Image courtesy of Registered Media
Image courtesy of Registered Media
Image courtesy of Registered Media
Posted on 06/03/2006 10:15:45 AM PDT by CedarDave
WASHINGTON— Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientist once suspected of being a spy, settled his privacy lawsuit Friday and will receive $1.6 million from the government and five news organizations in a case that turned into a fight over reporters' confidential sources.
Lee will receive $895,000 from the government for legal fees and associated taxes in the 6 1/2-year-old lawsuit in which he accused the Energy and Justice departments of violating his privacy rights by leaking information that he was under investigation as a spy for China.
The Associated Press and four other news organizations have agreed to pay Lee $750,000 as part of the settlement, which ends contempt-of-court proceedings against five reporters who refused to disclose the sources of their stories about the espionage investigation.
Gov. Bill Richardson and others were identified in an earlier federal appeals court ruling in the privacy case as likely sources of the leaks that identified Lee as a suspect in the espionage investigation. The governor was federal Energy secretary when the Lee case emerged.
Richardson has steadfastly refused to comment on Lee's suit. A spokesman for the governor said Friday he was in rural northeastern New Mexico and couldn't be reached for comment.
Lee was fired from his job at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, but he was never charged with espionage. He was held in solitary confinement for nine months, then released in 2000 after pleading guilty to mishandling computer files. A judge apologized for Lee's treatment.
The appeals court decision said Richardson and two others were among those who "in particular had been identified as likely sources of the leaks" about Lee but that the three "were unable (or unwilling) to identify the leaker(s)" in depositions they gave for Lee's privacy suit.
(Excerpt) Read more at abqjournal.com ...
Considering Lee's part in this is unclear (spy or not), the ending is certainly unsatisfactory except that news organizations got dinged some cash for violating privacy. As for Richardson's part, if he did any leaking it no doubt was for his own reasons (to enhance his reputation as a spy buster) rather than for the good of the country.
Image courtesy of Registered Media
Image courtesy of Registered Media
Image courtesy of Registered Media
Probably hiding out in a Holiday Inn hot tub.
The real Spy in Chief on behalf of China was bill clinton, who sold out our weapons secrets to Chinese intelligence for campaign contributions.
So we are unlikely to see the whole truth appear in court anytime soon. Wen Ho Lee appears to have been thrown to the wolves by the clintonoids to take attention away from themselves. It's not really clear whether he was guilty or not. In any case, he was mostly a distraction to divert the press and given them something to talk about.
Is it possible that a trial might have lead to revealing even more important secrets or illegalities by Clintonistas and thus was never held?
Treason pays
As far as I know, the analysis in this article is still valid:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1138
Conviction would have required testimony in open court that would have harmed national security.
Subject: GAO-01-896R FBI Official's Congressional Testimony Was Inaccurate
Dear Mr. Hast: As the Director of Intelligence at DOE during the Kindred Spirit Administrative Inquiry, I read with great interest the subject report posted on your website. Regrettably, the report contains some factual errors that, if left uncorrected, perpetuate the web of deceit the FBI has spun to cover up its own mistakes and blunders in the Wen Ho Lee debacle.
The FBI's effort to cover up these blunders shifting blame elsewhere is a disgrace to the history and tradition of the Bureau.
In this light, I cannot allow recent comments by Assistant Director Neil Gallagher in response to your inquiry to pass unchallenged.
Paragraph 10 of the GAO report makes the following statement.
Mr. Gallagher told us [the GAO] that in September 1999 after it became evident to him that there were problems with the Administrative Inquiry, he spoke to the FBI agent assigned to assist Energy in conducting the Administrative Inquiry. He said that the agent told him that he made written changes to a draft of the Administrative Inquiry in 1996 and suggested a more aggressive investigation of the original information. Mr. Gallagher told us that as a result of this conversation he determined that the agent's suggestions were ignored. He also learned that the agent did not see the final version of the Administrative Inquiry because he was no longer involved with the case after his review of the draft. [Emphasis added]
Once again, Gallagher is distorting the record and attempting to mislead both the GAO and the Congress. The facts of this matter are these. The FBI agent that assisted Energy was provided a soft copy of the draft final Administrative Inquiry report through the FBI. The agent complimented the DOE investigator for the fine work done and made suggestions and offered some comments as to revisions to the report. Many of these were incorporated into the final report that was forwarded to the FBI. Thus, Gallagher's assertion that the suggestions were ignored is patently false.
Second, the DOE investigator, who was not interviewed by the GAO, states that the FBI agent's comments were also provided directly to the FBI under separate cover. The agent has confirmed this in court documents made available during the Wen Ho Lee case. So the FBI could have easily compared the agent's suggestions with the final report provided by DOE.
In short, if the agent's comments and suggestions were ignored, it was by the FBI. Gallagher implies that it was DOE that ignored them. That is categorically false. This is at least the second time that I am aware of Gallagher's false and misleading responses to congressional inquiries. He has consistently misrepresented both the content and scope of the DOE Administrative Inquiry. For example, his 1999 testimony led the Senate Governmental Affairs committee to believe that DOE had only visited Los Alamos and had focused on Wen Ho Lee in late 1995. In fact, DOE visited all three weapons lab locations and conducted records searches at two other DOE facilities. DOE and FBI investigators did not make these visits until January 1996 and, at least the DOE investigator had never heard of Dr. Lee until months after Gallagher claimed DOE had already selected Dr. Lee.
I too have had nearly three decades in the national security field and have compiled a distinguished career of accomplishments. Gallagher and the FBI, in efforts to shift the blame for their bungling of the Wen Ho Lee investigation have tried to smear my good name. I would be happy to discuss this information with you or your associates. When I was at DOE, we cooperated fully with the GAO on any number of important studies that helped shape the perceptions of an agency that had lost control over the national laboratories.
Thank you for your attention to this matter. I may be reached at 703.237.XXXX.
Sincerely Notra Trulock, III Leave it to Clinton crimes and control of the FBI to cost us all.
Yet another example of Clinonistas in legal jeopardy becuase of BillyJeff. He and his pigwife remain unscathed amidst all they wreckage they created..
It is interesting how similar the MO was in this case to all the leaks that have been pouring forth recently for political reasons (Abu Grahib, etc...) wherein unamed sources feed info to the New York Times
Again this corrupt "Two-Party Cartel" covering up its own at the sake of the nation. We know that Bubba is now GW's brother so what else is there to say.
Time to put special prosecutor Fitzgerald on the case.
They're Clinton Kool-Aid Drinkers....
Overview Excerpt
PrologueI had spent the day with my lawyers trying to figure out why the FBI was launching a full-scale investigation of me. When I got home, my golden retriever, Casey, had a big gash on his head; dried blood matted his coat. Looking around, I had the chilling realization that someone had definitely been in our townhouse. This was not a simple break-in by kids looking for stereo gear or television sets. Books and papers, all of my working files, were scattered about the floor. At first glance, nothing seemed to be missing, but somebody had surely been searching through them. Had the same people hit Casey and left him cut and bloody?
My head was spinning. Just a few days earlier, around dinnertime on a stormy Friday evening in July 2000, two armed FBI agents had come into my home, interrogated me for about an hour and then confiscated my computer—unannounced, no explanation given, and no search warrant. They didn’t read me my rights; they just keep firing questions at me. The FBI, assisted by Department of Energy security officials, had “visited” my roommate at her office downtown that afternoon and coerced her “consent” to enter the home and take the computer. They held her a virtual hostage in her office, monitored all her phone calls, including those from her children, and threatened her with “busting down the door” of our townhouse and bringing TV camera crews along to film all this for the News at Eleven. She was terrified.
After the agents had left with the computer hard drive, which contained all my banking, tax, business and personal records, my friend told me that the FBI was accusing me of stealing classified documents and distributing classified information via e?mail to . . . god knows who. “Who did he talk to? Who did he send e-mails to? Who were his friends? Did he send e?mails overseas?” The FBI agents pounded away on her for hours that day. “They think you took classified documents and are using them at home, just like John Deutch and Wen Ho Lee,” she told me. Deutch, a former director of central intelligence, and Lee, the Los Alamos scientist then under indictment for spying, were both accused of “mishandling” classified information. Now the FBI acted as though I were up to the same thing. It didn’t make sense. I had recently published a magazine article that was very critical of FBI and Justice Department officials for their inept handling of a Chinese nuclear espionage investigation, but I was scrupulous about keeping classified information out of the article. But the FBI was serious. Its agents took the unprecedented step of searching the computers of U.S. senators and their staffs for any e?mails from me.
I wish I could say that this break-in was the only clip in the highlight film of my life in the Bill Clinton era. But there had been a preview about two years before, when two uniformed federal police officers wearing side arms and body armor appeared at the door of my office in the basement of the Department of Energy in downtown Washington. I was then director of intelligence at the DOE and my office was deep inside a soundproof, highly secure vault complete with double sets of steel doors. Visitors without the appropriate security clearances had to be escorted wherever they went inside this vault. The purpose of the police officers’ visit was to arrest me. A disgruntled employee had filed a complaint alleging that I had assaulted him, and the police were there to “take me out” on those charges. They backed off when witnesses who had been present at the meeting where it supposedly happened scoffed at these charges. At that time, the police apologized for the “inconvenience” and then left. Several weeks later I managed to get my hands on their final report, which said “the assault did not occur.” So you would think that the Energy Department officials would take action against the employee, right? They did: he was transferred, given a cash bonus, and later granted a huge settlement by Secretary Bill Richardson—even though repeated “investigations” failed to turn up even a shred of evidence against me.
But now the FBI was accusing me of something far more serious than assault: compromising classified information. One doesn’t expect the FBI to appreciate irony. But during my thirty years in the intelligence and national security field, I had worked on some of the most sensitive programs inside the U.S. government and had been in charge of special security to safeguard intelligence information at huge Department of Energy facilities employing thousands. Now the FBI was accusing me of violating the security oaths that I had enforced all those years. It least I think they were. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, but I never heard from the FBI again after the agents came barging into the apartment. So, I really don’t know what, if anything, I was accused of. Many people thought a new Bush administration would clear this up quickly, but Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Department of Justice has ignored personal appeals from his former colleagues on Capitol Hill and other close political associates to dismiss this case and help restore my reputation. With each passing day, it looks more and more as if the objective of the raid was to retaliate for my daring to criticize the Bureau’s performance in the Wen Ho Lee case and to make sure that I never worked in Washington again. They still have the computer—and all my personal records.
But that was hardly the end of it. As part of the fallout from the government’s prosecution of Wen Ho Lee, his lawyers and supporters branded me a racist and a bigot in a very public fashion. Mainstream media like the Washington Post, the New York Times and CBS News have repeated the most outrageous allegations against me, including my “bias” against minorities generally and ethnic Chinese in particular, and my alleged abuse of security to harm careers and destroy the reputations of minorities who worked for me. Lee’s lawyers constructed a defense strategy intended to depict me as the “Mark Fuhrman” of the Wen Ho Lee prosecution. His defenders claimed that I “singled out” Lee as the only suspect in the loss of national security information solely on the basis of his ethnicity. After you are smeared like this, try getting a job anywhere, especially in “diversity-sensitive” Washington, D.C. These false allegations have left me with no job, bankrupt and deeply worried about my children’s future.
And for what? What was the Wen Ho Lee case all about, and what had I done to justify all this abuse? Under my direction, in 1995, a team of Energy Department scientists had uncovered a campaign of Chinese nuclear espionage against our national laboratory complex stretching back nearly two decades. We found hard evidence that the Chinese had acquired highly classified information on our W88 thermonuclear warhead, the most modern in the world; the neutron bomb; and other U.S. nuclear warheads—seven in all. As the director of intelligence, I also led the fight to reform security and counterintelligence at the DOE, which had one of the worst security records in the government. The existence of serious problems at the national labs was hardly a secret in Washington, but I was the first one willing to force the government to take action to plug the gaping holes in security at the labs. This action, however, was like closing the barn door after the horse has already left. We will never really know how many secrets about our nuclear weapons were stolen over the past three decades.
I refused to look the other way when confronted with evidence of Chinese nuclear espionage, even though I was ordered by my superiors in the Energy Department to bury it. The evidence proved to be the tip of the iceberg of assaults by the People’s Republic of China on the U.S. defense science and technology community—assaults that continue to this day. I tried to put a stop to decades of neglect, mismanagement and blatant disregard for the protection of our most precious secrets concerning the design and development of nuclear weapons. Our security for these secrets was so bad, in fact, that government reports would later conclude that espionage and security breaches had occurred repeatedly and for years had gone undetected by those supposedly responsible for guarding this information.
I don’t mean to say that I made the government take notice of these issues single-handedly. I had help from some officials within the FBI, at CIA, and even inside the Energy Department. Some of our elected representatives, like Congressmen Duncan Hunter from California and Curt Weldon from Pennsylvania and Senator Arlen Specter, also from Pennsylvania, pushed through critical legislation that helped plug the gaps. But because I was the boss, the director of intelligence at DOE and responsible for counterintelligence at Energy’s national labs, I became the point man in the struggle to stop the theft of our nuclear secrets.
As part of the collateral damage of this assignment, I became one of the most visible casualties of the fierce debate inside the U.S. government over the nature of future challenges to our national security from the People’s Republic of China. Should we view China as a “strategic partner” or a “strategic competitor?” The Clinton administration embraced the former view with a vengeance, ignoring any and all intelligence information to the contrary.
One of the great ironies of the Clinton era is that while the administration was deeply hostile to U.S. nuclear weapons, it mostly looked the other way while a host of “rogue states” sought and acquired many of the ingredients for at least a fledgling nuclear capability. The PRC was the most blatant in doing this, but South Asia also “went nuclear” on the Clinton watch and Iran made important strides in developing both a nuclear and a ballistic missile capability to threaten its neighbors. And that is where I came in. The Chinese, Iraqis and others found a ready—and in some cases willing—source of information, knowledge and expertise within the U.S. nuclear weapons complex to assist their efforts to create or modernize nuclear weapons. The careless and haphazard approach to security and counterintelligence within the Energy Department complex offered a feast for hostile foreign intelligence services. Tasked by their scientific communities with acquiring the means to close the technological gap with the United States, these services looked to the DOE nuclear weapons labs as a sort of one-stop shopping source. Why did the Clinton administration and many of its friends on Capitol Hill, in the media and in academia constantly equate the “end of the Cold War” with the end of efforts by foreign intelligence services to acquire our scientific and technical secrets? A combination of naïveté and wishful thinking, I guess. The appetite of foreign scientific communities and their respective intelligence services did not diminish with the end of the Cold War; if anything, it grew. Certainly their job became easier as Clinton appointees opened up our nuclear weapons laboratories to scientists from our former Cold War opponents and emphasized “international scientific collaboration,” whose major achievement was to expose our scientists to foreign intelligence collectors. As a result, our national nuclear labs were suddenly flooded with visitors from China, Russia, India, even Iran and Iraq—many of them staying on for two years or more. Our ability to track them and enforce security measures and safeguards was overwhelmed by their sheer numbers. But the issue was not so much the presence of these scientists as the labs’ utter disregard of even the basic rules for protecting secrets.
Of course, this story takes place within the context of other, equally disturbing trends in U.S. national security. The performance of agencies responsible for counterespionage within the United States on the Clinton administration’s watch was so poor, especially against “nontraditional threats,” that it raised questions about whether we can protect our most precious secrets in this new era. More than one after-action report found blunders, mistakes, miscommunication, mismanagement, negligence and outright incompetence in the government’s handling of the PRC nuclear espionage scandal. As one such report concluded, the Chinese espionage investigation “was never a high priority” for the FBI or the Clinton administration as a whole, although “what was at issue was one of the gravest and most consequential purported acts of espionage ever investigated by the FBI.”
Very serious questions remain about the government’s actions against the only “suspect” in the Chinese nuclear espionage ever investigated by the FBI: Wen Ho Lee. Frankly, I don’t know if Lee “did it,” that is, gave the PRC our nuclear secrets. I do know that he was a walking security nightmare who violated nearly every security rule in existence at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He certainly had opportunity, access and perhaps even motivation—the Holy Trinity of espionage. I do know that he lied repeatedly when questioned by government officials about his contacts with PRC nuclear scientists, the classified information they were seeking from him, and the assistance he provided to them. He admitted helping the Chinese with computer codes and software that even he acknowledged could be used in nuclear weapons applications. He failed an FBI polygraph on questions involving the W88 nuclear warhead.
The circumstantial evidence on Wen Ho Lee merited an aggressive counter-intelligence investigation, but the FBI’s handling of this case was an unmitigated disaster from beginning to end. It was an investigation in name only. The Bureau never applied the tools or procedures common to a full-scale espionage case; it never conducted a financial analysis; never established surveillance, even episodically, on its main suspect; never conducted “trash covers”; and never interviewed the suspect’s co-workers or supervisors. Faced with evidence of illicit computer activity, the Bureau never searched Lee’s computer, nor did it even monitor his usage. Despite its potential significance, two years passed before FBI director Louis Freeh even became aware of the existence of this problem. Months would pass with little or no action by the FBI case agents. The Justice Department rejected FBI attempts to establish technical surveillance of the suspect’s telephone and computer usage, a very rare occurrence in the history of such efforts, and the FBI never was able to obtain such coverage, even when it feared that Lee might tip off foreign agents. But a well-known federal prosecutor, with a long track record of successful espionage convictions, later determined that there was sufficient “probable cause to believe that Wen Ho Lee was an agent of a foreign power . . . currently engaged in clandestine intelligence gathering activities for or on behalf of the PRC.”
As it was about to close its investigation, the FBI discovered that Wen Ho Lee had compromised nearly all of our nuclear warhead design secrets in one of the greatest breaches in the history of U.S. national security. He placed all these secrets on an unprotected computer network, which was repeatedly attacked by computer hackers, several of them known to be working for foreign governments. Despite such disturbing facts, the government still doesn’t know if Lee’s files were accessed from outside the lab. But the government does know that these files contained exactly the information that the Chinese needed to modernize their nuclear arsenal. And the government knows that China’s intelligence services targeted Los Alamos National Lab for the acquisition of these secrets.
Many of the FBI actions during its four-year investigation of Lee are simply inexplicable. Let me give one example: It is customary to maintain surveillance on a suspect after the FBI has polygraphed that suspect, in case he attempts to flee or takes some other action that further implicates him. Yet in Wen Ho Lee’s case, after the FBI told him he was an espionage suspect in early 1999, local agents made no effort to keep him under surveillance. If they had done so, the FBI would have detected Lee erasing millions of bytes of classified information he had placed on the unclassified Los Alamos computer network or on computer tapes, and sneaking back into his now off-limits office to destroy incriminating evidence of his massive security violations.
One explanation for the Bureau’s performance was its long history with Wen Ho Lee and his wife, Sylvia. The Lees would claim that they had collected information on Chinese nuclear scientists during the 1980s and provided this information to the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies. Wen Ho Lee admitted helping Chinese scientists fix their nuclear weapons codes during his trips to China, but failed to report these interactions to the lab or the Bureau upon his return. This has led many to suspect that Lee “doubled” the FBI. The Bureau and the Justice Department have gone to extraordinary lengths to suppress any information about this chapter of the Kindred Spirit story.
Equally distressing was the response of government officials when finally ordered by the President of the United States to close security vulnerabilities and reform counterintelligence at the nation’s nuclear weapons labs. “Cynicism,” “arrogant disregard for authority” and a “staggering pattern of denial” characterized the Energy Department’s response to those presidential mandates. Months after President Bill Clinton had finally ordered major security and counterintelligence reforms, Energy Department and lab officials remained “unconvinced of Presidential authority.” Months before, the number two official in the Energy Department had ignored the FBI director’s recommendation to remove Wen Ho Lee from access to nuclear secrets. She later claimed that she thought Director Louis Freeh, who twice urged the Energy Department to take action against Lee, was not speaking on behalf of the FBI. Nearly every single Energy Department official referred to in this book still works at the department in a significant capacity today. Should we now accept government assurances that our nuclear secrets are safe?
Not only was the FBI’s investigation of Lee inept and mismanaged, the Justice Department’s prosecution of him on allegations of mishandling classified information was nothing short of bizarre. One day Wen Ho Lee was in solitary confinement, a serious danger to national security because he wouldn’t tell what he did with computer tapes he had made containing reams of nuclear secrets. The next day he was a free man, the victim of racism and overzealousness. Yes, he is a convicted felon, but he has his full laboratory pension (despite being fired in 1999), he got a lucrative book deal, and he may even be the star of an upcoming movie. And is the United States any closer to learning what really happened to all those nuclear secrets on the missing tapes?
Those tapes contained electronic blueprints of our nuclear warheads, giving their exact shapes and dimensions as well as the materials used in their construction. They had computer codes and databases holding all of the precious information collected over forty years from the more than a thousand live nuclear tests conducted by the United States. The tapes contained everything necessary to simulate the actual performance of these warheads. At the very last minute before his release, the prosecution and Lee’s own lawyers learned for the first time that he had made twice as many tapes as previously believed and maybe even more. Do we know what happened to those tapes? Lee has stuck to his story that he destroyed them, but the FBI has only his word for it. This from a man whom the FBI’s files, stretching back twenty years, labeled as a person who would answer such questions “truthfully only when confronted with irrefutable evidence or the threat of a polygraph.” The FBI searched a huge garbage dump outside of Los Alamos looking for the tapes, but opted not to polygraph Wen Ho Lee to test his claims. But what the Justice Department suspects may be inferred from its offer of immunity from prosecution to Lee’s wife if only she would give up the tapes.
What made the government walk away from its case in early September 2000? Was it the impending presidential election? Norman Mineta, a Clinton administration cabinet official, visited a key Lee family member before the plea bargain was struck and just before the presidential race kicked off in earnest. Many suspect that PRC contributions to the 1996 Clinton campaign were a factor in the government’s overall handling of this case. There is good reason to believe that political motivations shaped both the FBI’s and the Justice Department’s behavior in the Wen Ho Lee case. Twice during the Clinton administration, the Justice Department refused to prosecute U.S. nuclear lab scientists on charges of spying for China and opted instead for lesser charges of mishandling classified information—without implicating the Chinese government in any way. Much of the FBI’s strange behavior can be explained by fear within the Bureau of offending the Chinese government, a fear that was allowed to “undermine a critical FBI investigation about Chinese espionage.”
The most serious implication of the Chinese espionage case is the effect it has had on the federal security and counterintelligence community, already suffering from a severe crisis of leadership. Throughout the case, FBI agents expressed their fear of lawsuits by Lee against them for simply doing their jobs. What future security official or counterintelligence officer will act on evidence of espionage by the People’s Republic of China or any other nation that can call on a large community of political activists in the United States and a powerful lobby in Washington? Counterterrorism programs were hamstrung by worries about offending similar activist groups, at least before September 11, 2001. What CI officer would put his career and his family’s financial security on the line, knowing that his government will abandon him in a heartbeat once the specter of “racism” or ethnic profiling is raised? The simple fact that the tactic worked so well in the Lee defense ensures that it will be used again and again.
After the tragic attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it was commonplace to hear that “everything has changed.” But has it? One of the worst consequences of the Clinton era for our national security was the complacency that pervaded both the government and the society. This complacency encouraged the deterioration of security and “threat awareness” at government agencies and facilities responsible for protecting American citizens and American secrets. Our nuclear laboratories were not the only government institutions to feel the deadening hand of the Clinton administration when it came to security and counterintelligence. Decisions made by Clinton officials, implemented by bureaucrats concerned only for their own promotions and raises, and then allowed to remain unchallenged by a Congress that seemed asleep at the switch will haunt this country for years to come. Our intelligence community, suffering from its own leadership crisis, failed to detect plans for an attack that killed more Americans than Pearl Harbor. The CIA was formed specifically to prevent another Pearl Harbor. It failed, in no small measure because of decisions taken by Bill Clinton and his administration. Many of the problems that plagued FBI efforts against Chinese nuclear espionage resurfaced in the weeks and months leading up to September 11. Solutions to the errors experienced during the Lee case were proposed, even legislatively mandated, but the Bureau failed to implement these quickly enough and so repeated some of its mistakes—this time at a cost of over three thousand American lives.
While the Clinton administration could not manage national security, it surely could manage the news. Of course, the Chinese nuclear espionage scandal was overshadowed by all the President’s other scandals. Suspicions of PRC espionage could hardly compete with news accounts of presidential semen on a blue Gap dress, but the administration had lots of help from sympathetic journalists. The Washington Post, the “company” newspaper in D.C., and CBS News did some of the worst reporting. The New York Times has taken a lot of heat for its coverage, but whatever mistakes it made pale in comparison with the distortions and fabrications published by the Post on almost a daily basis. The Post repeatedly misquoted official reports and launched a scorched-earth campaign, relying on anonymous “officials,” to promote its line that no espionage had occurred and that racism was responsible for Wen Ho Lee’s predicament.
Last, but by no means least, there was the role of Congress in the whole affair. In response to its oversight obligations in potentially one of the most serious espionage cases since World War II, Congress proved to be nearly as inept as the Clinton administration. There was no central, coordinated investigation of the scandal or of the administration’s failure to disclose information to the Hill. Instead, competing committees conducted their own inquiries, each turning up important elements of the scandal, but never combining their efforts to provide the American public with a coherent picture of what had happened on the Clinton watch. The role of the armed services and intelligence oversight committees in both houses was negligible despite the serious implications of this case for national security. The “legislative” solution to security and counterintelligence vulnerabilities that created the problem in the first place produced a Rube-Goldberg-like organization that left the Department of Energy and its labs less secure than before the scandal.
This book is about what I saw during the Chinese nuclear espionage scandal. It is a story of cover-ups and concealment, missed opportunities, bungled investigations, and malfeasance. Intelligence professionals with long and distinguished careers were forced into retirement; others had their professional reputations tarnished and smeared and, as a result, would retreat into other, less dangerous intelligence disciplines. At the same time, Clinton political appointees and even career federal officials lied repeatedly under oath before congressional committees and to supposedly independent government investigators. Most of these federal officials were promoted, awarded raises and bonuses, and moved ahead in their careers as a reward from grateful political appointees for participating in this cover-up. Throughout this period, a class of pampered and privileged scientists continued to feed at the public trough, but categorically refused to accept even the most modest security and counterintelligence measures to protect the nation’s nuclear assets. Secrets that American taxpayers spent billions of dollars to develop were given away by an administration bent on achieving ephemeral arms-control objectives.
This is also a story of what can happen to one person who tries to do his job in Washington today. Presented with documentary evidence of PRC nuclear espionage, I couldn’t look away or ignore either this theft or the vulnerabilities at the DOE National Labs that made it possible. Everybody in Washington knows the risks of speaking truth to power. I would be reminded of those risks over and over again during what still remains the most alarming and least understood scandal of the Clinton era
As soon as they educate themselves to the facts surrounding the case, including Notra Trulock's involvement and why Lee was not convicted, they'll be singing a different tune.
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