-Caveat Lector-
September 19, 2000
Commentary
Now Let's Catch the Real Spy
By Francis Fukuyama, a professor of public policy at George Mason
University.
Commenting on the meltdown of the government's case against Los
Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, President Clinton said he was "very
troubled" by the behavior of government prosecutors and suggested
he will be talking to Attorney General Janet Reno soon about her
department's handling of the case.
This takes, as his wife Hillary has learned to say, a lot of
"chutzpah," reminding one of the French official Reynaud in the
film "Casablanca" who professed to be "shocked, shocked!" to
learn that gambling was going on at the nightclub as he was being
handed his winnings. The Justice Department has had a history of
lurching between lackadaisical enforcement of security issues and
"police state" overreaction, something the president should have
intervened to fix long ago.
Questions Remain
Mr. Lee is guilty of a felony count of mishandling classified
information, and has yet to explain what he did with the large
amount of classified data that he downloaded to computer tapes
that were subsequently destroyed. This is a serious offense, but
the government's case began to crumble when it became
increasingly clear that it could not show Mr. Lee was a spy.
There are a number of plausible explanations for why Mr. Lee
would have downloaded the data, explanations that would have made
the act a very stupid one but not a matter of criminal espionage.
As outlined by the Cox Commission report, the Chinese government
sometime in the late 1980s acquired sensitive nuclear design
information, in particular regarding the miniaturized W-88
warhead used on the Trident D-5 submarine-launched ballistic
missile. We know this because a "walk-in" showed U.S.
intelligence officials classified Chinese documents containing
the stolen information. It seems pretty clear at this point that
whoever passed the W-88 information to the Chinese was not Mr.
Lee, whose downloading didn't occur until after 1993.
This has two implications about the way that the Clinton
administration has handled the charges of Chinese spying.
First, that Mr. Lee was the victim of overzealous prosecutors
and an administration that wanted desperately to finger someone
so as to evade charges of lax security in the U.S. weapons labs.
And second, that the real spy or spies responsible for the W-88
theft are probably still out there, uncaught, and at this point
are probably pretty safe from further scrutiny.
Federal Judge James A. Parker, who said that the government's
behavior embarrassed the nation, appears to have been
particularly angry at the behavior of John Kelly, the U.S.
attorney for New Mexico who was lead prosecutor in the case.
Mr. Kelly, now running for Congress as a Democrat, told the
judge that releasing Mr. Lee on bail would lead to a
catastrophic loss of strategic information, which justified the
use of solitary confinement and shackles to imprison Mr. Lee for
nine months. Ms. Reno refused to apologize on the grounds that
Mr. Lee should have agreed to reveal what he did with the
downloaded documents, something his lawyers in fact offered some
time ago. (Why Mr. Lee should have given away his only
bargaining chips to the Reno Justice Department is another
question.)
Ms. Reno, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Louis Freeh,
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and Mr. Clinton are now all
busy pointing fingers at each other trying to deflect criticism
for the debacle. In point of fact, they all share in the blame:
Everyone in the Clinton administration had a powerful interest in
pretending that by prosecuting Mr. Lee they were getting to the
root of the espionage. Parallels to the case of Richard Jewel --
the man accused falsely of setting off a bomb at the Atlanta
Olympic Games -- are apparent.
The charges of "racial profiling" and racism raised by various
Asian-American advocacy groups are overdone. Chinese military
intelligence has been known to target ethnic Chinese abroad for
recruitment, so it is not prima facie racist to scrutinize
members of that group. Mr. Lee was not, moreover, caught in a
broad net cast over all ethnic Chinese. He came under suspicion
because he was one of very few Americans with privileged access
to the nation's most secret weapons data -- one on a list of 12
top suspects compiled during the Energy Department's 1996
investigation of the W-88 theft.
To the extent that ethnicity may have been misused, the real
problem came when the FBI discovered the downloaded documents and
fastened onto Mr. Lee to the exclusion of all other suspects.
Unless the government proves willing to release more information
linking Mr. Lee directly to espionage, it appears that its case
was circumstantial, based entirely on contacts that Mr. Lee and
his wife Sylvia had with various Chinese scientific institutes.
The FBI appears to have put little effort into investigating the
11 others on the Energy Department's list, not to speak of the
many other individuals outside Los Alamos who had access to the
W-88 design information. Indeed, failure to follow up with other
suspects was the main reason that the Justice Department twice
turned down the FBI's request for authority to wiretap the Lees.
Given the government's bungling of this case, we now have the
worst of all worlds. On the one hand, the problem of espionage
of sensitive weapons secrets has not been resolved. There are
likely still spies out there who have not been caught, and the
inattention to security procedures at the national labs has
continued to be a problem (as the subsequent misplacing of a pair
of extremely sensitive hard drives -- also unsolved --
demonstrates).
On the other hand, the hysteria over spying in the wake of the
Lee case has led a number of government agencies to impose
heavy-handed restrictions on contacts with foreigners that will
produce utterly counterproductive results. Our national labs
risk losing access to manpower and compartmentalizing themselves
into a ghetto where they will be cut off from the most vital
currents in the civilian economy.
In a high-tech region like Silicon Valley, more than 40% of the
engineers are foreign born, the vast bulk of them Chinese. Of
the approximately 1,200 Ph.D.s granted by American universities
last year in mathematics, only 43% were granted to native-born
Americans. As Annalee Saxenian of Berkeley has recently shown,
there is a huge and enormously beneficial exchange of
technological expertise, managerial know-how, and
entrepreneurship that takes place as a result of ethnic Chinese
and Indians shuttling between California and their home
countries. The ability of our national labs to recruit
scientists and engineers from this pool, as well as to
collaborate with the civilian technology community, has been
seriously damaged by the events surrounding Mr. Lee's
prosecution.
Where the Buck Stops
The Republicans were far from blameless in the Lee affair, since
they were the ones demanding that the administration clamp down
hard on the weapons labs and were all too ready to accept the
prosecutors' claims that they had solved the problem. Congress
needs to demand that the executive branch explain the grounds of
its prosecution of Mr. Lee, now that his plea bargain forecloses
the courts from doing this.
If there were, indeed, no grounds for thinking that Mr. Lee was
the source of the W-88 information, Congress should demand that
the administration go back to the drawing board in figuring out
how the information was compromised. And the president needs to
move from being "very troubled" to actually replacing those
officials responsible for this debacle.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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