In retrospect, the most important lesson of my '60s encounter with a defector from our own intelligence service was the tolerance, sympathy and even support for treason that can be found in mainstream liberalism itself. Even though we thought of ourselves as radicals, the mainstream culture that we despised was so tolerant and even supportive of our radical postures that we were never prosecuted for the crime we had committed. Instead, we were given a kind of hero status for our "journalistic coup" in printing the revelations of "Winslow Peck." The New York Times gave our story front-page coverage.

It is obvious to me now that the adversarial attitude that inspired me in the '60s (and that I have since rejected) lies behind the sympathy for Lee and the preposterous belief that his activities were "innocent." This attitude is both typified and given ominous expression in the role played by an old comrade of mine who preceded me at Ramparts, and who later became a national correspondent and then a powerful columnist at the Los Angeles Times -- the very paper that led the attack on the Cox Report and also the defense of Lee.

There is perhaps no more outspoken champion of Lee in American journalism than L.A. Times pundit Robert Scheer, who has authored more than a dozen columns on Lee (including one filed from Albuquerque, where Lee was indicted and held). Scheer has even called Lee "an American Dreyfus," after the French Jew who was falsely accused by anti-Semites of treason in the 19th century: "In a case that parallels the frame-up of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army a century ago," Scheer wrote at the time of Lee's arrest, "the U.S. government is hellbent on destroying Wen Ho Lee, a naturalized American citizen and former Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientist ... In both cases, the 'foreignness' of the suspect was used by officials and the media to stoke fears of betrayal of the nation's security to a dangerous enemy."

The idea that the Clinton administration singled out Lee for ethnic persecution is laughable. The notion that Dreyfus and Lee are parallel cases is simply ludicrous.

Even before taking up Lee's cause, Scheer had led the attacks on the bipartisan Cox Report, released in the spring of 1999, which documented the theft of America's nuclear arsenal, including the miniaturized W-88 warhead suited for placement on cruise-type ballistic missiles. Attacking Cox, and the Democrats who supported him, as "fear-mongers" and national security hysterics, Scheer actually asserted that there were no nuclear secrets to begin with, so the Chinese couldn't have stolen them.

"The dirty secret of the nuclear weapons business is that there are no secrets," Scheer wrote in the Times on Aug. 3, 1999. "Nothing has happened since Hiroshima and Nagasaki to render these weapons any more plausibly useful as weapons. A crude nuclear weapon dropped from a propeller-driven plane or carried in a suitcase does the job of terrorizing civilian populations -- the only function of nuclear weapons -- as effectively as the modernized warheads, whose technology some claim Beijing has stolen."

The statement betrays an astounding ignorance of modern nuclear strategy for a columnist at the Los Angeles Times. But as though even this howling claim was not sufficient to make Scheer's point, he also invoked O'Leary's "level playing field." Whatever weapons the Chinese Communist dictatorship did not already have, Scheer wrote, the United States should provide to it, in the interests of peace! "It would be in our national security interest to supply the Chinese with a Trident-class sub that works, as opposed to their lone sub contender that leaks radiation so badly that it isn't operational. And, heresy of heresies, we should give the Chinese some submarine-suitable missiles armed with the miniaturized W-88 warhead that they are supposed to have stolen. That way, even if they thought a nuclear weapon was en route to them, they would not have to instantly respond, being secure in the knowledge that they possessed survivable retaliatory power."

Where do such bizarre, alienated and delusional attitudes come from? As I have already mentioned, Scheer preceded me as the editor of the radical-left magazine Ramparts. In fact, my co-editors and I fired him in 1969, less than three years before we published the revelations of national security agent "Peck." Although our firing of Scheer was not political, it turned out that he subsequently veered farther to the left than any of us were ever tempted to go.

Unlike me and others who have had second thoughts (but just like Nesson), Scheer has never had second thoughts. He has probably changed some of the beliefs he held in the '60s and has probably reconsidered some of the actions he took. But he has never repudiated them, never acknowledged how wrong he had been and never relinquished the adversarial attitudes that led him astray in the first place. That is the real national security problem that the latest turn in the Wen Ho Lee case reveals.

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