American Spies: Espionage against the United States from the Cold War to the Present

22 Chinese Nuclear Espionage and the Wen Ho Lee Case

22 241 Chinese Nuclear Espionage and the Wen Ho Lee Case This is going to be just as bad as the Rosenbergs. Comment by PAUL REDMOND, former chief of CIA counterintelligence, on media revelations of Chinese nuclear espionage, cited by Stober and Hoffman, Convenient Spy, 196 (In addition to Stober and Hoffman’s balanced study, two other books approach the case from decidedly different perspectives: Wen Ho Lee’s own defense is in his autobiography, My Country versus Me; for a radically different view of the case, Notra Trulock, the Department of Energy chief of counterintelligence who first focused on Lee, provides his account in Kindred Spirit.) Paul Redmond’s comments were echoed by others shocked to read in the New York Times on March 6, 1999, that China had stolen America’s nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a pillar of weapons research in the Department of Energy’s (DOE) nationwide research-anddevelopment network. Over the next eighteen months, the investigation of the main suspect in the case of Chinese nuclear theft would be muddled by bitter political partisanship, interagency squabbles, tangled legal arguments , and the ugly specter of racial prejudice. At the center of this maelstrom was Wen Ho Lee, a slight, gray-haired Chinese American scientist at Los Alamos who stood accused of betraying America’s most precious national defense secrets. Lee’s path to Los Alamos was typical of many other Chinese American scientists working at national laboratories. He was born to a family of farmers in Taiwan in 1939 at the Espionage in the New Millennium 242 height of Japan’s occupation of the island. After studying engineering at a Taiwanese university, Lee emigrated to America and received a PhD in engineering from Texas A&M University. Lee became an American citizen in 1974 and was hired as a specialist in hydrodynamics at the Argonne National Laboratory and then at Los Alamos. When Lee began work at Los Alamos in 1978, the United States and China had launched an exchange program between their nuclear scientists. The reciprocal visits were designed for the mutual benefit of both nations, but China ultimately gained the most from the program. In 1988 the Chinese tested a neutron bomb, an enhanced radiation weapon designed to destroy human beings but leave infrastructure intact. The bomb’s warhead was based on America’s W-70, the most advanced warhead in its arsenal at the time. An espionage investigation regarding possible theft of the warhead design focused on Guo Bao Min, a Chinese American scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.1 Like Wen Ho Lee, Guo had studied engineering first in Taiwan and then in the United States before working at Livermore. In 1979, he was in contact with Chinese scientists under the exchange program and afterward was discovered checking materials out of Livermore’s library about topics outside his job responsibilities. The FBI investigation, code-named Tiger Trap, resulted in Guo’s firing by Livermore but DOJ decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Guo. In December 1982, Lee called Guo out of the blue to offer his help. Lee told Guo that he had contacts in Taiwan and perhaps he could discover who had accused the Livermore scientist. Guo dismissed his offer and hung up. Unbeknownst to Lee, FBI agents tapping Guo’s phone heard the strange conversation and opened an investigation on him.2 Instead of allaying FBI suspicions, Lee initially denied that he had called Guo, a pattern of deception that would characterize his entire case. After finally admitting that he had made the call, he also confessed that he was in contact with Taiwanese scientists and had sent them Los Alamos materials. Although the materials were unclassified, they were subject to Nuclear Regulatory Commission export controls, and thus Lee should have sought authorization before dispatching them to the Taiwanese.3 However, Lee’s offense did not meet the threshold for prosecution and the FBI closed the investigation. Chinese Nuclear Espionage and the Wen Ho Lee Case 243 Lee, however, later aggravated his security problems. Lee and his wife Sylvia, who also worked at the lab, frequently met visiting Chinese scientists , and they also traveled twice to China on official visits in the late 1980s. In 1988, on his second trip, Lee was unexpectedly visited in his hotel room by two of his Chinese hosts. One of them, Hu Side, was considered the father of Chinese nuclear...