Despite the now-obvious flaws in the Times' March 6 story on Los Alamos, at the time it made believers out of most readers. "I assumed maybe I had been overly critical of the Times," recalls Steven Aftergood, a senior analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. "Because now they had nailed the story down and here's the guy I figured they found transferring codes to China."

As he began to read the paper's steady stream of follow-up reports though, Aftergood's fear of widespread Chinese espionage quickly faded. "The coverage was so breathless in its speculation that China was now a nuclear power thanks to U.S. espionage. That was objectively false."

The Times told its readers as much on Sept. 7, 1999, in the form of a 5,000-word, Page 1 piece by science writer William Broad. The story seriously questioned, in a gentlemanly way, much of Gerth's and Risen's reporting. "It was what we call 'The Retraction,'" says Henry Tang of the Committee of 100, a Chinese-American group that believes Lee was singled out because of his ethnicity.

Ever since the Broad article appeared one year ago, the Times has covered the Lee story with an even hand. Risen and Gerth no longer write about the case. "I give the Times a lot of credit" for its subsequent Lee coverage, says former National Security Council spokesman Leavy. "They let another reporter with fresh eyes really challenge the conclusions of Gerth and Risen."

With Broad's story, observers might have concluded the Times was backing away from Gerth's and Risen's earlier reports. But instead of acknowledging its errors, the Times seemed to go into a bunker. In its November 1999 issue, Brill's Content ran a critical piece examining the newspaper's initial reporting on Lee. Times investigative editor Stephen Engelberg (who teamed up with Gerth to write Whitewater stories in the early '90s) promptly responded with a 2,500-word letter to the editor, adamantly denying Broad's piece was in any way a retraction. By protesting so loudly, the Times was once again seen as defending its original, and now widely ridiculed, Wen Ho Lee stories.

But finally the Lee case, already seen by many observers as weak, collapsed in spectacular fashion inside an Albuquerque, N.M., courtroom this month, leading to the obvious question: How did this all happen?

So far, the Times has refused to openly concede its role in the saga. That has made for some peculiar reading, as when concerned, unsigned editorials began calling this month for an independent body to determine whether Wen Ho Lee was fingered by investigators simply because he was Chinese-American. Compare that to the spring of 1999, when the Times editorial page had no such reservations as it lustily cheered the paper's investigative reporting. "The United States might as well have dumped its most sensitive defense secrets on Pennsylvania Avenue for Chinese spies to pick up," fulminated a May 16 editorial.

The Times' selective memory was on further display in Gail Collins' Aug. 29 column belittling the Lee prosecution, suggesting the case was "brought to you courtesy of the FBI and the Department of Energy." Collins delicately overlooked the Times' own glaring role in the rush to judge Wen Ho Lee. Reached at the paper, Collins declined to comment. Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who has also written critically of the Lee prosecution without mentioning the paper, also declined to comment, other than to agree that the Times' involvement in the Lee case "is a very good subject for exploration."

So far the Times disagrees. Despite the uproar over the unjust treatment of Lee, the Times has not published a single editorial, op-ed column or letter to the editor about the paper's Lee coverage.

"There's nothing wrong with making an error, we all make mistakes," says Aftergood. "What's scary is the paper's unwillingness to admit fault. I think the Times is doing a real disservice to its own interest. But it seems they've dug in so deep they can't get out."

At the height of the Lee story last year, Vrooman recalls receiving a request from the Times, asking for a photograph of himself. "I asked them what for and they said, 'You're a part of the story.' I said, 'Well, so are you.'" He half-jokingly suggested the paper run photographs of Gerth in its news reports about Lee.

Says Vrooman, "Nobody is going to write a history of this case without mentioning the New York Times."

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