Lee says he has been unfairly singled out by the government because of his Chinese heritage

December 10, 1999
Web posted at: 3:18 p.m. EST (2018 GMT)

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The FBI has taken nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee into custody, CNN has learned, and an indictment has been filed under seal. The former Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist is expected to be charged with mishandling highly classified nuclear data -- but not spying -- CNN learned Friday.

Although Lee has been investigated in connection with allegations of Chinese espionage at U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, sources said the indictment would not accuse him of spying.

Instead, it would allege Lee failed to adequately safeguard classified information by downloading top secret data into a non-secure computer.

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Although prosecutions on such matters have been extremely rare, some federal officials argued for an indictment because of the extreme sensitivity of the information Lee allegedly mishandled, namely nuclear weapons codes.

Such information is essentially the blueprint for many of the nation's most sophisticated nuclear weapons.

While FBI officials cannot prove Lee gave the data to anyone, they point to a number of suspicious facts they maintain may show gross negligence by Lee. As CNN first reported several weeks ago, he apparently cannot account for at least one computer tape containing nuclear code information.

According to officials familiar with the investigation, Lee also allegedly downloaded information from a secure computer to a non-secure computer; not once, but several times.

Lee, an American physicist who was born in Taiwan, has denied passing secrets to China. He was fired from the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico last March for security violations.

Lee and some critics of the investigation say he was unfairly singled out because of his ethnicity.

China has steadfastly denied stealing U.S. nuclear secrets.

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