouragement of the FBI, the CIA and Los Alamos
administrators.
Contact Dan Stober at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or (650) 688-7587.
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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