CURRENT EVENTS UPDATE

By MICHAEL DUFFY/Washington

It was hard to find anyone left standing—much less standing tall—after the government’s strange case against nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee came crashing to the ground last week. No one was bleeding so heavily as the FBI and its director, Louis Freeh, whose top agent recanted some of his testimony against the 60-year-old Los Alamos engineer. But there was rubble everywhere you looked. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose department had ignored security lapses at Los Alamos for years, was walking around in a daze. Rescue workers were still searching for Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder, who were trying to explain why they had suddenly agreed to drop 58 of 59 charges against a man once accused of stealing the "crown jewels" of America’s nuclear arsenal. When master survivalist Bill Clinton came out of hiding, it was to confide to reporters that he had "always had reservations" about some aspects of the case—words that recalled the way he ducked responsibility for the Waco fiasco in 1993.

And though the neighbors in White Rock, N.M., just down the road from Los Alamos, welcomed Lee home with a big backyard party, the man at the center of the wreckage still has a lot of explaining to do. Lee won back his freedom only after pleading guilty to a single felony count of mishandling national-defense information, which means he downloaded the equivalent of 400,000 pages of classified data about the U.S. nuclear-weapons program onto an unsecured computer system and then transferred them to high-volume cassettes. Lee had refused to spell out why he spent an estimated 40 hours over 70 days downloading all that data, what he did with much of it or why he tried repeatedly to enter a restricted area after losing his security clearance—once, around 3:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve. As part of his plea agreement, Lee promised to explain everything to investigators. He will never again be able to vote, however, or serve on a jury.

The Wen Ho Lee saga began in 1995, when a walk-in source gave the CIA a document from the People’s Republic of China that claimed Chinese weapons designers had obtained specific and highly classified details of an American nuclear warhead known as the W-88. Not everyone in the intelligence community was convinced the document was genuine. The doe and the fbi, which handles spy catching, quickly learned that several agencies and some defense contractors had information about the w-88, and concluded that the leak had probably occurred at the weapons lab at Los Alamos, where most of the data were stored.

Before releasing Lee, U.S. District Judge James Parker scolded the government for its handling of the case, apologized to Lee and told him he had served enough time already—278 days in prison.

Afterward, Richardson argued improbably that the government had triumphed. "The issue here," he says, "is are we getting the tapes back, and do we find out what happened to those tapes. The plea bargain enables us to get that information." Maybe so, but there had to have been an easier way.

—TIME, September 25, 2000

Questions
1. Who is Wen Ho Lee, and what crime was he accused of committing?

2. Why did the government’s case against Lee come "crashing down"?

TIME CLASSROOM