The spy who wasn't

Lee's book, written with Helen Zia, details his strange, unwelcome tango with American courts. (In his acknowledgments, Lee thanks no fewer than 24 members of his legal team and their staffs.)

Since Wen Ho Lee's name has already become synonymous with an egregious miscarriage of justice, it's important to have his version of the story on the record. Those who followed the nuclear scientist's saga closely, though, probably won't find much new information in the book.

Readers won't find many fireworks either. Calm and quiet almost to a fault, Lee, who's never watched the Super Bowl (he prefers fishing), never voted and only listens to music written centuries ago, continues to hold his cards close to the vest. His anger and frustration still simmer, but he allows himself only the mildest outbursts in print.

"Trouble came roaring into my safe and steady world on December 23, 1998, like the kind of flash rainstorm in the mountains that can turn a placid fishing trip deadly," writes Lee. On that day, having just returned to his job at the Los Alamos National Lab from a trip to Taiwan, Lee was summoned into the security office for a debriefing.

He didn't know it at the time (and by not quickly hiring a lawyer, he needlessly remained the dark for months), but Lee was suspected of providing the Chinese with design features for the United States' W-88 miniature nuclear warhead. Why Lee? In part, because he knew how the W-88 was designed, and he'd visited China.

In the end, the government's Operation Kindred Spirit, which examined Lee's supposed hand in the supposed espionage, fizzled. But that was simply replaced by Operation Sea Change, which charged Lee with illegally downloading computer files. On Dec. 10, 1999, Lee was arrested, charged with 59 counts, and faced a maximum sentence of life in prison.

In his book, Lee insists that the tapes he made, and subsequently threw away, were simply backups to protect his own files, and that other people, such as former CIA Director John Deutch, have also been guilty of transferring files to unsecured computers, but were never prosecuted like Lee.

In their recent book, however, "A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage," reporters Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman criticize the government's investigation but take issue with Lee's explanation of the tapes. They suggest his highly unusual downloading activities justifiably raised suspicions, and that Lee was building up a library of bomb data in hopes of landing a better job outside of LANL. Lee's critics still insist that his foolish actions were the cause of his troubles, but only his most radical detractors suggest that he was ever a spy.

Lee's saga is all about a crusade run amok, but unfortunately neither book can answer the crucial questions of how and why the operation jumped off track. The key players who can provide the answers aren't talking.

One of them is FBI agent Carol Covert, whose shockingly inappropriate interrogation session with Lee on March 7, 1999, became a national embarrassment when Lee's advocates obtained transcripts and posted them on a Web site while he was behind bars. Another is former Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, who caved in to political pressure and OK'd the Lee witch hunt.

And then there's supervising FBI agent Robert Messmer, whose inflammatory testimony helped make sure Lee was imprisoned for nearly a year while awaiting trial; Messmer was later forced to recant that testimony as "misstatements." Renegade, self-styled whistle-blower Notra Trulock, a discredited former Energy Department intelligence officer, became fixated on Lee early on and then leaked fictional accounts of the spy investigation to the New York Times. (During the height of the frenzy, NBC's Tim Russert welcomed Trulock on "Meet the Press" and treated him with reverence.)

Another culprit is Lee's old LANL boss Dick Krajcik, who testified that Lee had downloaded "the crown jewels of the nuclear weapons program," and Dr. Paul Robinson, LANL's former associate director for national security, who testified that Lee's tapes "could truly change the world's strategic balance." Both assertions were proven to be pure nonsense.

And then there are Sens. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, John McCain, R-Ariz., and Trent Lott, R-Miss., who all banged the proverbial table during more than a dozen Lee-related congressional hearings, demanding to know what the Clinton administration was going to do about the Chinese spy in its midst and why the scientist hadn't yet been indicted for, let alone convicted of, spying.

Next Page: The New York Times' utterly unfair coverage

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