Amerithrax (56 page)

Roger Kintzel, publisher of the
Journal-Constitution
, de- fended the newspaper’s coverage. “We believe the charges are without foundation and that we will prevail in court,” he said. The suit claimed Jewell was falsely portrayed as a man with “a bizarre employment history and an aberrant personality” who probably was guilty of placing the bomb. The lawsuit also named as defendants nine reporters, col- umnists, and editors, along with Piedmont College president Ray Cleere and a former school spokesman. The lawsuit said that newspaper stories quoted Cleere as describing Jewell as a “badge-wearing zealot” who “would write epic police re- ports for minor infractions.” Jewell reached a settlement with NBC (worth half a million dollars) over comments an- chor Tom Brokaw made on the air shortly after the bombing. Eventually Eric Robert Rudolph, a fugitive, was charged with the bombing, along with the 1997 and 1998 bombings in Birmingham, Alabama, of an abortion clinic and a night- club, and an Atlanta women’s clinic. At the time, Rudolph was still at large (although he has since been taken into custody on the outskirts of a national forest in North Car- olina). Now the FBI was careful of who they accused and

how they phrased it. They were cautious of leaks.

Another person of interest looming large was Wen Ho Lee. Born in Taiwan, the son of uneducated farmers, Lee studied mechanical engineering at Cheng Kung University. In 1964 he came to the U.S., where he earned a doctorate in mechanical engineering from Texas A & M. In 1978, he joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a nuclear lab- oratory in New Mexico, and within two years became part of the X Division, the unit that designs nuclear bombs. Lee held a Q clearance, the highest level of security clearance. His equations were used in the Persian Gulf War in 1992.

On September 25 of that same year, China detonated a small, two-point nuclear bomb. On February 23, 1994, Los Alamos hosted a delegation of Chinese weapons officials, among them Dr. Hu Side, who had been in charge of de- signing China’s new bomb. A translator said he overheard Hu quietly thanking Lee for providing computer software and calculations that helped China complete its sophisticated bomb. Los Alamos reported the conversation to the FBI, which began an investigation of Lee. They did not use elec- tronic eavesdropping, conduct surveillance, or search Lee’s computer even though he had signed a waiver in permitting his employer to do so. The
Wall Street Journal
, without naming Lee, ran a story about an espionage investigation at Los Alamos.

In June 1995, a Taiwanese official received a document purporting to show that the Chinese had obtained the design of America’s most advanced nuclear bomb, the W-88, seven years earlier. The CIA, which had suspected the Chinese of obtaining American secrets, drew up a list of Los Alamos scientists with access to the plans or who had security prob- lems. Lee had traveled to China in the mid-1980s. Often, China focused on Chinese Americans, appealing to an ob- ligation to aid their homeland. Chinese intelligence encoun- tered prospects in social, academic, or professional settings. Most information was passed orally. Lee never reported such advances, though they are common, and failed to in- form his supervisors about his trips to Beijing as security regulations required.

In August 1998, the FBI set up “a false flag operation.” An agent, posing as a Chinese intelligence officer, attempted

to lure Lee into a meeting, but since he spoke Cantonese and Lee spoke Mandarin, the advance failed. In December, Lee went to Taiwan for three weeks. When he returned, he was reassigned out of the X Division. Given a polygraph test, Lee passed, but admitted during the test that during his 1988 trip to Beijing, a Chinese scientist whom he knew called him in his hotel room and asked to meet with him alone. Lee agreed and Hu Side showed up. Lee said he did not tell him anything, but did not report the contact as re- quired.

During questioning, the FBI threatened Lee with the fate of the CIA’s Aldrich Ames, who had sold secrets about the nation’s spy apparatus to the Russians for a decade. That information led to the deaths of many CIA and FBI sources. The FBI also used the examples of Julius and Ethel Rosen- berg, who were executed for giving secrets from Los Ala- mos to the Soviet Union. They pointed to John A. Walker, a Navy warrant officer turned in by his former wife. “Whether you’re professing your innocence like the Rosen- bergs to the day they take you to the electric chair,” inter- rogators warned, “do you want to go down in history with your kids knowing that you got arrested for espionage?”

On February 10, 1999, FBI polygraphers examined Lee in a hotel room in Los Alamos. “Did you give nuclear weap- ons codes to any unauthorized person?” he was asked. Lee said he had not. FBI polygraph examiners in Washington examined Lee’s polygraph charts and reported the results were inconclusive, but that Lee had probably showed de- ception.

For the first time the FBI asked Lee’s consent to search his office and he consented. Agents discovered that over seventy days Lee had downloaded sensitive files equal to 430,000 pages of information from the laboratory’s classi- fied computer system. He had transferred them to his un- secured desktop computer and portable tapes. Nine of the fifteen tapes were missing. Lee later said he had copied the information as a backup to his work. After his inconclusive polygraph, Lee started deleting files he had downloaded.

On March 6, 1999, the
New York Times
headlined:

breach at los alamos: a special report; china stole

nuclear secrets for bombs, u.s. aides say
. Though the
Times
didn’t name the spy suspect, it described him as a Los Alamos computer scientist who was Chinese American and who had failed a lie detector test in February.

The day after, the FBI conducted another interview. The next day, Lee was dismissed for failing to report contacts with people from a “sensitive country” and for mishandling classified documents found on his desk.

After languidly pursuing the investigation for four and a half years, the FBI conducted a thousand interviews and surveilled Lee around the clock. They uncovered nothing. A fifty-nine–count indictment on December 10 required prosecutors to prove that Lee acted with intent to “injure the United States or to secure an advantage to any foreign na- tion.” The maximum penalty was life in prison. At Lee’s bail hearing, Robert Messemer, a new agent on the case, said Lee had told a colleague he wanted to borrow his com- puter to download a “resume” but in fact, Messemer testi- fied, Lee borrowed the computer to download more files. Messemer had stretched the truth.

“The reason I downloaded those files,” wrote Lee, “was very simple and mundane. I wanted to protect them from loss in the event that LANL [Los Alamos National Labo- ratories] changed the computer operating system again or experienced a computer crash—both had occurred in the past, causing serious problems for me. During those inci- dents, I lost some important computer codes I had writ- ten...

“As a code developer, it was important that I have my own copy of my version of the codes I worked on. That’s because other code developers worked on other parts of the code at the same time that I worked on the hydrodynamics portion... If they made changes to the code, it could affect the way my subroutines operated on the code. What I wanted to do was save a snapshot of the code at a certain time. It wouldn’t help me to have a copy of the code after months or years of additional work had been done on it, because I would have to reconstruct all the changes to all the subroutines that might have affected my part of the code. I might be able to reconstruct everything, but it would be a

great waste of time, possibly years, when it was so simple just to have a tape as documentation of the program.” As in the Jewell case, unsourced leaks had played a part in the government’s rush to judgment.

Without benefit of a trial, the sixty-one-year-old Lee was imprisoned in a tiny, constantly illuminated cell. His leg was manacled the entire time. After 278 days in solitary con- finement, he was given a second bail hearing. On August 17, 2000, Messemer admitted he had made a mistake. Lee had been indicted with insufficient evidence. On September 13, 2000, Judge James A. Parker finally freed Lee, speaking to him before a packed courtroom gallery. “I believe you were terribly wronged by being held in custody pretrial in the Santa Fe County Detention Center under demeaning, unnecessarily punitive conditions,” Parker said. “I am truly sorry that I was led by our executive branch of government to order your detention last December. Dr. Lee, I tell you with great sadness that I feel I was led astray last December by the executive branch of our government through its De- partment of Justice, and its Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Lee agreed to a sentence of time served and to undergo sixty hours of debriefing under oath. He acknowledged il- legally making copies of the tapes and mishandling national security data, a single felony count out of fifty-nine counts. Those had included thirty-nine counts each carrying a life sentence for violating the Atomic Energy Act and for steal- ing nuclear secrets with the intent to harm America. Asian American groups claimed Lee was a victim of racial profil- ing and the CIA raised doubts about the veracity of infor- mation showing China had stolen the secrets to W-88 in the

first place.

Lee and Jewell—two cases highly prejudged by the FBI and unproven—explained the hesitancy of the Bureau. Treatment of both had led to formal apologies and success- ful lawsuits.

The months-long search had been maddening. Who had committed the worst bioterror attack on American soil? He had to be smart, an expert, have access to the spores of a certain strain and the machinery to manufacture it, and have been at postal zones where they were mailed. Could he be

connected to Kathy Nguyen or Ottilie Lundgren, the two victims who did not fit? Their investigation kept turning back to Hatfill. Though officials were now pointing him out as only one of “around twelve” people they were looking at, not a suspect or even a target of the investigation. The Anthrax Task Force had discovered the strain of anthrax used and winnowed it down from a series of labs to the precise source of the contagion. Now they were about to find the mailbox the killer had used.

ON
Tuesday morning, August 6, 2002, Attorney General Ashcroft, speaking from his fifth-floor suite at the Justice Department, told
The Early Show
that “Progress is being made. But until you cross the thresholds of information that will provide the basis for action, it may be that the progress doesn’t mean a lot.” When asked if Dr. Hatfill was a suspect, Ashcroft said, “Well, he’s a person of interest... I’m not prepared to say any more at this time other than the fact that he is an individual of interest... We have important things to do and to proceed with and to comment would be inap- propriate at this time.” He hinted at another search of Dr. Hatfill’s apartment.

A month earlier, the FBI handlers of three police blood- hounds had presented the dogs with a set of “scent packs.” These had been lifted from the letters to Daschle and Leahy, which had been cleansed of anthrax spores without elimi- nating the sender’s scent. The handlers either rubbed sterile gauze on the envelopes and exposed the scent packs to the dogs or used a scent machine. The six-hundred-dollar STU-

100 device vacuumed scent onto a gauze pad directly from items a suspect had touched or worn close to the skin. The gauze pads could be preserved in an evidence freezer until needed. Bloodhounds have “noses a thousand times more sensitive than a human’s” and are the only dogs whose pow- ers of smell are admissible in court.

In the hunt for Jack the Ripper through the streets of Whitechapel, Sir Charles Warren had been ridiculed when he obtained the use of Edwin Brough’s two champion Scar- borough bloodhounds, Barnaby and Burgho. On October 8, 1888, in Regent’s Park, London, handlers on horseback gave a demonstration of the hounds’ tracking powers on ground thickly coated with frost. The bloodhounds hunted a man for a mile after he had been given a fifteen-minute head start. They were tested again that night in pitch blackness and the following morning when a half-dozen successful runs were made. Warren himself took the part of the hunted man twice. Unfortunately bloodhounds were never used in tracking Jack through the narrow East End streets.

With little fanfare, FBI agents had been taking blood- hounds to locations frequented by the twelve “persons of interest” on their Amerithrax short list. While they hoped the dogs might leap and bark, meaning they had matched the scent on the letters, they had not reacted at all. They drove the dogs to a series of locations Hatfill frequented, hoping to match the scent on the letter. Larry Harris and his bloodhounds had been flown in from California by the FBI for the Hatfill search. Earlier, the FBI had already taken the three dogs to Louisiana to aid local police in tracking a serial killer. Now they returned.

The dogs were said to have visibly reacted when brought to a Denny’s Restaurant in Baton Rouge where Hatfill had eaten the day before. FBI agents also brought the blood- hounds to the Washington, D.C., apartment of his girlfriend. The dogs barked and jumped there too, as they did at places where Hatfill and two women had been. Dr. Hatfill later claimed that agents used heavy-handed tactics when they searched his Malaysian girlfriend’s home. “She was man- handled by the FBI upon their entry, not immediately shown the search warrant, her apartment was wrecked while FBI