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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Wen Ho Lee was charged in December with 59 counts of mishandling nuclear secrets and denied bail. He spent most of this year in solitary confinement. When the most recent bail hearing began in August, the government's case crumbled. The most damaging revelation came from the FBI's lead agent, Robert Messemer, who was forced to recant crucial testimony he'd given in December, when he charged that Lee had lied to investigators and colleagues.
By early this month, government prosecutors, who once claimed Lee had downloaded the "crown jewels" of the nuclear defense system, agreed to free Lee if he pleaded guilty to one count of improperly downloading classified material.
On Sept. 13, after the U.S. District Court judge lit into top government officials who had "embarrassed our entire nation" in their handling of the case, Lee was free.
The stunning public turnaround suddenly drew attention to the fact that the entire premise of the New York Times' early news reports and strident editorials -- proclaiming that a Chinese-American scientist inside Los Alamos had given away nuclear secrets that had dramatically helped China improve its arsenal, and that the Clinton administration could have stopped it but chose not to -- had turned out to be flat wrong.
To date, the paper has been strangely silent about its pivotal role in the Lee saga. Attempts to get comments from executive editor Joseph Lelyveld, managing editor Bill Keller, editorial page editor Howell Raines, Washington bureau chief Michael Oreskes and reporter Jeff Gerth, among others, were unsuccessful.
A newspaper spokesperson hinted to Salon that the paper may yet address the controversy: "Our next assessment or explanation of the Wen Ho Lee case will be addressed to our readers, not other publications."
Times watchers predict that an extended editor's note addressing the paper's coverage will run in the "Week in Review" section Sunday, and that it will argue the Times was merely being aggressive in following a criminal investigation.
Many outside the paper, however, are not waiting for its official explanation.
"They rushed into this," suggests Steve Schwartz, publisher of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. "This story was given to them and nobody else and they decided to run it without thinking through what they were doing. They created the illusion of something that just wasn't there and ignored the other evidence that painted a different picture."
"It starts out with allegations, none of which turn out to be true," notes Walter Pincus, who has covered the Lee story for the Washington Post.
"Obviously they should be embarrassed," says Robert Vrooman, retired Los Alamos counterintelligence chief. "Gerth and Risen were in over their heads and they got snookered."
"It looks like a terrible injustice was done to a guy and his name first surfaced in the New York Times," notes Don Hewitt, executive producer of CBS's "60 Minutes," which aired an interview with Lee last year. "I'll leave it to the New York Times as to what they should do about it."
Off the record, journalists at other major media outlets are teeing off on the Times, labeling its performance "utterly reckless," suggesting the paper "fell for sources that any other reporter would have said are not playing with a full deck."
The unusually loud drumbeat of fault finding is so steady even the White House feels comfortable publicly chastising the Times. Administration spokesman Jake Siewert told Salon, "The paper singled out Wen Ho Lee as the primary suspect and now it seems to have developed collective amnesia about its earlier reporting and editorializing."
While the paper's performance raises troubling questions (to borrow a favorite Times phrase when it questions the motivations and actions of others), some see an even more perplexing trend in the work of Gerth, the influential reporter who drove the original Wen Ho Lee coverage. Gerth also broke the Loral satellite transfer story two years ago (which in retrospect seems badly inflated), as well as the Whitewater allegations in 1992. That was back before Whitewater blossomed into a megastory, but instead centered around allegations of shady Clinton investments and the couple's alleged attempts to stymie federal regulators.
But on Wednesday, independent counsel Robert Ray decided to finally shut down the six-year Whitewater investigation without bringing any charges against the Clintons. And when his predecessor, Kenneth Starr, filed his final report on the Clinton probe, he included nothing on Whitewater. Thus, those early allegations in Gerth's stories turned out to be specious and unfounded, accusations that the government spent $52 million -- and the press untold hours -- chasing. ("Don't even mention Whitewater," sighs Pincus at the Post.)
For those who connect the dots between the three major Gerth stories, there's an unmistakable sense of dij` vu. Each contains ominous conclusions drawn from questionable evidence, lots of loaded language, loyalty to flawed sources with axes to grind, cheerleading from the editorial page and, most importantly, central accusations that simply never pan out. To some, the Wen Ho Lee saga reads an awful lot like Whitewater.
