Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China (12 page)

He had zeroed in on a suspect, a scientist at the lab. The official was sure he was the spy.

Chapter 9

KINDRED SPIRIT: WEN HO LEE

N
OTRA TRULOCK GREW UP
outside Indianapolis, the son of a fireman who became a gunsmith, and a mother who started her own doll-making business. He was a self-described mediocre student at Indiana University.

The Vietnam War was on; when he graduated in 1970 he was drafted into the Army, which sent him to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey to learn Russian. The Army Security Agency posted him to Germany, to the Bavarian Alps, where he spent eighteen months listening to Soviet radio traffic. After he got out, he joined the National Security Agency in 1975, then worked for a think tank in Denver. In 1990 he took a job at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Four years later, he was promoted to director of intelligence at the Department of Energy in Washington.

Counterintelligence at the department was "little more than a joke,"
Trulock said. Although he had no background in CI, Trulock was determined to do something about the problems at DOE, particularly to improve what he perceived as lax security at the nuclear weapons labs. He was swimming against the current; scientists believe in the free exchange of ideas and are inherently resistant to security restrictions, polygraphs, and the counterintelligence mindset. There was, and probably always will be, tension between the physicists who design the nation's nuclear weapons, and "the cops" who are responsible for keeping secrets from falling into the wrong hands.

In 1992 an event took place that led in time to a prolonged mole hunt at DOE, presided over by Trulock. On September 25, China tested a nuclear weapon underground. US analysts concluded that Beijing had succeeded in exploding a miniaturized bomb. Over the next few years, other Chinese tests followed. In the spring of 1995 two scientists at Los Alamos, after analyzing the test data, told Trulock that China, in achieving a small warhead in a very short time, probably gained its success through espionage.

By July, under the code name
KINDRED SPIRIT,
an interagency working group with experts from the nuclear labs, the CIA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency was studying the question of whether China had developed a miniaturized warhead through spying. The group's cautious conclusions were never sent to the FBI, however. That same month, the FBI opened a file under the same code name,
KINDRED SPIRIT
, on the possible loss of nuclear secrets to China.

A month later, the CIA shared with the Energy Department the startling document with details of the W-88 warhead obtained from the walk-in who claimed to work in China's nuclear weapons program. Up to then, the suspicion of Chinese espionage had been based on an analysis of China's nuclear tests. The document provided by the walk-in dramatically changed all that. Now the focus of the inquiry shifted to the W-88. In September, DOE opened a formal investigation
of how China had obtained precise classified details of America's most advanced weapon, the Trident warhead.

Trulock eagerly embraced the idea that American labs had been penetrated by China and nuclear secrets stolen. Someone in China had obtained the measurements of the W-88. Trulock was convinced the spy must be at Los Alamos, where the weapon had been designed in 1984, although data about the warhead had been widely circulated within the government.

With the assistance of an FBI agent who was dispatched to Los Alamos, a list of a dozen suspects was drawn up and sent to the bureau by Trulock. Wen Ho Lee was on the list, along with his wife, Sylvia, who had also been employed at Los Alamos. Lee worked in X Division, where the nuclear bombs are designed, the most secret part of the Los Alamos lab, and he had specific knowledge about the W-88.

Trulock, who quit as an officer of his college fraternity and moved out when it refused to pledge a black student, vehemently denied that Wen Ho Lee was singled out because he was Chinese. "We came up with a list of about a dozen people," he said. "There were Americans of Chinese origin and not of Chinese origin on the list."
^*

But a memo written by Dan Bruno, the chief of counterintelligence investigations at DOE—who reported to Trulock—explicitly recommended that Chinese Americans who worked with the W-88 be targeted by the investigation.

"A crucial element of this inquiry is the identification of personnel who worked on the various aspects of the design," the memo stated. "An initial consideration will be to identify those US citizens, of Chinese heritage,
who worked directly or peripherally with the design development.... This is a logical starting point based upon the Intelligence Community's evaluation that the PRC targets and utilizes ethnic Chinese for espionage rather than persons of non-Chinese origin."

In the same vein, one of the more bizarre documents churned up in the Wen Ho Lee investigation is a memo in DOE files dated November 15, 1995, of a meeting about China's nuclear weapons program. It states that Charles Curtis, the deputy secretary of energy, "noted that there are seven Chinese restaurants in Los Alamos."

The question of whether Wen Ho Lee was singled out because he was Chinese was examined in a
TOP SECRET
Justice Department review completed in 2000 by Randy Bellows, a federal prosecutor. The exhaustive review, which was extremely critical of both DOE and the FBI, found "no evidence of racial bias" by DOE
or "that the selection of Wen Ho Lee was based upon an investigation of Chinese Americans to the exclusion of any other group of potential suspects."

At the same time, the Bellows review found that DOE's final report to the FBI was edited at DOE to convert it from "a broad identification of potential suspects to a virtual indictment of the Lees."
The forty-four-page DOE report found that Wen Ho Lee "was the only individual identified during this inquiry who had the opportunity, motivation and legitimate access"
to the design of the W-88.

"Wen Ho Lee should never have been the
only
suspect," the Bellows review asserted, finding that "the message communicated to the FBI was that the FBI need look no further within DOE for a suspect. Wen Ho Lee was its man."

In short, Wen Ho Lee quickly became DOE's and Trulock's prime suspect. The widely held public perception that Lee was singled out because he was a Chinese American is a controversy that may never be fully resolved. Even those who investigated Lee are ambiguous in dealing with the question. For example, Robert Vrooman, a former CIA officer who was chief of counterintelligence at Los Alamos, said in a sworn court declaration in August 2000 that the scientist was singled out "because Lee is ethnic Chinese."
But a month later, appearing on the PBS television show
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,
he told interviewer Gwen Ifill that the cause was not "ethnic profiling or racism.
It was really just the lack of intellectual rigor in the original investigation.... Once they found Lee, and he was ethnic Chinese, they didn't go on and look at the entire population."

There were, however, several good reasons that Wen Ho Lee came up so rapidly on the radar screen. He had previously been investigated twice by the FBI for suspicious behavior.

In 1982 he was scrutinized at length by the FBI after he made the telephone call to Gwo-bao Min, the
TIGER TRAP
suspect, offering to find out who had "squealed" on Min. He had lied when asked about that, denying he had contacted the Livermore scientist, admitting the truth only when confronted with the transcript of the wiretap on Min's phone.

There was some question about how he learned that Min had been forced out of Livermore. In his memoir,
My Country Versus Me,
Wen Ho Lee wrote that he read "in a popular Chinese-language magazine" that "a Taiwanese nuclear scientist was fired from Lawrence Livermore."
The publication, he said, had named Min. But Min's name did not surface, at least in any English-language publication, until after his identity was disclosed in a court document in the prosecution of Wen Ho Lee. The FBI suspected that Lee had learned about Min from another scientist.

On December 23, 1998, Lee was given a lie detector test administered by the security firm Wackenhut, an Energy Department contractor. He answered no when asked if he had ever committed espionage against the United States. In the pretest interview he acknowledged that, many years before, he had learned that "Ko Pau Ming," whom he knew was from Taiwan, "was having trouble with some men in China" and "out of curiosity" had telephoned him.
^*
The Wackenhut report was declassified by the government in the subsequent prosecution of Wen Ho Lee. Min was later identified by name
in a story by reporter Dan Stober in the
San Jose Mercury News.

Early in 1994 the FBI opened a second investigation of Wen Ho Lee after an incident known in counterintelligence circles as "the hug." It began when Lee showed up uninvited at a meeting in Los Alamos of senior officials with a high-level visiting delegation of scientists from China.

The delegation was led by Hu Side, China's leading nuclear weapons designer. During a break in the meeting, Lee went up to Hu and was warmly embraced by the top Chinese weapons scientist.
Some of the American participants in the meeting were immediately suspicious. How did Wen Ho Lee, a relatively low-level employee at Los Alamos, know Hu, and how did he merit a hug?

An FBI memorandum about the 1994 meeting cites an unidentified source who quoted Hu as saying of Wen Ho Lee, "We know him very well. He came to Beijing and helped us a lot."

Lee had been to China twice to attend scientific meetings, in 1986 and 1988. In his trip report after the 1988 meeting, Lee failed to mention that he had been visited at his hotel room by Hu Side, who was accompanied by another scientist, Zheng Shao Tong. Nor did he report that Zheng had asked whether the United States used two-point detonation on the W-88. Lee was aware that the answer was highly classified. He later claimed that he told Zheng "he did not know the answer" and did not want to discuss the matter.

Two-point detonation was, of course, the key to the design of the W-88, the way that US scientists had solved the problem of how to build a miniaturized warhead. And Hu Side was credited with developing the small warhead that Beijing tested four years later, in 1992.

Robert Vrooman, the Los Alamos counterintelligence chief, interviewed Wen Ho Lee after his 1988 trip to China. According to Vrooman, Lee not only omitted any mention of his hotel room meeting with Hu Side,
"He answered no to a direct question," when specifically asked if any approach of that kind had occurred.

As a result of "the hug," the FBI investigated Wen Ho Lee for a year and a half, until November 1995. Six months later, on May 30, 1996, at the request of DOE, the FBI opened a full-fledged investigation of Wen Ho and Sylvia Lee.
This time the probe, still code-named
KINDRED SPIRIT
, was not about a suspicious hug. It was about whether Wen Ho Lee had given the design secrets of the W-88 to Beijing.

The walk-in, whether under Chinese control or not, had produced a document that proved China had acquired details of America's most deadly and sophisticated warhead. That should have led immediately to a massive investigation by the FBI, the CIA, and DOE, to try to determine the source of the leak. Astonishingly, that did not happen for three years. In 1999, months after Wen Ho Lee was fired from the Los Alamos lab, a broader investigation was finally begun by the FBI.

Because of the narrow findings of the DOE formal inquiry, which pointed only to Wen Ho Lee, the FBI for three years was not investigating how and where China might have stolen the design details of the warhead. Instead, it was investigating Wen Ho Lee and his wife. In the words of the Bellows Report, "the FBI investigated the wrong crime."

Wen Ho Lee was born on December 21, 1939, into a poor farm family in Nantou, Taiwan, one of ten children who grew up in a three-room adobe mud house, surviving on the vegetables the family grew, and the chickens, ducks, geese, and pigs they raised. With his brothers and sisters, he caught fish and frogs each day for dinner.
As a child during World War II, Lee lived through the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. After graduating from Cheng Kung University he served in Taiwan's air force for a year of compulsory military service. He came to the United States as a student in 1964, enrolled in Texas A&M, and earned a master's degree and then a PhD in engineering. He met his wife, Sylvia, in 1969 at the Rose Bowl parade in Pasadena; she had been born on the mainland but, like Wen Ho Lee, grew up on Taiwan. They were married soon afterward, and had two children.

In 1974 he became a US citizen, and four years later he was hired to work at Los Alamos on hydrodynamics codes of nuclear weapons. When metals liquefy in a nuclear explosion, they behave like fluids. Using computer models, scientists can write codes that simulate what happens in a real nuclear detonation. At Los Alamos, Lee worked on computer simulations of both primary fission components and the secondary hydrogen bombs. And he ran codes to test the W-88.

Sylvia Lee also was hired by the lab, as a secretary and then a data-entry clerk, and she soon volunteered as a sort of unofficial greeter for visiting scientists from China. She also reported to the FBI and the CIA on what she gleaned from those contacts.

Behind the scenes, the investigation of Wen Ho Lee created a dilemma for both the FBI and DOE. If he was a spy and remained in X Division, it was feared he might do more damage. But if he was pulled out, he might become suspicious that the government was closing in.

In 1996 DOE came up with an elaborate scheme to limit Wen Ho Lee's access to the vault at Los Alamos containing X Division's most sensitive secrets, but to do it in a way that would not alarm him. The lab would install an electronic device that would read palms to allow entry to the vault; then several employees, including Wen Ho Lee, would be told they no longer had access under the new system. The lab chief thought the palm reader had been installed, but it never was.