Having established, albeit only in words, that there were no nuclear weapons secrets to steal, Scheer found it relatively easy to reach the conclusion that Lee was innocent of the suspicions the FBI had focused on him, notwithstanding the fact that he had removed thousands of pages of classified files from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab (in and of itself a violation of the Espionage Act). Drawing on years of training in the left, Scheer went on the offensive, identifying Lee as the hapless target of a racial witch hunt. Two months later, on Aug. 3, Scheer wrote his first Wen Ho Lee column. It began with Scheer's usual subtlety:

The 'Chinaman' did it. The diabolical Asian has long been a staple of American racism, and it's not surprising that the folks attempting to whip up a new red espionage scare would focus on Wen Ho Lee.

In making these bizarre accusations, Scheer was obviously aware that any such witch hunt against Lee would have to have been orchestrated by Lee's prosecutors -- Attorney General Janet Reno, FBI Director Louis Freeh and the local U.S. attorney on the case, who happened to be a former college roommate and close political friend of Bill Clinton's. To make the persecution of Lee seamless, there would also have to be collusion on the part of the acting deputy attorney general for civil rights, Bill Lann Lee -- himself an American of Chinese lineage and a hypersensitive opponent of racial profiling.

All this did not cause Scheer any second thoughts. Instead, he just plucked two more supposed culprits out of his magician's hat: the Republican head of the bipartisan nuclear secrets committee (to please radical fans) and the chief media rival to his own paper (to please editors at the Times). Wrote Scheer:

Facts evidently don't matter to those in Congress, led by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), and in the media, where the august New York Times has acted as head cheerleader for those sounding the alarm of a Chinese nuclear threat.

The following day, Cox responded. In a letter to the editor, he pointed out that Lee's name had not appeared in his committee report, and that "neither I nor any member of the Select Committee had even heard of Wen Ho Lee when we completed our report in January." Cox further pointed out that when Energy Secretary Bill Richardson fired Lee, calling him a man who had "massively violated our security system," Cox had issued a widely publicized statement criticizing the media's spotlight on Lee and saying that it was wrong, without proof, "to juxtapose him with some of the most serious crimes that have ever been committed against our military secrets."

The fact that the man whom Scheer falsely accused of persecuting Lee had actually defended the scientist did not prevent Scheer from repeating the slander in a column the next month. "It's time to pronounce the Chinese nuclear weapons spy story a hoax," he wrote. Scheer said the rationale for the investigation was "led by an outraged Cox, who represents the more right-wing fringes of Southern California, eager to find a new evil empire as justification of a military buildup, once the staple of that region's economy."

With that column Scheer managed to start a witch hunt of his own, tarring Cox, a respected congressional leader, as a member of the farthest-right fringe. Scheer's subsequent column provoked a joint rebuttal from Cox and the ranking Democrat on the committee, Norm Dix, a liberal from Washington: Scheer's "column asserted four main 'facts,'" their letter asserted, and "each of them is false."

Five days before Scheer's column appeared, the National Intelligence Estimate, representing the consensus of the entire U.S. intelligence community, released a report predicting that China was ready to test a new, longer-range intercontinental missile that could travel farther than anything it had previously developed. The technology had been developed from secrets that had been passed to the Chinese. This missile technology had been shared with Kim Il Sung's loony police state in North Korea. The letter also stated that the missile would be fitted with "smaller nuclear warheads -- in part influenced by U.S. technology gained through espionage." It was a warhead, the W-88, small enough to fit a missile, that Lee was suspected of stealing information about. (Editor's note: It was later learned that Lee never worked on or had access to data relating to that warhead.)

In the midst of Scheer's false claims and accusations (his articles continued into the following year), he got a break. On Sept. 13, 2000, the government announced that it was dropping 58 of its 59 charges against Lee. President Clinton even volunteered an apology, as though some kind of injustice had been done. However, this didn't prevent Clinton from flying to New Mexico the very next week to raise campaign money for Lee's prosecutor. The New York Times also apologized. Reno and Freeh did not. Freeh told a congressional committee: "The Department of Justice and the FBI stand by each and every one of the 59 counts in the indictment of Dr. Lee. Each of those counts could be proved in December 1999 [when Lee was formally indicted], and each of them could be proven today."

At the time Freeh defended the decision, I recalled events of the past that I believe motivated Scheer's continual defense of Lee and the Chinese communists -- it was a bedrock of conviction that hadn't changed in 40 years.

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