Former Los Alamos Scientist Wen Ho Lee Criticizes FBI of Racism
Feature Story by Celeste Berry - 1/28/2002
Dr. Lee was terminated from his job as a physicist from Los Alamos National Laboratories in March of 1999 on allegations that he was a spy. Nine months later, Lee was indicted on fifty-nine counts, which included “mishandling material containing restricted data, with the intent to injure the United States,” and “unlawfully obtaining and retaining defense information.”Lee asserts that the charges of espionage were never the driving force of the investigation. He writes that government officials have admitted that there was never any kind of evidence of espionage, and blames the investigation and the charges against him on anti-Asian hysteria and stereotypes about his loyalties.
He writes that three years ago, the United States government was in a frenzy over fears that the Chinese government had stolen nuclear secrets, and claims that he was the scapegoat of their paranoia.
Lee writes that FBI agents, under pressure from Washington to get Lee to admit to stealing sensitive nuclear secrets, yelled and threatened him with the fate of the Rosenburgs (the husband and wife spy team executed in 1953), and when those tactics did not convince him to confess, lied to him that he had failed a polygraph test on whether he was a Chinese spy.
However, Lee still maintained his innocence, denying his culpability even after the government intentionally revealed facts about his investigation to the news media in order to pressure Lee into confessing. The media vilified Lee, causing his family to be threatened and harassed, and intensifying a wave of anti-Asian sentiment across the country.
However, despite the foibles of the government, Lee is not an innocent. He acknowledges that he committed a security violation by downloading classified computer codes unto un-secure sources. Yet he maintains that he did so "to protect my files [and] to make a backup copy,. . . because there were no lab rules against making copies, and most prudent people [kept] many copies of their important documents.”
After spending close to nine months in solitary confinement in a Santa Fe prison, Lee made the decision, on the advice of his lawyers John Cline and Mark Holscher, to plead guilty to one count of mishandling classified information. They told him that he had a 95 percent chance of winning if he went to trial, but a five percent chance that he could lose. “If we lose,” his lawyers advised him, “you could face life in prison. Are you willing to take that risk?" Saying, "it was not worth the risk of spending the rest of my life in prison," Lee agreed.
Lee is pursuing a lawsuit against the U.S. government for violating his privacy rights, and is hopeful of a pardon from the president for his treatment.
He also wishes to remind all Americans, especially in the face of the US government’s questionable behavior to persons of Middle Eastern descent after September 11, that despite the hysteria about Chinese spies, not one spy has been found, and not one theft of classified information by the Chinese government has been proven.
