-Caveat Lector-
Evidence
Suspect's Ethnicity A 'Major Factor' in China
Spy Probe
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 17, 1999; Page A01
Federal investigators targeted physicist Wen Ho Lee as
an espionage suspect largely because he is a Chinese
American and they still do not have a "shred of
evidence" that he leaked nuclear secrets to China, the
former chief of counterintelligence at Los Alamos
National Laboratory said yesterday.
Breaking a long public silence, Robert S. Vrooman also
said he does not believe that China obtained top-secret
information about U.S. nuclear warheads from Los
Alamos or any other laboratory belonging to the
Department of Energy. The stolen data, he said, could
have come from documents distributed to "hundreds of
locations throughout the U.S. government" as well as to
private defense contractors.
While some Chinese American rights organizations
previously have charged that Lee was unfairly targeted,
Vrooman is the first high-ranking participant in the
investigation to state that Lee's ethnicity was "a major
factor" in his identification as the government's prime
suspect.
Vrooman made his remarks in an interview with The
Washington Post less than a week after Energy Secretary
Bill Richardson recommended disciplinary action
against him and two other former Los Alamos officials
for alleged missteps during the espionage probe.
"I've had a distinguished career," said Vrooman, 62, a
former CIA operations officer who retired from Los
Alamos in March 1998 and is now working there as a
consultant. "And I'm not going to go down in history as
the guy who screwed up this case, because I wasn't. This
case was screwed up because there was nothing there --
it was built on thin air."
In a separate statement faxed to The Post, Vrooman said
Lee "was identified by the Department of Energy's
Office of Counterintelligence as the prime suspect based
on an, at best, cursory investigation at only two
facilities, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory."
While "details of this investigation are still classified,"
he added, "it can be said at this time that Mr. Lee's
ethnicity was a major factor."
The fact that Lee had visited China and met with
officials at a physics institute there in 1986 and 1988
became another strike against him, Vrooman said, even
though "Caucasians at Los Alamos who went to the same
institute and visited the same people -- I counted 13 of
them -- were left out of the investigation."
A bipartisan congressional committee chaired by Rep.
Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) concluded in May that China
had stolen information about the design of U.S. nuclear
weapons, including the nation's most advanced warhead,
the miniaturized W-88.
Vrooman said, however, that the information could have
leaked from many sources. While "no complete
inventory of documents containing this data has been
made or is possible," he said, one "rather detailed
description of the W-88" was distributed to 548 different
addresses at the Defense Department, Energy
Department, various defense firms, the armed services
and even the National Guard.
Lee, a Taiwan-born nuclear physicist and U.S. citizen,
was fired in March for alleged violations of Los
Alamos's security regulations. He has denied ever
passing secrets to China, and he has not been charged
with any crime. The Justice Department is weighing
whether to charge him with transferring classified
information from the secure computer system at Los
Alamos to his vulnerable desktop computer.
In recommending last week that Los Alamos take some
unspecified disciplinary action against Vrooman,
Richardson said Vrooman had failed to remove Lee from
the laboratory's top-secret Division X or to deny him
access to secret information after he came under
suspicion of espionage.
Vrooman countered yesterday that the decision to allow
Lee to keep working was made in 1997 by the Energy
Department's chief intelligence officer, Notra Trulock --
the same officer who had identified Lee as the
government's main suspect.
"We could not have removed [Lee] from access [to
classified materials] without alerting him, and that
would have just blown everything," Vrooman said. "It
was a judgment call -- I think it was the right call. And
it was made in concert with the FBI."
Richardson also recommended unspecified disciplinary
action against Terry Craig, another counterintelligence
official at Los Alamos, saying Craig had failed to inform
the FBI in 1996 that Lee had signed a waiver authorizing
officials to search his computer.
Craig told The Washington Post yesterday that no one in
the FBI ever asked him to look into whether Lee had
signed a waiver. He said he lacked authority to perform
the research without authorization from FBI
investigators.
"By leaking our names, [DOE officials] in essence
damaged our reputations -- and it seems to me there's
way too much of that going on," said Craig, 55, a career
employee at Los Alamos who transferred two months
ago to another job unrelated to counterintelligence.
The third official facing disciplinary action, former Los
Alamos director Sig Hecker, has not returned telephone
messages.
An Energy Department spokeswoman said Richardson
recommended disciplinary measures only after
commissioning two internal inquiries. "Based on the
evidence gathered in these inquiries, the secretary
concluded that these individuals had specific
responsibilities with respect to the FBI investigation that
they did not meet," the spokeswoman said.
Richardson also has denied that Lee's ethnicity played a
major role in the investigation, and he has assured
employees at the national laboratories that he will not
tolerate any discrimination against Chinese Americans.
Both Craig and Vrooman said there is no evidence
pinpointing Los Alamos as the source of secrets stolen
by China. Similar conclusions were reached earlier this
year by the CIA, the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board and the Senate Governmental Affairs
Committee.
Vrooman also said he disagreed when Trulock, the
Energy Department intelligence official, concluded in
1995 that China had stolen the design of the W-88.
Trulock's conclusion was based largely on a document
obtained by the CIA from a Chinese intelligence agent
showing the warhead's explosive yield and external
dimensions.
"If I give you the exterior dimensions of my home, could
you recreate the floor plan? No," Vrooman said.
Despite those doubts, Vrooman said, he pressed the FBI
to pursue the case vigorously and succeeded in getting
the bureau to replace an agent who was busy with other
matters. But he said he now believes "they picked the
wrong guy for the wrong reason."
"I have been an outspoken critic of the flawed
investigation that identified Mr. Lee as the prime suspect
in this case," Vrooman said. "I do not agree with Mr.
Trulock or with the secretary of energy that the
information obtained by the Chinese came from the
Department of Energy. I consider disciplinary action
against me to be retaliation for opposing them on this
issue."
� Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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