A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage

by Dan Stober, Ian Hoffman

Overview

No espionage case in recent decades has been anything like the Wen Ho Lee affair. As Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman describe in A Convenient Spy, an astonishingly inept investigation of a crime that may never have occurred ended in a national disgrace. A weapons-code scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lee was hunted as a spy for China, indicted on fifty-nine counts, and held in detention for nine months as a threat to the entire nation. But after pleading guilty to just one count, he went home — with an unusual and emotional apology from a federal judge. Prosecutors' claims that Lee had stolen America's "crown jewels" of nuclear security simply evaporated. Yet Lee's motives have never been satisfactorily explained, and his often-repeated excuse that he was just backing up his work files does not stand up to scrutiny.

As Stober and Hoffman report, Lee's lies and his unexplained connections to foreign scientists spanned eighteen years. He was a security nightmare. Tapping at his keyboard, he assembled a private collection of the computer programs used to design America's nuclear weapons, then left them vulnerable to hackers and foreign intelligence services for years. The FBI's belated discovery that he had also put the codes on portable cassette tapes launched a frenzied worldwide search that eventually carried agents to the Los Alamos landfill. And yet today, the tapes have never been found.

In 1995, Lee was just another American, a Taiwanese immigrant striving to support a family he cherished and to make a name for himself in scientific circles. Unknown to him, however, scientists working in the secret world of nuclear-weapons intelligence examined purloined Chinese documents, studied spy reports, and wondered: Had China stolen the secrets of the W88, America's most advanced nuclear weapon? Scientific hunches rapidly evolved into a criminal investigation aimed at Lee. He had been overheard by the FBI while telephoning a spy suspect, and he was warmly embraced by a high-ranking Chinese nuclear-weapons official whom he wasn't supposed to know. The FBI noted that he was "ethnic Chinese." And in this uncertain period after the Cold War, many politicians played up China as a threatening new enemy. Energy Secretary and vice presidential hopeful Bill Richardson was eager to fire Lee and appear decisive in protecting national security.

In this stormy confluence of intelligence and politics, Lee became a convenient spy. But was he guilty?

Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman tell the story of the Wen Ho Lee fiasco dramatically and authoritatively, providing an objective account that no partisan version of the story can match.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416572091
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	08/03/2007
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Dan Stober reports for the San Jose Mercury-News, where he shared the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for public service for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 5: Tiger Trap

At the end of the workday on Friday, December 2, 1982, Wen Ho Lee sat down at his office desk and made a brief phone call to California that would change his life in ways he could never imagine. His call was prompted by news that another Taiwanese-American nuclear scientist, this one at Lawrence Livermore, was in some kind of trouble and had lost his job. The situation could have implications for Lee as well, because, as he understood it, the other scientist was caught doing something Lee himself had been busy at, providing unclassified documents to the government of Taiwan.

Lee placed the call, and Gwo-Bao Min came on the line from his suburban Bay Area house a few minutes from the lab. Lee introduced himself in Mandarin as a weapons designer at Los Alamos, the holder of a Q clearance. The "weapons designer" description was an exaggeration, of course.

Still speaking in Mandarin, Lee mentioned a mutual friend, another Livermore scientist who had spoken to Lee about Min. Then Lee got down to business. He had contacts with Taiwan, he bragged, and offered to help Min find out who had "squealed" or "made little reports" on him. Maybe they should get together and talk.

Min attempted to tone Lee down, saying, maybe we shouldn't talk about this now. Min didn't seem interested, and he got off the phone fast. Lee's strange call must have been confusing to Min, as it was to the FBI agents secretly taping all of Min's phone calls. For Min and the agents knew what Lee did not -- that Min, though Taiwanese by birth, had not been helping Taiwan. Instead, the agents believed, Min was a spy for the People's Republic of China, a man who had given away highly classified secrets about the design of the neutron bomb and other nuclear weapons. The FBI code-named their investigation of Min "Tiger Trap."

Gwo-Bao Min was born in Taiwan in 1939, a few months before Wen Ho Lee. In 1962, after graduating from National Taiwan University in Taipei with an engineering degree, he came to the United States. He earned a master's degree in engineering from West Virginia University, then, in 1970, a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan. He became a U.S. citizen and went to work for Lawrence Livermore in 1975. He and his wife settled into a modest but comfortable ranch-style home in nearby Danville to raise their children.

His coworkers found him friendly and capable; to his friends, he was a kind man and a good father. Occasionally, he talked of going into business with his family. He worked in the lab's D-Division, where researchers did systems studies, looking at nuclear issues from a larger perspective than the design of one weapon. It was not unusual for D-Division scientists to go to the lab's technical library and check out papers on a wide range of issues. At one point, Min worked on missile defense, the precursor of the Reagan-era Star Wars program.

In 1979, Min talked with Chinese scientists. Later, a spy inside China provided U.S. intelligence with clues that pointed to Min as a security risk. FBI agents from the San Francisco Field Office tore into every part of his background, followed him around, and obtained a special warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington to monitor his telephone and perhaps bug his house.

The agents discovered that in his trips to the lab library, Min had accumulated a mass of data about a variety of weapons, well outside of his job responsibilities. A team of experts, including scientists from Los Alamos, "did a job on his office," compiling lists of every document he checked out. The volume of material would climb just before his trips to China. "You could almost tell when he was leaving," according to one team member.

When Min was stopped in an airport in 1981 en route to China, he was carrying papers with detailed answers to five questions, including one about the two-point detonation system for primaries that made miniaturization of missile warheads possible.

The investigators were convinced that Min had given away the design of the W70, the warhead for the Lance missile, popularly known as the neutron bomb.

If so, China would gain twice over. First, with the neutron bomb itself, and second, by learning how to reduce the size of the plutonium primaries in its own warheads. The W70 contained a primary that was exceptionally small, despite its spherical shape. U.S. officials worried that China could use the primary in a "road mobile" missile launched from the back of a truck.

China tested its own neutron bomb on September 25, 1988.

Investigators thought they knew the identity of Min's contact with Chinese intelligence. But when the FBI agents finally made their move in 1981, rounding up and questioning both Min and the supposed contact, they were unable to get confessions from either. Bill Cleveland, the agent who headed the investigation, thought he had pushed Min "right to the brink" of confessing. "I really thought I had him," Cleveland told his coworkers.

FBI officials went to federal prosecutors and recommended prosecution, but the Justice Department felt the evidence was too weak. The case lacked a confession or any proof of "transfer," such as a photograph of Min handing over documents to the Chinese. Additionally, a long court proceeding ran the risk of unmasking the U.S. asset -- the spy -- in China.

Min was told he could resign from the lab or be fired. He quit in February 1981, and went into the trading business, traveling often to China, trips missed completely by the FBI. When Cleveland, on assignment in Beijing, ran into Min, it was startling for both of them. Min seemed to think that Cleveland had followed him all the way across the Pacific Ocean.

Even after Min was interrogated and forced from the lab, the FBI kept up its surveillance, convincing a judge to renew the wiretap. From the agents' experience, some suspects grew complacent when they had beaten the rap. Others might panic at the attention and call for help.

The wiretap led to nothing, however, except Wen Ho Lee. When Cleveland's agents first listened to Lee's voice, a year after Min's dismissal, they had a hard time understanding his name. Certainly, none of them had ever heard of him. But the conversation, confusing as it was, alarmed them. Here was a

nuclear-weapons scientist making an unsolicited phone call to a spy suspect,

offering help. Even the most favorable interpretation of Lee's scrambled understanding of the facts led to the conclusion that he was eager to form an alliance with someone he thought had been fired for passing U.S. documents to a foreign country in violation of security rules. The FBI quickly launched an investigation, under the guise of a scheduled review of Lee's security clearance. But the agents did not question Lee for another year, not wanting to spoil the secrecy of the wiretap on Min's phone by moving sooner.

Finally, on November 9, 1983, agents went to talk to Lee. As always, the diminutive scientist was smiling, polite. They asked general questions, to test him, to see if he would lie. Did he know Gwo-Bao Min? Had he called him? Offered aid? Lee denied all, claiming he had no idea of how to get in contact with Min. His denials, an agent would say later, were unequivocal. The agents thanked Lee and went away. Six weeks later they came back, armed with evidence from the wiretap, which they showed to Lee. Now his story changed. Yes, he admitted, he had called Min.

As the agents listened, Lee explained about his aid to the Taiwanese government, how he had begun sending unclassified reactor-safety documents, beginning in 1977 or 1978, and had performed consulting work. "Lee indicated that starting about 1980, he would receive requests for papers and reports from the Taiwanese embassy, which he would then copy and mail to the embassy," as Attorney General Janet Reno would later testify. Lee said he thought Min was doing the same thing, and he was concerned. Lee was edging closer to the truth, but was still holding back. It was the beginning of a recurring pattern, in which Lee would retreat under pressure, not telling the full story until it was unavoidable.

By then the FBI had obtained toll records for Lee's office phone and knew that he had phoned the Coordination Council for North American Affairs, the equivalent of Taiwan's embassy in Washington, during the same period that he had called Min. But Lee denied making the calls.

The agents were interested in something else that day. Min was still very much on their minds, and they had a plan to snare him. They asked Lee to cooperate, to participate in a "false flag" operation against the same scientist he had offered to help a year before. Lee agreed. With the FBI tape recorder rolling once again, Lee telephoned Min, pretending to be an agent of China, seeking Min's partnership in espionage. When the phone call fizzled, the FBI paid for Lee to travel to Min's Danville home. Wired with a hidden microphone, he knocked on the door. There was a brief conversation, but Min did not respond to Lee's enticements and the false flag was over. In the end, Lee had become a player in the intelligence game, as both suspect and servant of the government.

Another month went by. Lee agreed to the Bureau's request for a polygraph. On January 24, 1984, Lee went in for the test, and now had a slightly different story about Taiwan. Some of those unclassified documents he had mailed to Washington, he said, carried a special marking, NOFORN, for "no foreign dissemination." It wasn't a crime, but Lee had played fast and loose with the security rules. According to a secret report compiled by the government, "Wen Ho Lee stated that his motive for sending the publications was brought on out of a desire to help in scientific exchange." Lee had also said "he helps other scientists routinely and had no desire to receive any monetary or other type of reward from Taiwan."

He now also admitted making the calls to Taiwan's unofficial embassy. With that off his chest, Lee passed the lie detector test. He was no spy, the examiner ruled. Still, he was a walking security risk, a holder of a high-level clearance who had winked at the rules and then lied about it. People had lost their security clearance for less.

Tiger Trap was an important case to the FBI. It increased the Bureau's worry level about scientists giving away secrets. "I'm more afraid of a visiting physicist than I am an intelligence agent," fumed Ed Appel, an agent in the San Francisco office. "I worry about the scientist who shares his formula with the other guy because they have a wink, a smile, and a handshake, or they're going to save the world together."

Tiger Trap remained an open case, but a secret one. Lee's role was so far from center stage that almost no one at Los Alamos knew about it. His clearance was not revoked; no disciplinary action was taken. An opportunity to head off the trouble ahead was missed.

Copyright © 2001 by Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman

Table of Contents

Contents

Prologue: "They Electrocuted Them, Wen Ho"

1. Nantou to Los Alamos
   
2. The Hill
   
3. A Neat and Delicate Package
   
4. The China Connection
   
5. Tiger Trap
   
6. The Narrow Neck of the Hourglass
   
7. Alarm Bells
   
8. ASKINT Meets Guanxi
   
9. The Collector
   
10. Kindred Spirits
    
11. A Shallow Pool
    
12. Mass-Market Espionage
    
13. The Out-of-Towner
    
14. The FISA
    
15. Flying the False Flag
    
16. Trulock and the True Believers
    
17. Exile from X Division
    
18. Panic
    
19. "As Bad as the Rosenbergs"
    
20. Becoming the Enemy
    
21. Shock Waves
    
22. Intent to Injure
    
23. The Crown Jewels
    
24. "It's Conceivable That This Is Possible"
    
25. Swords of Armageddon
    
26. The Momentum Shifts
    
27. Freedom
    

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

A Convenient Spy is a well-written cautionary tale that dissects what can happen when race, ambition and politics mix with espionage, criminal law and foreign policy.
— Washington Post Book World

James Bamford

Two journalists take the widely publicized case of accused secret agent Wen Ho Lee as an instance of lax security, bureaucratic bungling, misguided energy, and ill-served justice in America. Taiwanese immigrant Lee, a programmer at Los Alamos National Laboratories for two decades, had access to virtually every piece of nuclear data in the American arsenal. There's no question that Lee broke every security rule in the book: he squirreled away top-secret information, copied computer files detailing nuclear-bomb codes onto floppy disks and unsecured hard drives, and talked willingly to Chinese nuclear scientists about technologies that eventually showed up in weapons developed in the People's Republic. But was he a spy? The US government, having ferreted Lee out in a hunt that pitted agency against agency, never turned up solid evidence that he betrayed his adopted country, though investigators did find box after box of sensitive documents and data in Lee's garage and caught him in lie after lie on polygraph tests. In the end, Lee walked, despite all the efforts of an intelligence community convinced that China is likely to be America's chief enemy in years to come and despite the fact that China had been actively gathering nuclear secrets from "not only ethnic Chinese but anyone with access to science and technology information"-requisites that Lee fulfilled to the letter. The heart of the authors' text addresses the questions of why American intelligence failed, why Lee was able to gather information so freely, and why incompetence seems to run rampant at all levels of our government. Though their narrative sometimes gasps under the weight of detail, Stober (San Jose Mercury News) andHoffman (Albuquerque Tribune) do a fine job of negotiating a path through the secretive, arrogant subcultures involved in the Lee affair: the demimondes of spies and counterspies, of federal bureaucrats, of self-serving politicians, of scientists-and of journalists. A powerful expose.

Kirkus Reviews