Editor’s Note: The following is based on My Country Versus Me, the story of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos scientist who was falsely accused by the U.S. government of being a spy, imprisoned, and subjected to the kind of treatment that most Americans would expect only in third world countries.

It appears the U.S. government under the Clinton administration had a mission to scapegoat Wen Ho Lee and shift the focus from lax security measures at our national laboratories and from individuals in the U.S. government who may have been responsible for the loss of nuclear secrets to the Chinese government.

The establishment media were enthusiastically complicit with the government in that mission. So thorough was the hatchet work by the New York Times and other mainstream media that, even today, many Americans are under the false impression that Wen Ho Lee was a crafty, villainous spy who betrayed and endangered the United States, his adopted country.

I believe that Wen Ho Lee’s story, as told in his book, is the truth. It is my hope that my words here will encourage many to obtain the book and read it. If you are as impacted by his story as I have been, please pass the book along to others. It is a story that should be told—and remembered.
--M. Brannan

In reading this exceptional book, I found a picture of a gentle, mild-mannered scientist and a loving husband and father who wanted nothing more than to pursue his scientific work and devote his leisure time to quiet pastimes that included gardening, cooking for his family, listening to his favorite classical music, and fishing—a lifelong love. I found it impossible to reconcile this picture of a quiet, law-abiding Chinese American with the picture in the media of a conniving, ideology-driven traitor.

The Dream—and the Nightmare
Wen Ho Lee was born in Taiwan, the seventh of ten children. He came to the U.S. as a graduate student in 1964; he received his doctorate from Texas A&M in 1969, and was married to a Chinese American girl shortly after that. The couple moved to the New York/New Jersey area, where Dr. Lee was employed writing computer programs until 1973, when they moved to California. In 1974 Dr. Lee became a U.S. citizen and was eligible to work at the national laboratories. He was hired in 1975 to work at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, run by the Department of Energy. For a short time, he worked at Argonne National Labs in Chicago. His job at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) began in December 1978.

Before his horrible ordeal began, Wen Ho Lee believed he had achieved the American Dream—a good education, a loving wife and two exceptional children, a job which he considered important to America’s national security, and the income to provide an enjoyable life in a place of great natural beauty and in a quiet community of like-minded and similarly gifted and educated people.

The nightmare began on December 23, 1998. Dr. Lee had just returned from a trip to Taiwan on personal family business. On that visit, he also visited some of his scientific colleagues at a research facility similar to our national laboratories, but purposely did not present any scientific papers or talks because he had not requested LANL permission beforehand to do so.

Wen Ho had been employed by LANL in Los Alamos, New Mexico, for 20 years as a nuclear code developer on several of the complex computer programs that simulate the detonation of thermonuclear weapons. During those twenty years, Dr. Lee visited Taiwan periodically, especially to honor his parents’ graves. At other times, he presented scientific papers of unclassified material, always with full prior approval from LANL.

It might be more correct to say that Wen Ho’s ordeal really began 16 years earlier, in 1982. Wen Ho made a phone call that year to a nuclear scientist who worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in California. He did not know at the time that the FBI monitored Chinese American scientists, nor did he know the man personally; he had learned of him through a popular Chinese-language magazine. The man’s phones were being tapped as part of an FBI surveillance operation called “Tiger Trap,” and Dr. Lee’s phone call triggered interrogations by the FBI. As Dr. Lee was to learn, that particular scientist was suspected of giving secrets to China. Wen Ho Lee was subjected to numerous, lengthy interrogations by the FBI and was required to take a polygraph test, which he passed. He had cooperated fully with the FBI, and he believed that his polygraph test proved that he had told the truth.

Then, just before Christmas of 1998, Wen Ho Lee began to see how one encounter with the FBI could keep coming back to haunt him. He was subjected again to lengthy polygraph testing, and again, he passed. But DOE and FBI counterintelligence officials, determined to catch themselves a spy, initiated a program of intimidation, leaks, and innuendo that led to Dr. Lee’s firing from LANL a little over two months later.

Tried by the Media
At that point, the “trial by media” took off with a vengeance. A front-page headline in the New York Times on March 6, 1999, read “BREACH AT LOS ALAMOS, U.S. Aides say.” It was a long and sensational story, loaded with misinformation and unfounded allegations.

Dr. Lee later wrote, “I could not understand how such a powerful and influential newspaper could be so one-sided.” According to the Times, there was no room for doubt: China got its nuclear technology by spying on America, the spy was from Los Alamos, and Wen Ho Lee was it.

The New York Times and other establishment media acted as virtual “arms of the government” by allowing themselves to become conduits for lies and leaks about the investigation. Many of the journalists who wrote about Wen Ho Lee ignored readily available facts which, had they been reported, would have discredited their lurid speculations about his alleged crimes. The New York Times, especially, trashed Dr. Lee with a vigor that doubtless emboldened those who were determined to prove Wen Ho Lee was a dangerous spy.

The intensity of FBI harassment mounted. FBI agents even threatened Wen Ho Lee with execution if he did not confess to being a spy.

In April of 1999, Dr. Lee’s home and personal belongings—as well as those of his family—were illegally searched and hundreds of personal items were confiscated by the FBI. Dr. Lee and his family were placed under virtual house arrest at their home in White Rock, a quiet community a short distance from Los Alamos. Dozens of FBI agents were stationed outside their house, 24-7, monitoring every move for a full nine months. Incredibly, Dr. Lee had still not been officially charged with any crime.

Interrogations dragged on for a full year, with no credible evidence to indicate Dr. Lee was guilty of espionage.

In Chains and Solitary
On December 10, 1999, Wen Ho Lee was brought to the jail in Santa Fe in chains and shackles and placed in solitary confinement. He had not yet been officially charged with any crime.

In the early days of his incarceration, before he understood that the treatment he was receiving was far harsher than that of other prisoners—and before his attorneys intervened on his behalf—Dr. Lee was subjected to outrageous indignities and deprivations. He was kept in solitary confinement, prohibited from making phone calls, denied access to the outdoors exercise yard, and limited to brief and infrequent visits by family members. Whenever he was taken from his cell, his hands and feet were shackled to a chain that encircled his waist. (Dr. Lee notes in his book that his shackles were always removed before he was seen in court because the government did not want the public to see him in chains.)

Wen Ho suffered day and night from the cold in the winter months of 1999-2000, having been provided with only a denim jumpsuit, thin under shorts, and two thin blankets to keep him warm in his cold jail cell. He slept on a metal bed with only a one-inch plastic mat for a mattress, and a light burned in his cell at night, denying him even the meager comfort of sleeping in the darkness. His cell had a window, outside of which sat a security guard who had full view of Dr. Lee around the clock. He had not even the privacy of using the toilet without being under constant surveillance.

David and Goliath
After the initial shock of finding himself imprisoned and accused without evidence for a stunning array of crimes under the Atomic Energy Act (39 of which carried a life sentence), Dr. Lee began to contemplate the overwhelming task of trying to establish his innocence. He compared his case to “a black box” which the government said contained diamonds (top nuclear secrets, upon which the safety of our nation utterly depended) but which Dr. Lee maintained held sand (restricted data—not Secret or Confidential, as was charged). The files in question were categorized as PARD—“Protect as Restricted Data”—when Dr. Lee downloaded them, and that designation was not changed to Secret and Confidential until April 1999—a month after Dr. Lee was fired from his job at the Los Alamos Laboratories.

But the government controlled access to the “box,” and information that could have demonstrated his innocence from the beginning was withheld as “classified” by the government. For months, until they had gone through the lengthy process of obtaining security clearances, Dr. Lee’s attorneys were denied access to the very information that could have proven Wen Ho Lee’s innocence.

It became apparent that a “secure room”—a vault-like structure—would have to be built in the courthouse in Albuquerque so that Dr. Lee could meet with his attorneys to prepare his defense without the potential for top-secret information being intercepted. Once this had been accomplished, Dr. Lee and his attorneys went through a remarkable period of several months during which they educated one another. The attorneys learned about nuclear physics, and Dr. Lee learned about United States law—a subject which, had he been a more observant student in his earlier days, might have saved him a great deal of torment at the hands of the Executive branch of the U.S. government, the U.S. Attorneys for the District of New Mexico, his jailers, and some of his unscrupulous interrogators with the FBI

A Stunning Day in Court
On September 13, 2000, after 278 days in prison, nine long months of virtual house arrest prior to that, and years of harassment by the FBI, Dr. Lee stood in the Rio Grande courtroom in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and agreed to a plea bargain on one count. All other charges of the original 59 counts in the indictment had been dismissed for lack of evidence.

The offense to which Wen Ho Lee pleaded guilty consisted of a breach of security in handling of data categorized as “restricted,” but not classified or secret. It was a practice that other scientists were known to have engaged in to facilitate handling of computer files in an extremely cumbersome security system. Dr. Lee’s attorneys documented that fact, and pointed out that no other American scientist—nor any of numerous persons at high levels of government who were known to have engaged in similar breaches of security—had ever been criminally charged or imprisoned. Former CIA Director John Deutch, for example, downloaded top secrets to his unsecured home computer but was never charged with any crime; at the time of Wen Ho Lee’s imprisonment, Deutch continued to consult on military matters with the defense industry.

For Wen Ho’s offense, Judge James Parker sentenced him to 278 days in prison—the exact number of days he had already served. Then, in a surprising move that was more telling than any other thing he could have done to demonstrate his belief in Wen Ho Lee’s innocence, Judge Parker apologized to Dr. Wen Ho Lee:

“I believe you were terribly wronged by being held in custody pretrial in the Santa Fe County Detention Center under demeaning, unnecessarily punitive conditions. I am truly sorry that I was led by our executive branch of government to order your detention last December.

“Dr. Lee, I tell you with great sadness that I feel I was led astray last December by the executive branch of our government through its Department of Justice, by its Federal Bureau of Investigation, and by its United States attorney for the district of New Mexico, who held the office at that time. . .

“I sincerely apologize to you, Dr. Lee, for the unfair manner you were held in custody by the executive branch.”

Dr. Lee later wrote, “The judge then adjourned the court; I was moments away from being freed. I leaned over to [my lawyer] Mark Holscher and asked him, ‘Is it common for a judge to talk like this?’ Mark replied, ‘No, Wen Ho. This is very, very rare.’”

Indicted by Leaks and Innuendo
Wen Ho Lee had spent the entire winter of 1999 and the following spring and summer—278 days—in “pre-trial detention,” the government’s way of saying he should be jailed even though under our laws he was presumed to be innocent.

“According to the government officials who hoped to imprison me for life—from members of the President’s Cabinet and Congress to local prosecutors—I was so dangerous that I had to be locked away under the most severe conditions they could devise,” wrote Dr. Lee.

“One thing I did know, more than anyone else, was that the Judge and the nation were indeed terribly misled. I knew, and the other nuclear weapons scientists who watched this elaborate show, knew that the “nuclear secrets” I was falsely accused of stealing were not really secrets but were available in the open literature. Also, the files I had downloaded as part of my job as a nuclear code developer were not the state of the art weapons codes that the government wanted everyone to believe.”

Had Dr. Lee’s case actually gone to trial, these facts would almost certainly have led to a “not guilty” verdict. “But that process,” Dr. Lee wrote, “would have taken many more months and cost hundreds—even millions—more dollars in additional legal expenses. The strain on my family was already too great. When the attorneys reached an acceptable plea agreement, I took it.”

Establishment Media: Fourth Branch of Government?
Dr. Lee’s book presents all of this in a fascinating—but horrifying—expose of how an honorable American citizen was shamefully mistreated by rogue elements of government and irresponsible media that produced a steady stream of false information for public consumption. He compared the two forces to “two gangs of hoodlums—the government and the news—joining forces to keep the FBI employed and to sell newspapers.”

Wen Ho Lee compared the situation in Soviet Russia with what he had experienced in the United States: “In Russia, the government has tortured people by beating them or sending them to Siberia. Here in America, people can be tortured by the media, which involves a highly developed technique. The government gives leaks to reporters, and too often, the newspapers print them. . . .It’s how ‘torture-by-media’ works.”

On the positive side, there were some in the media who were on Dr. Lee’s side, and there were thousands of scientists who wrote articles in his defense and petitioned government for his release. Hundreds (if not thousands) of American citizens wrote letters to the government, conducted fundraisers for his defense, and participated in demonstrations on his behalf.

One particularly succinct statement in the press summed up the ordeal of Wen Ho Lee. Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer bluntly criticized the actions of the Clinton administration against Dr. Lee:

“What we are left with is not the hunt for the “crown jewels” of U.S. nuclear secrets, the “jewels” that were so often the subject of lurid headlines about Lee in respectable newspapers, led by the New York Times. Rather, what we have here is the willingness of government bureaucrats—who hounded this man for five years and came up with nothing substantive—to cynically destroy Lee in order to save face. . . . (“Spy Case is Evaporating, but Not the Bad Smell,” July 11, 2000)

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which was created by the first nuclear weapons scientists of the Manhattan Project, sent a letter to Judge Parker in the summer of 2000 on behalf of its 2,500 members, asking for Dr. Lee’s release on bond. The FAS was only one of many scientific academies and associations that registered their outrage over the gross injustice done to Wen Ho Lee. One brief excerpt from the FAS letter states:

“Incredibly, Dr. Lee has now served over seven months under extraordinarily harsh prison conditions, although he has been convicted of no crime. This is hard to reconcile with our understanding of American justice.”

And indeed it is. Every American should understand what happened to Wen Ho Lee. As he wrote in his book, “If these incredible things happened to me, they can happen again, to any American.”

Notches on the Guns of Opportunists
Following Judge Parker’s apology to Wen Ho Lee in the Rio Grande courtroom, he continued to speak—trying, it seemed, to make some sense of the ordeal for Wen Ho Lee, for the people, and perhaps for himself.

He talked about the laws of this country that protect people from being jailed until there is a trial and conviction, and how the accused are denied bail only in exceptional circumstances. One by one, Judge Parker referred to Janet Reno, Bill Richardson, and even Bill Clinton and Al Gore as the parties in the Executive branch who were responsible for the deception that led to Wen Ho Lee’s imprisonment. “He didn’t list them by name,” Wen Ho wrote, “but by title: the U.S. Attorney General, the Secretary of the Department of Energy, the President, and the Vice President.”

Judge Parker spoke about egregious abuses of power that had occurred in the government’s over-zealous “spy hunt”: “The executive branch has enormous power, the abuse of which can be devastating to our citizens. The second branch of our national government is the legislative branch, our Congress. Congress promulgated the laws under which you were prosecuted, the criminal statutes. And it also promulgated the Bail Reform Act, under which, in hindsight, you should not have been held in custody. . . .

“The top decision makers in the executive branch, especially the Department of Justice and the Department of Energy and locally . . . have caused embarrassment by the way this case began and was handled. They did not embarrass me alone. They have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it. . . .

“I am sad for you and your family because of the way in which you were kept in custody while you were presumed under the law to be innocent of the charges the executive branch brought against you. . . .

“I might say that I am also sad and troubled because I do not know the real reasons why the executive branch has done all of this. We will not learn why, because the plea agreement shields the executive branch from disclosing a lot of information that it was under order to produce that might have supplied the answer (emphasis added).

“My dream is gone . . .”
In the conclusion of his story, Wen Ho Lee writes sadly, “My American Dream is gone. It died in February 1999 when I realized the FBI was lying to me, trying to trap me. . . . Now I know that any government can turn bad, if we let it.

“If I could rewind the clock, I would have paid more attention to the issues and the concerns around me and I would have been more involved as an American citizen, using my voice to speak against discrimination and my vote to elect better leaders. . .

“My generation of immigrants came to America thinking that we could work hard, get an education, mind our own business, and take care of our own families. We didn’t think it was important to get involved in politics. . . . I have learned a lot in these years. . . . it is not too late for someone, even at my age, to learn the importance of getting involved in the American democracy. . . .

“I know that if I had been accused of such a thing in China or Russia, I would probably be dead. I would have been shot if this happened in Taiwan under the Kuomintang. The fact that I could be released after being so wrongly accused is evidence of the good in America. I can still say that I am truly glad that I am an American. . . .”

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My Country Versus Me was co-authored by Helen Zia, an award-winning journalist and author of Asian American Dreams. She has covered Asian American communities and social and political movements for more than twenty years. She was born in New Jersey and was a graduate of Princeton’s first co-educational class.

The book was published in 2001 by Hyperion Books. The ISBN number is 0-7868-6803-1.