-Caveat Lector-
Indictment Sought for Scientist Lee
By H. Josef Hebert
Associated Press Writer
Friday, Dec. 10, 1999; 2:46 p.m. EST
WASHINGTON The government has decided to seek a federal
indictment of fired scientist Wen Ho Lee for removing nuclear
secrets from a secured computer at the Los Alamos weapons lab
where he worked, government officials told The Associated Press
today.
U.S. Attorney John Kelly was seeking the indictment as early as
this afternoon from a grand jury meeting in Albuquerque, N.M.,
the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
But the government has been unable to prove that Lee gave
specific secrets to any country, including China, the officials
said.
The grand jury has been hearing evidence for months concerning
alleged security violations by Lee at the Los Alamos lab where he
had worked for nearly 20 years before being fired last March.
Kelly refused to comment on the case.
But officials familiar with the prosecutor's plans said the
government planned to charge Lee with downloading secrets of
American nuclear weapons and tests from a secured computer at the
lab.
The government would further allege the scientist stored the
secret data on computer tapes and removed them from the lab, the
officials said.
Lee, a Taiwan-born computer scientist who worked on top-secret
nuclear weapons programs, has been the center of a controversy
involving alleged theft of nuclear secrets by China dating back
to the 1980s. He has been the prime target of an FBI
investigation involving alleged theft of nuclear secrets by China
since 1996.
The Justice Department, which wrestled for months over whether to
seek an indictment, was unable to develop evidence that Lee ever
deliberately provided secrets to China, according to the sources.
The decision to prosecute Lee was made by Attorney General Janet
Reno earlier in the week after a Saturday White House meeting of
top administration officials including Energy Secretary Bill
Richardson, FBI Director Louis Freeh, CIA director George Tenet
and Samuel Berger, the president's national security adviser.
Richardson, who ordered Lee fired last March for security
violations and has argued for criminal prosecution, said he would
have no problem in declassifying certain nuclear weapons secrets
needed in a trial once a decision was made to prosecute.
Mark Holscher, Lee's attorney, did not return telephone calls to
his office in Los Angeles today.
Lee was fired for failing to safeguard classified material and
not informing Energy Department officials about details of
several trips to China.
At the time, Lee had been the target of a three-year FBI
investigation concerning the alleged theft of secrets by China in
the 1980s of details about the W-88 miniaturized nuclear warhead
used on Trident submarines. Prosecutors, however, have never been
able to clearly link Lee to the loss of the W-88 warhead secrets.
It was not until after he was fired that authorities discovered
that Lee, around 1994, had improperly transferred thousands of
computer codes, the "legacy codes" that provide a history of
nuclear weapons development, from Los Alamos' highly secured
computer system to his less-secure personal office computer.
Lee, who has rarely spoken publicly in the last nine months,
acknowledged the computer file transfers, but maintained that he
had put the codes into his office computer as a backup to
safeguard against a computer crash. Los Alamos officials have
scoffed at the explanation.
More recently, according to the government officials, it was
determined that Lee also copied some of the computer codes onto
tapes and taken them from the lab. Investigators have been unable
to account for the movement of the computer tapes, according to
the sources.
While the government's case focuses on the transfer of the legacy
code files, no evidence appears to have surfaced to link Lee with
the loss of the W-88 warhead material in the mid-1980s, the case
that put the spotlight on Lee at the outset.
In fact, the FBI's investigation into the W-88 warhead loss, and
even how extensive of a loss might, in fact, have occurred, has
been a subject of growing controversy in recent months.
Last summer a Senate report and then a report by the president's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board criticized the FBI and
Justice Department for focusing too narrowly on Los Alamos and on
Lee in the investigation. These groups said the information about
the warhead could have come from many other places.
In September, Reno ordered the investigation into the W-88 matter
to broaden its focus to other labs, Energy Department sites and
defense contractors.
� Copyright 1999 The Associated Press
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