The Chinese in America (51 page)

According to Lee’s colleagues, such security lapses were common, and the data Lee had downloaded fell in a gray area of classification: “protect as restricted data,” or PARD. This meant the data had to be handled with care, as it might contain sensitive information, but did not merit the same kind of security precautions as “secret” or even “confidential” data. Scientists could leave PARD on their desks overnight, and a former weapons designer at Los Alamos admitted to the
Times
that he had committed his own blunder with PARD when the wind blew a sheaf of documents out a window. But after Lee’s arrest, the U.S. government reclassified the downloaded PARD files to a much higher level—as “secret restricted data”—a decision critics described as politically motivated, an attempt to justify what had already been done to Lee.

To put Lee’s actions into context, his supporters pointed to the contrasting treatment of John Deutch, a former director of the CIA, who had committed gross security violations. Wen Ho Lee had transferred PARD information from one computer to another within the laboratory, but Deutch had actually removed top-secret files from the CIA and carried them home in a briefcase. In December 1996, the CIA discovered that Deutch’s unprotected home computer contained seventeen thousand pages of documents that included ultrasecret “black programs,” presidentially approved covert operations, and even a twenty-six-volume personal diary of his tenure at the CIA and the Pentagon. An “alien resident” housekeeper had full access to the room with this computer whenever Deutch and his family were away from home. The computer was routinely used to access the Internet (including porn sites) through America Online, and neither encryption nor a secure phone line had shielded the computer from access by hackers. The CIA also learned that Deutch would leave important memory cards lying around in his car and kept extremely sensitive files on his laptop computer, which could have been easily copied or stolen.

When Deutch learned about the investigation, he immediately began deleting more than a thousand files from his personal computer, and he refused to give interviews to CIA agents on the subject. Given Deutch’s lack of cooperation, the CIA shelved the investigation, even though officials believed the former director had broken three major laws. Security investigators at the CIA wanted to alert the Justice Department about “three crimes we knew were sure-fire violations with clear evidence, but the [current] chief said ‘no,’ ” according to one CIA official, who spoke to the media only under condition of anonymity. These crimes included the unauthorized removal of classified information (punishable by up to one year in prison), the concealment or attempt to remove or destroy government documents (punishable by up to three years in prison), and working on personal projects with a financial interest involved.

The disparity between the Justice Department’s handling of the two cases was stunning. While Wen Ho Lee—a man never formally charged with espionage—was imprisoned and denied bail, Deutch, who had committed far graver offenses against national security, never spent a single night in jail. The only penalty he suffered was the removal of his security clearance, two and a half years after his security breach was discovered. Meanwhile, his life and career went on as usual. When Deutch failed in his efforts to become secretary of defense, he went back to teaching chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More significantly, Deutch may have abused his power as former director of the CIA to obstruct justice. He recommended Nora Slatkin, a CIA official overseeing the internal investigation of Deutch’s security lapses, for a top executive position at Citibank. After Deutch resigned as director in 1996, he joined the board of Citibank, and in 1997, Slatkin became a vice president there.

The double standard in the Lee and Deutch cases infuriated people both inside and outside the Chinese American community. “Deutch can get away with anything because his racial and class background enables him to behave like he owns the country and even if he has done anything illegal, he retains his privilege,” Ling-chi Wang, head of the Berkeley ethnic studies department, wrote in a public e-mail. Indeed, Deutch’s violations caused no great public outcry, no public debate about whether he, like Lee, might have been guilty of espionage. Robert Scheer, a columnist for the
Los Angeles Times,
wondered if this was because “Deutch is a leading member of the old-boy intelligence establishment, and Lee is not.” Others wondered how much of the case was driven by racism. Robert Vrooman, former head of counterintelligence at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told the
Washington Post
he believed that the federal government had targeted Lee because he was ethnic Chinese, and that the entire investigation was “built on thin air.”

Critics began to compare the handling of the Lee case with the conduct of foreign dictatorships during the cold war. In a New Mexico jail, Lee had endured conditions that few convicted felons face: for more than two hundred days, he lived in solitary confinement and was shackled in chains whenever he stepped out of his cell, which was one hour a day for exercise, and one hour a week to see his family. “While Deutch has been coddled,” Robert Scheer wrote for the
Los Angeles Times,
“Lee sits in a solitary jail cell after having been lied to by the FBI, which, acting like goons from some totalitarian country, told him he had failed the lie detector test that they knew he had easily passed.” Many people believed Lee was imprisoned without bail so he would plead guilty under pressure. “This case stinks and the resolution doesn’t make it smell any better,” said Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. “If he pleaded innocent, he had to remain in jail, but if he pleads guilty, he gets out of jail—it is so Soviet. It is un-American.” Fang Lizhi, the renowned scientist and human rights activist who had escaped from the PRC after the Tiananmen Square massacre, compared Lee’s experience in jail with human rights abuses in mainland China. The extraordinarily brutal conditions of Lee’s incarceration led even Plato Cacheris—the attorney for Aldrich Ames, the convicted spy for Moscow—to comment that Wen Ho Lee was treated far worse than his own client.

In the fall of 2000, to salvage a rapidly eroding case against Lee, the Justice Department worked out a plea bargain with his attorneys, dropping all but one of the fifty-nine counts in exchange for his agreement to cooperate with federal authorities. The judge later apologized to Lee, asserting that he had been “terribly wronged” and admitting that federal prosecutors had “embarrassed our entire nation.” It was later discovered that several government leaks to the media were not only lies but also violations of U.S. law. The following year, declassified portions of an eight-hundred-page report commissioned by Attorney General Janet Reno concluded that “the FBI has been investigating a crime which was never established to have occurred.”

The incident left a lasting wound on the psyche of the Chinese American community. They would remember not only the unbounded arrogance of the Justice Department but also the role of an irresponsible press that fanned flames of racist paranoia across America. During the Lee investigation, the media exploited cruel caricatures of the Chinese, reminding historians of the racist cartoons that led to the exclusion era of the nineteenth century.

A big part of Lee’s problems must be laid at the feet of the well-respected
New York Times,
whose reporters and editors too gullibly did the government’s bidding by running unsubstantiated government leaks on its front page. Within days, the Lee story degenerated into an orgy of yellow journalism across the nation. Talk-radio and television hosts lumped together all ethnic Chinese—Chinese Americans and foreign Chinese nationals alike—as potential spies.
⁵⁹
Major newspapers drew fantasies of millions of Chinese united by a nefarious master scheme to commit espionage. “China’s spying, they say, more typically involves cajoling morsels of information out of visiting foreign experts and tasking thousands of Chinese abroad to bring secrets home one at a time like ants carrying grains of sand,” the
Washington
Post wrote. “The Chinese have been assembling such grains of sand since at least the fourth century B.C., when the military philosopher Sun Tzu noted the value of espionage in his classic work, ‘The Art of War.’ ”

Eventually the New York Times faced criticism, both within the organization and by outsiders, for its careless reporting of the Wen Ho Lee case. In the series of articles that started it all, the
Times
reported a mysterious $700 withdrawal that Lee had made from an American Express office in Hong Kong, and speculated that he used it to buy an airplane ticket to Shanghai. It was later discovered, however, that the money had in fact been used by his daughter on a sightseeing tour outside Hong Kong. No detail was too small to be interpreted as possible evidence of Lee’s guilt. When Lee was warmly greeted by a PRC nuclear expert at a public function in Los Alamos, as scientists greet foreign colleagues whenever and wherever they meet, the
Times
wrote that the Chinese scientist hugged Lee “in a manner that seemed suspiciously congratulatory.”

The Chinese American community would also remember offhand comments made by certain politicians during the Wen Ho Lee affair that revealed the depth of their anti-Chinese feelings. In March 1999, Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, told the NBC program
Meet the Press,
“We’ve got to remember the Chinese are everywhere as far as our weapons systems, not only in our labs that make our nuclear weapons and development, but also in the technology to deliver them. We’ve seen some of that. They’re real. They’re here. And probably in some ways, very crafty people.” Though a spokesperson from his office later explained that Shelby meant Chinese spies, not Chinese Americans in general, his remarks infuriated the Asian American community. “He doesn’t distinguish between Chinese foreign nationals, Chinese graduate students, and Chinese Americans, some of whom are fifth-generation Californians,” Frank Wu, a Howard University law professor, told the
San Francisco Examiner.
“He sees them everywhere. That should be troubling.”

Equally disturbing was the fact that Robert Smith, a Republican congressman from New Hampshire, mixed up Wen Ho Lee with Bill Lann Lee, the assistant attorney general for civil rights. “The problem is guilt by racial association,” said Wu. “This gives Asian Americans insight into African-American complaints about racial profiling.”

After the press coverage of the Wen Ho Lee affair, a cloud of suspicion descended over all ethnic Chinese scientists at the national laboratories. The U.S. government began to investigate Chinese Americans for the most innocuous activities. According to Brian Sun, the attorney for Wen Ho Lee, one Chinese American in Los Angeles was interrogated merely because he sent his laptop computer out to be repaired. As one of several authors of a memo distributed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one Chinese American employee felt she was considered guilty just because of her race: “The Lab treated me as a suspect when it denied my access to the computers in my office until my computers proved that I was innocent ... I love my job. Please don’t squeeze me out.”

During the Wen Ho Lee affair, the U.S. government shocked the Chinese American community by openly acknowledging that it would use racial profiling as a tactic to investigate possible PRC espionage. Paul Moore, former head of FBI Chinese counterintelligence, said the FBI would focus their efforts on Chinese American scientists as long as PRC agents were “interested obsessively in people of Chinese American ancestry to the exclusion of people from other groups.”

The Wen Ho Lee case served as a wake-up call for the Chinese at the national laboratories. The case and its aftermath forced many Chinese American scientists—particularly those in the second wave—to rethink their priorities. Why devote their energies to supporting institutions that regarded them as untrustworthy? Would their talents not be better served in a more respectful environment? If the U.S. government did not reward their effort, or withheld promotions on the basis of skin color and ethnicity, then why did it deserve the best years of their lives? They began to complain of an environment rife with nepotism, incompetence, and racial prejudice, all of which deprived Chinese Americans of recognition. Joel Wong, an immigrant engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, spoke for thousands of other Chinese Americans in Science magazine: “The term going around now among us is that we’re high-tech coolies—if we work hard, we’re given more work.” He and other Asian Americans, several of them Taiwanese American, charged that a glass ceiling kept them from the ranks of upper management. They called the performance evaluations “subjective, arbitrary and capricious” because they were conducted in secret, were hard to contest, and were influenced by the “old-boys network.”

According to their analysis of lab salaries, the average Asian American physics Ph.D. earned as much as $12,000 less than other employees with similar credentials. In fact, Asian American compensation was often lower than white compensation by as much as 15 to 20 percent. Pointing out that racial discrimination violated federal law, the group voiced their desire for management to use “the same appropriate yardsticks for everyone, instead of the current rubber yardsticks.”

Some believed the problem arose from different values: the military culture of the administration at the national laboratories, and the academic culture of the ethnic Chinese who worked not as policy-makers or analysts, but as rank-and-file scientists. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the highest echelons of management tend to be retired naval officers. Several Chinese Americans who worked under these officers believed their bosses were deeply suspicious of all Asians because of the legacy of three wars fought in Asia: World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Many ethnic Chinese scientists asserted that this racism existed at such a deep, visceral level that the perpetrators themselves were often unaware of it. “Subconsciously, you become the enemy,” said one Taiwanese American employee at the lab. “The moment they hear your accent, they distrust you.”