By ANDREW GUMBEL
LOS ANGELES - If Wen Ho Lee is one of the most dastardly spies of the nuclear age, he certainly does not look the part. He has an almost impossibly benign face, so gentle and unassuming he looks incapable of swatting a fly, much less betraying his country.
And yet, for the past nine months, the 60-year-old nuclear scientist has been kept in solitary confinement at a high-security prison in Santa Fe, New Mexico, under suspicion of delivering some of the most precious secrets of America's atomic weapons programme to the Chinese. He is allowed out of his cell for one hour a day, and even then he is shackled and handcuffed and accompanied by two FBI agents at all times.
According to his prosecutors, Lee committed the most despicable of acts: abusing his security clearance at the Los Alamos National Laboratories and filching America's military "crown jewels" for the benefit of a potentially hostile foreign power. One expert cited in the prosecution's deposition papers said his actions might alter the whole global strategic balance, and that "hundreds of millions of people could be killed" as a result.
And yet there is something wrong with the case against Lee, something that was apparent to his friends and colleagues from the very first moment that he came under suspicion for leaking secrets to the Chinese and that now threatens to besmirch the reputation of the very Government agencies arrayed against him.
For all the recent scandals about security leaks at Los Alamos and the fears - much vented in the pages of the New York Times and in a controversial congressional report published 18 months ago - that China was stealing many of America's most closely held military secrets, it is not at all clear what evidence, if any, the FBI and the Department of Energy have against Lee.
Already they have indicated that they will not be pressing espionage charges, an astonishing climbdown after more than a year of vilifying Lee as a traitor in court documents and in the media. Their efforts to show he had unauthorised contacts with Chinese scientists have fallen completely flat, as have their dogged attempts to catch him out in a lie about his behaviour: he has consistently passed all polygraph tests with flying colours.
The only thing, in fact, that they appear able to hold against him is that he downloaded files from a secure computer at Los Alamos to a less secure computer, and copied some of the material on to disks or tapes that have not been fully accounted for. This activity is the basis of the 59 charges of mishandling classified information still outstanding against him. But even these accusations are fraught with problems. The material Lee is alleged to have downloaded was declared secret only after the fact.
What is worse, it appears that Government agents misrepresented the facts - both to Lee when they were interrogating him, and to the court that ordered him to be held without bail last December. In a hearing in Albuquerque last week, the lead FBI agent on the case, Robert Messemer, was forced to retract three key allegations. Lee had not, he acknowledged, tricked a colleague into letting him use his computer for downloading sensitive files; there was no evidence that Lee had used this information to tart up job applications to foreign Governments; and it was not true that Lee's contacts with Chinese scientists he met on an official visit to Beijing in 1996 had gone unreported.
Agent Messemer defended his earlier allegations as "simple, inadvertent error." But they could yet be the loose thread from which the whole case unravels. Already, Judge James A. Parker has ruled that the defendant should now be offered bail; the precise terms of Lee's release are yet to be worked out, but barring injunctions from a higher court he is likely to return home as early as today.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of jurists and expert witnesses are beginning to wonder if the trial, set for November, will take place at all or if the case will simply be thrown out before then.
And the Government is beginning to quake at the prospect of massive civil suits seeking damages for the trauma that Lee and his family have been put through.
Bail would be a first step towards restoring his dignity and putting some balance back into an unbalanced case; whether fact or circumstance will enable him to clear his name altogether remains to be seen.
- INDEPENDENT
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