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Senate probes Wen Ho Lee case

From left: Reno, Lee, Freeh

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- FBI Director Louis Freeh defended the government's case against former Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee Tuesday in testimony to the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.

Freeh testified in the open hearing that the government had strong evidence against Lee and could have convicted the Taiwan-born scientist on all 59 counts of mishandling nuclear secrets. He said prosecutors agreed to a plea bargain because it was the best way to find out what happened to computer tapes Lee loaded with reams of top-secret nuclear material.

A closed-door hearing is scheduled for this afternoon.

Freeh said investigators had not finished debriefing Lee, but they have already learned that he made copies of the tapes.

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He said Lee spent more than 40 hours over 70 different days collecting his own "portable, personal trove of U.S. nuclear data." He said other scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory were ready to testify that there was no legitimate scientific reason for Lee to assemble the data and that Lee was not even working on many of the projects he collected information on.

He told the panel that Lee had to go through several steps to declassify the 400,000 pages of information, alter the files so they could be read from unsecured computers and copy them.

Once the data was on the unsecured computer, Freeh said, anyone who had Lee's password could access it from any computer in the world.

The files included electronic blueprints with the exact size and dimensions of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Racial profiling charge 'disturbing'

Freeh said the government had several reasons to believe that Lee was spying for China.

He said Lee did not disclose contacts with a high-ranking Chinese nuclear scientist, who later became the head of China's nuclear weapons program.

A polygraph expert found that Lee was deceptive when asked if he had given nuclear information to unauthorized personnel. Lee later admitted helping Chinese scientists solve a math problem that was not classified, but could help develop nuclear weapons.

Freeh said Lee also tried to enter the lab's top-secret "X-division" several times after his security clearance was lifted and tricked a computer help-desk technician to restore his access to X-division computers after it was blocked.

Freeh also said that Lee left some of the data he transferred on unsecured servers for up to six years, and did not start deleting it until three days after he was questioned.

He said allegations that Lee was a target of racial profiling were disturbing.

Wen Ho Lee

"Dr. Lee was prosecuted because of his actions, not because of his race," Freeh said.

Earlier, Attorney General Janet Reno testified that Lee was not an innocent victim.

"Dr. Lee is not a hero, he is not an absent-minded professor, he is a felon," Reno said.

Reno said Lee betrayed the trust of the American people by putting nuclear secrets at risk.

Some senators skeptical

A number of senators on the panel questioned the way Lee was treated during his nine months in custody.

Senator Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, asked if Lee was shackled and kept in solitary confinement in order to pressure him into making a confession.

Freeh said Lee's attorneys, who he described as the most capable and litigious he had ever worked with, never brought up the issue of shackles.

Reno said the Justice Department took several steps to improve his conditions, including providing a Mandarin translator so he could speak more freely with his family, more frequent exercise and more fruit at his evening meal.

She also read a letter from a jail administrator who said Lee told him he was surprised by reports that he was mistreated.

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Federal Bureau of Investigation
U.S. Department of Justice
WenHoLee.org
Los Alamos National Laboratory

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