-Caveat Lector-
For Government, Wen Ho Lee Mystery Deepens
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 15, 2000 ; Page A02
FBI crime laboratory and Energy Department experts have
determined that none of more than 10 cassette tapes retrieved
from the Los Alamos County Landfill are the infamous tapes of
U.S. nuclear weapons secrets made by Wen Ho Lee, Clinton
administration officials said yesterday.
The finding raises fresh doubts about the Taiwanese American
scientist's assertion that he tossed the tapes into the trash at
Los Alamos National Laboratory in January 1999. But, officials
were quick to point out, they have no physical evidence to
disprove Lee's story, either.
When federal prosecutors agreed to a plea bargain that let Lee
out of jail in September, they thought they were trading his
freedom for answers. But the mysteries of the case have only
deepened, and investigators from the FBI and Energy Department
are reluctantly concluding that they may never know what
happened, officials close to the investigation said.
After questioning Lee under oath behind closed doors for 10 days
in recent weeks and after digging through a giant pile of trash,
the FBI still is not sure why he made the tapes or exactly what
he did with them.
Moreover, investigators have determined that Lee made at least 10
trips to Taiwan over the past 25 years, many more than they had
realized.
They also have raised their estimate of the number of tapes he
made from the classified computer system at the laboratory's X
Division, where Lee worked and where most of America's nuclear
weapons were designed.
Originally, there were said to be seven missing tapes, based on
notations found in Lee's notebooks. Now, the FBI believes there
may be several times that number; Lee has said he cannot remember
exactly how many he made, according to officials familiar with
the investigation.
Efforts to reach Lee's lawyers for comment were unsuccessful.
Under the terms of Lee's plea agreement, the 10 days of
questioning granted the government are over; the only step left
for the government is to administer a polygraph or "lie detector"
exam.
"If he shows deception" on the fundamental questions of why he
made the tapes and whether he destroyed them, a senior official
said, "we are right back where we were when we first discovered
what he had done."
Over 40 hours on 70 days in 1993, 1994 and 1997, Lee downloaded
1.4 gigabytes of data, the equivalent of about 400,000 pages,
from the secure computer system at Los Alamos, according to the
FBI. Often working on nights and weekends, and circumventing
security safeguards, he moved the data to his office desktop
computer and to pocket-sized tapes that look like 8-mm
videocassettes, a bit thicker than conventional audio cassettes.
He then made copies of some of those tapes.
In the recent FBI questioning, sources said, Lee has steadfastly
maintained that he made the tapes as a safeguard against computer
failures. Other scientists at Los Alamos have questioned the
plausibility of that explanation, noting that there were simpler,
authorized ways to protect data from computer crashes, such as
backing up the files on hard drives.
Lee also has assured investigators that he never removed any of
the tapes from the laboratory or showed them to anyone. A few
days after losing his security clearance in December 1999, he has
reportedly said, he threw the tapes into a Dumpster outside the
lab's X Division.
Based on that information, FBI agents began searching the county
landfill in late November. Using records of when trash was
dumped into various parts of the landfill, they isolated a
section of the site and combed through tons of garbage with
rakes. By last Friday, the agents had found more than 10
computer tapes, which were sent to the forensic laboratory at FBI
headquarters for analysis.
Officials said yesterday that the tapes were not the ones Lee
made.
Lee was investigated by the FBI from 1996 to 1999 as a suspect in
the loss of some data about America's latest nuclear warhead, the
W-88, to China. But he denied ever passing information to any
foreign country, and he was never charged with espionage.
The discovery of his downloading came later, after he had been
fired from the laboratory for security violations in March 1999.
At the time, Capitol Hill was in a political furor over
allegations of Chinese espionage. Lee was indicted and held in
solitary confinement on 59 felony counts, including alleged
violations of the Atomic Energy Act that carried the threat of
life imprisonment.
The case against Lee collapsed even before trial, however.
Expert witnesses questioned whether the information he had
downloaded really represented the "crown jewels" of the U.S.
nuclear program, and defense lawyers showed that the lead FBI
agent on the case had given faulty testimony. When Lee pleaded
guilty in September to a single felony count, a federal trial
judge not only freed him, but also apologized and said his harsh
treatment had been an embarrassment to the nation.
After treating Lee for months as a major threat to national
security, Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis J.
Freeh justified the plea agreement as an essential step to secure
his cooperation in determining what happened to the tapes and
whether U.S. secrets had been compromised.
One of the factors that originally drew investigators to Lee was
that he had made trips to mainland China in 1986 and 1988. On
both occasions, he stopped in Taiwan, where he was born and has
close relatives. In 1998 he was also a visiting scholar at the
Chung Shan Institute of Science and Technology, Taiwan's leading
nuclear research center.
In 1982, the CIA had learned that scientists at Chung Shan were
secretly building a plutonium separation facility for nuclear
weapons, and U.S. officials successfully pressed Taiwan to close
it. As a result, Taiwan has since been on an Energy Department
list of sensitive countries, which requires U.S. government
scientists visiting there to be briefed and debriefed before and
after their trips.
Officials said yesterday that investigators recently compiled a
list of at least 10 trips that Lee made to Taiwan beginning in
the late 1970s. In several cases, the officials said, there is no
record that he informed the U.S. government before or after the
visits, but it is possible that those records were lost.
In 1989, when Lee's security clearance was due for a five-year
review, his file was sent to Energy Department headquarters here.
It was lost in the Forrestal Building and was not reconstructed
until 1992.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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