-Caveat Lector-
The Times and Wen Ho Lee
>From THE EDITORS
On March 6, 1999, The New York Times reported that Government
investigators believed China had accelerated its nuclear weapons
program with the aid of stolen American secrets. The article
said the Federal Bureau of Investigation had focused its
suspicions on a Chinese-American scientist at the Los Alamos
National Laboratory. Two days later, the government announced
that it had fired a Los Alamos scientist for "serious security
violations." Officials identified the man as Wen Ho Lee.
Dr. Lee was indicted nine months later on charges that he had
transferred huge amounts of restricted information to an easily
accessible computer. Justice Department prosecutors persuaded a
judge to hold him in solitary confinement without bail, saying
his release would pose a grave threat to the nuclear balance.
This month the Justice Department settled for a guilty plea to a
single count of mishandling secret information. The judge
accused prosecutors of having misled him on the national security
threat and having provided inaccurate testimony. Dr. Lee was
released on the condition that he cooperate with the authorities
to explain why he downloaded the weapons data and what he did
with it.
The Times's coverage of this case, especially the articles
published in the first few months, attracted criticism from
competing journalists and media critics and from defenders of Dr.
Lee, who contended that our reporting had stimulated a political
frenzy amounting to a witch hunt. After Dr. Lee's release, the
White House, too, blamed the pressure of coverage in the media,
and specifically The Times, for having propelled an overzealous
prosecution by the administration's own Justice Department.
As a rule, we prefer to let our reporting speak for itself. In
this extraordinary case, the outcome of the prosecution and the
accusations leveled at this newspaper may have left many readers
with questions about our coverage. That confusion � and the
stakes involved, a man's liberty and reputation � convince us
that a public accounting is warranted.
In the days since the prosecution ended, the paper has looked
back at the coverage. On the whole, we remain proud of work that
brought into the open a major national security problem of which
officials had been aware for months, even years. Our review
found careful reporting that included extensive cross-checking
and vetting of multiple sources, despite enormous obstacles of
official secrecy and government efforts to identify The Times's
sources. We found articles that accurately portrayed a debate
behind the scenes on the extent and importance of Chinese
espionage � a debate that now, a year and a half later, is still
going on. We found clear, precise explanations of complex
science.
But looking back, we also found some things we wish we had done
differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the
full benefit of the doubt. In those months, we could have pushed
harder to uncover weaknesses in the F.B.I. case against Dr.
Lee. Our coverage would have been strengthened had we moved
faster to assess the scientific, technical and investigative
assumptions that led the F.B.I. and the Department of Energy to
connect Dr. Lee to what is still widely acknowledged to have
been a major security breach.
The Times neither imagined the security breach nor initiated the
case against Wen Ho Lee. By the time our March 6 article
appeared, F.B.I. agents had been looking closely into Dr. Lee's
activities for more than three years. A bipartisan congressional
committee had already conducted closed hearings and written a
secret report unanimously concluding that Chinese nuclear
espionage had harmed American national security, and questioning
the administration's vigilance. The White House had been briefed
repeatedly on these issues, and the secretary of energy had begun
prodding the F.B.I. Dr. Lee had already taken a lie detector
test; F.B.I. investigators believed that it showed deception when
he was asked whether he had leaked secrets.
The Times's stories � echoed and often oversimplified by
politicians and other news organizations � touched off a fierce
public debate. At a time when the Clinton administration was
defending a policy of increased engagement with China, any
suggestion that the White House had not moved swiftly against a
major Chinese espionage operation was politically explosive.
But the investigative and political forces were converging on Dr.
Lee long before The Times began looking into this story.
The assertion in our March 6 article that the Chinese made a
surprising leap in the miniaturization of nuclear weapons remains
unchallenged. That concern had previously been reported in The
Wall Street Journal, but without the details provided by The
Times in a painstaking narrative that showed how various agencies
and the White House itself had responded to the reported security
breach.
The prevailing view within the government is still that China
made its gains with access to valuable information about American
nuclear weaponry, although the extent to which this espionage
helped China is disputed. And while the circle of suspicion has
widened greatly, Los Alamos has not been ruled out as the source
of the leak.
The article, however, had flaws that are more apparent now that
the weaknesses of the F.B.I. case against Dr. Lee have
surfaced. It did not pay enough attention to the possibility
that there had been a major intelligence loss in which the Los
Alamos scientist was a minor player, or completely uninvolved.
The Times should have moved more quickly to open a second line of
reporting, particularly among scientists inside and outside the
government. The paper did this in the early summer, and published
a comprehensive article on Sept. 7, 1999. The article laid out
even more extensively the evidence that Chinese espionage had
secured the key design elements of an American warhead called the
W-88 while showing at the same time that this secret material was
available not only at Los Alamos but "to hundreds and perhaps
thousands of individuals scattered throughout the nation's arms
complex."
That article, which helped put the charges against Dr. Lee in a
new perspective, appeared a full three months before the
scientist was indicted.
Early on, our reporting turned up cautions that might have led us
to that perspective sooner. For example, the March 6 article
noted, deep in the text, that the Justice Department prosecutors
did not think they had enough evidence against the Los Alamos
scientist to justify a wiretap on his telephone. At the time,
the Justice Department refused to discuss its decision, but the
fact that the evidence available to the F.B.I. could not
overcome the relatively permissive standards for a wiretap in a
case of such potential gravity should have been more prominent in
the article and in our thinking.
Passages of some articles also posed a problem of tone. In place
of a tone of journalistic detachment from our sources, we
occasionally used language that adopted the sense of alarm that
was contained in official reports and was being voiced to us by
investigators, members of Congress and administration officials
with knowledge of the case.
This happened even in an otherwise far-seeing article on June 14,
1999, that laid out � a half year before the indictment � the
reasons the Justice Department might never be able to prove that
Dr. Lee had spied for China. The article said Dr. Lee "may be
responsible for the most damaging espionage of the post-cold war
era." Though it accurately attributed this characterization to
"officials and lawmakers, primarily Republicans," such remarks
should have been, at a minimum, balanced with the more skeptical
views of those who had doubts about the charges against Dr.
Lee.
Nevertheless, far from stimulating a witch hunt, The Times had
clearly shown before Dr. Lee was even charged that the case
against him was circumstantial and therefore weak, and that there
were numerous other potential sources for the design of the
warhead.
There are articles we should have assigned but did not. We never
prepared a full-scale profile of Dr. Lee, which might have
humanized him and provided some balance.
Some other stories we wish we had assigned in those early months
include a more thorough look at the political context of the
Chinese weapons debate, in which Republicans were eager to score
points against the White House on China; an examination of how
Dr. Lee's handling of classified information compared with the
usual practices in the laboratories; a closer look at Notra
Trulock, the intelligence official at the Department of Energy
who sounded some of the loudest alarms about Chinese espionage;
and an exploration of the various suspects and leads that federal
investigators passed up in favor of Dr. Lee.
In those instances where we fell short of our standards in our
coverage of this story, the blame lies principally with those who
directed the coverage, for not raising questions that occurred to
us only later. Nothing in this experience undermines our faith in
any of our reporters, who remained persistent and fair-minded in
their newsgathering in the face of some fierce attacks.
An enormous amount remains unknown or disputed about the case of
Dr. Lee and the larger issue of Chinese espionage, including why
the scientist transferred classified computer code to an easily
accessible computer and then tried to hide the fact (a
development first reported in The Times), and how the government
case evolved. Even the best investigative reporting is performed
under deadline pressure, with the best assessment of information
available at the time. We have dispatched a team of reporters,
including the reporters who broke our first stories, to go back
to the beginning of these controversies and do more reporting,
drawing on sources and documents that were not previously
available. Our coverage of this case is not over.
=================================================================
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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