-Caveat Lector-
Ex-Official: Bomb Lab Case Lacks 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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