Guilty Plea, Release Leave Unresolved Questions in Lee Case By Vernon Loeb and Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday , September 17, 2000 ; A12 After nine months in jail, the Taiwanese American nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee went free last week after pleading guilty to removing classified information from Los Alamos National Laboratory. But many of the key questions about his case remain unanswered. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Lee is required to submit to detailed questioning by the FBI. But the government may keep his answers secret, on the grounds of his privacy and the nation's security. Among the central issues that remain in dispute are whether China stole U.S. nuclear secrets, why the government investigation focused on Lee, why he copied data about nuclear weapons onto portable tapes, and how important the data may be. While definitive answers may not yet be possible, recent court hearings and interviews with Lee's colleagues have provided some new information. It now appears, for example, that Lee's motive in making the tapes may have been to ensure that he could continue to do unclassified work in his specialty, hydrodynamics, at other laboratories if he lost his job at Los Alamos. Lee's case began in 1996 as an investigation, code-named Kindred Spirit, into China's alleged theft of U.S. nuclear secrets. But the FBI never found evidence that he had passed secrets to any foreign country, and he was never charged with spying. After the espionage investigation stalled, Lee was fired last year from Los Alamos, where he had worked for nearly 20 years. The FBI then searched his office and found that he had transferred or "downloaded" data from the lab's classified computer system to his unsecure desktop computer and 10 tapes, seven of which were missing. This triggered a second investigation and, eventually, Lee's prosecution on 59 counts of mishandling classified information, an indictment that fell short of espionage but still carried a possible life sentence. Moreover, prosecutors argued successfully that Lee should not be released on bail. While awaiting trial, he was initially held in solitary confinement, with a light bulb burning 24 hours a day and shackles on his legs during a single hour of daily exercise. Meanwhile, his defense lawyers chipped away at the prosecution's arguments. Last month, they forced an FBI agent to admit that, contrary to his prior testimony, Lee had not lied to a colleague about the downloading. They also found experts who questioned the secrecy of the information. With their case in trouble, prosecutors agreed to a plea bargain. Last Wednesday, Lee admitted his guilt on a single felony count. U.S. District Judge James A. Parker sentenced Lee to the time he had served, apologizing profusely for the "demeaning, unnecessarily punitive conditions" of Lee's confinement. The judge said he had been "led astray" by the executive branch of government. Did China Steal U.S. Nuclear Secrets? Suspicions of espionage began with nine underground nuclear tests conducted by China and monitored by U.S. satellites and seismic stations from 1990 to 1995. They indicated that China had, in a short time, developed both a neutron bomb and a very compact weapon similar to America's W-88, the warhead on the latest U.S. sub-launched intercontinental missile, the Trident II. U.S. intelligence analysts wondered whether Beijing's scientists could have made such rapid progress on their own. Notra Trulock III, then head of the Energy Department's intelligence unit, became even more alarmed when he saw a Chinese military document that had been provided in 1995 by a purported defector who walked into the U.S. Embassy in Taiwan. The "walk-in document," dated 1988, contained a chart on seven U.S. warheads, including the weight, range, yield, dimensions and a line drawing of each. In 1995, Trulock convened a group of five scientists to review the evidence of espionage. Some members dissented, but Trulock began an administrative inquiry into who was responsible, and he quickly focused on Los Alamos, where the W-88 was designed. In 1996, he started briefing senior officials, telling them that Chinese espionage had resulted in the loss of important design data on several U.S. nuclear weapons, particularly the W-88. Trulock has maintained in congressional testimony that his findings were upheld by an intelligence community assessment delivered in April 1999 by CIA analyst Robert Walpole. But the Walpole panel's findings were not so cut and dried. The assessment said that spying had "probably accelerated" China's nuclear program but that the Chinese were "more likely" to have used stolen data "to inform their own program than to replicate U.S. weapons designs." Moreover, the panel said China gained information not just from espionage, but also from "contact with U.S. and other countries' scientists, conferences and publications, unauthorized media disclosures, declassified U.S. weapons information, and Chinese indigenous development." The "relative contribution of each" of these sources, it concluded, "cannot be determined." Both of Trulock's conclusions--that China stole weapons designs and that the information probably came from Los Alamos--have been challenged by scientists and intelligence experts. Paul Robinson, director of Sandia National Laboratories and former head of nuclear weapons development at Los Alamos, said the data in the walk-in document were basic "geometrical information that is shared with U.S. explosive ordnance people around the world," meaning that "hundreds of agencies of the U.S. government had documents with the same information." Former senator Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which reviewed the espionage allegations last year, said in an interview last week, "It is my belief that there was no espionage" involved with the W-88 data obtained by the Chinese. As far as China's new, smaller warhead, Rudman said, "What they did, they did on their own." Why Did Government Focus on Wen Ho Lee? The Energy Department's internal probe, prompted by the "walk-in document," began in 1995. Trulock started with all Los Alamos personnel who had knowledge of the W-88 data, then determined which of them had traveled to China in the 1980s. The resulting list contained 12 names, including at least one other Chinese American. Lee's name, however, was at the top. Trulock insists that his report, sent to the FBI in early 1996, did not single out Lee. But in May 1999, when Congress was in an uproar over the espionage allegations, Trulock testified that by spring 1996, "we had completed our administrative inquiry and had identified a potential suspect." Lee was at the top of the list because he had traveled to China in 1986 and 1988, and because he and his wife, Sylvia, had taken an active role in greeting visiting Chinese scientists. She had also accompanied Lee on his 1986 trip. What Trulock did not know is that Sylvia Lee had been helping the FBI with information about the Chinese. After Trulock submitted his report, the FBI picked up the case and continued to focus on Lee. A year earlier, a confidential informant had reported that Lee appeared friendly with a senior Chinese weapons designer who was visiting Los Alamos. Since Lee had never reported any contacts with the visitor, as Los Alamos security rules required, the bureau was suspicious. In November 1998, Trulock appeared at two closed sessions of a select committee, chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), that was looking into Chinese espionage. In January 1999, four months before public release of the Cox committee's report, word began to leak out to journalists that a Los Alamos scientist with an Asian surname was under investigation. On March 6, 1999, the New York Times published a front-page story that said in part: "Government investigators had identified a suspect, an American scientist at Los Alamos. . . . This suspect 'stuck out like a sore thumb,' said one official." Two days later, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson directed the University of California, which administers Los Alamos, to fire Lee. Richardson said in a recent interview that Lee was discharged because he had not been honest with lab officials, had failed to report fully on his meetings with Chinese scientists, and had misplaced information. In addition, Richardson said, "there was pressure to make an example of him." Why Did He Make The Computer Tapes? As they celebrated his return home last week, some of Lee's supporters remained convinced that his downloads were dumb but not sinister, most likely performed to back up his work against computer crashes. Robert Vrooman, Los Alamos National Laboratory's former counterintelligence director, does not buy that theory, and neither do many other nuclear weapons scientists at the lab. Vrooman does not believe Lee is a spy. But "he was up to something--I'm puzzled, and I want to know what," said Vrooman, a former CIA operations officer. Working secretively, often late at night and on weekends, Lee downloaded 1.4 gigabytes of data, a little more than half of which--800 megabytes--was classified. That's the equivalent of 430,000 pages, a stack of paper 134 feet high. Most officials at the lab now accept the proposition that Lee's downloads were at least partly related to a notice he received in 1993 that he might be laid off, since that is when his intensive downloading began. A number of lab officials and scientists now also believe Lee wanted the computer programs or "codes," not to give them to a foreign power, but to continue using them in his field of expertise, hydrodynamics, the study of how solid materials behave as they turn to fluids under extreme pressure. "The prosecutors have said that he wanted to create his own personal library of nuclear weapons codes," said one former X Division scientist who worked directly with Lee. "But these codes have lots of other uses." Lee is an expert in armor-piercing projectiles, a subject about which he published many unclassified papers as a Los Alamos scientist, his former colleague said. Without portions of the programs he downloaded, the former colleague added, he would not have been able to do the calculations needed to continue writing such scholarly papers, and would not have been able to reproduce the algorithms on his own. "Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of hydrodynamics is unclassified," added Chris Mechels, another former Los Alamos scientist who knew Lee in the lab's top-secret X Division. "It's only classified when you put it in a weapons code. So a reasonable hypothesis would be, he was making a copy of his unclassified work in a classified product." He should have known better, Mechels said, but that's a far cry from spying for China. How Important Was Information on Tapes? One Los Alamos weapons scientist, Stephen Younger, testified in court that the tapes represented "a complete portable nuclear design capability," information so sensitive, he said, that it could "change the global strategic balance." Another scientist, John Richter, scoffed at Younger's claims, saying 99 percent of what's on the tapes is unclassified science. But scientists inside and outside the nation's nuclear weapons complex say the information Lee downloaded is enormously sensitive and should be safeguarded at the highest possible security level. One senior lab official said the computer programs are valuable, not because of the basic science embedded in them, but because they have been refined and linked to simulate an entire thermonuclear weapon, from primary to secondary detonation. Just because a dictionary is unclassified, the official said, doesn't mean everything written in the English language is unclassified too. "It's how you put the poem together, how you put the novel together," the official said, adding that there are only about 25 people left in America who can seamlessly link the codes to re-create a full fusion reaction. On the seven missing tapes, Lee downloaded four complete weapons codes, A, B, D and I. Code B, which simulates the primary stage of a nuclear weapon, and Code A, which simulates the secondary stage, were among the most modern codes at the time Lee downloaded them, used on an almost daily basis to evaluate the reliability of the nation's nuclear stockpile. In addition to those computer programs, Lee also downloaded complete data sets, known as input decks, necessary to run the programs. While the codes describe the physical processes that take place inside a weapon, an input deck describes the geometry of a specific warhead or bomb. Written in Fortran, each code is hundreds of thousands of lines long. While the codes would be unintelligible to a layman, a graduate student in physics trained in Fortran could print out the material and read it like a textbook. As a general rule, scientists say, the codes Lee downloaded would be of little value to a nonnuclear state, of moderate value to a fledgling nuclear nation, such as Pakistan, and of extreme value to an advanced nuclear nation such as China, where scientists could use the codes to better understand the yield-to-weight ratio of U.S. weapons, as well as their design characteristics and their vulnerabilities. One Los Alamos official said the codes Lee downloaded offer the fullest description in the world of how materials behave in energy domains ranging from a firecracker to a star. 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