Review: Wen Ho Lee's eloquent defense

"My Country Versus Me"
By Wen Ho Lee with Helen Zia
Hyperion
Nonfiction/Memoir
332 pages

(CNN) -- Everyone knows what Wen Ho Lee did. He somehow managed to smuggle nuclear secrets out of Los Alamos National Laboratory and put them in the hands of China. He got caught and went to jail.

What everyone knows is wrong.

For the first time, the Taiwan-born engineer tells his story in "My Country Versus Me". Lee builds an eloquent case for his own defense. He asserts, simply and powerfully, that he is an innocent man, wrongly accused.

Whether you believe him or not, his story is harrowing. He lived a very quiet life, working in an obscure corner of the nuclear industry. He is not a scientist and he doesn't design bombs. His job was to run engineering tests on nuclear weapons designs. To hear Lee tell it, he was good at his job, publishing numerous academic articles and speaking at technical meetings around the world.

That all changed in December 1998 when he was accused of spying for China.

He would spend nearly two years tangled in a web of deception and intimidation spun by the FBI and federal prosecutors, all the while in the eye of a political storm. Nothing prepared Lee for that. He had never broken the law and had no interest in politics. Suddenly, his name was on the front page of every newspaper in the country and his picture was plastered all over the television.

'This is how torture-by-media works'

"Here in America," Lee writes, "people can be tortured by the media, which involves a highly developed technique. The government gives leaks to reporters, and too often, newspapers print them. I realize that not all reporters are like this, and that they have a job to do; I also saw many stories that I thought were very balanced and fair. But when a little guy like me gets destroyed in the media by a behemoth like the government, it is impossible to change the minds of all people who wrongly conclude, 'Oh, you're Wen Ho Lee, the spy who stole the W-88 [nuclear warhead]!' This is how torture-by-media works."

"My Country Versus Me" may prove to be an antidote to some of the poison injected into the life of Wen Ho Lee. The government's criminal case against him never materialized. After spending a year in solitary confinement, he went free, pleading guilty to a single technical violation of security rules. He emerged wounded, embittered and deeply disillusioned.

But one thing about Wen Ho Lee didn't change. It's a part of him rarely depicted in news accounts and court documents. Lee is an American, and remains fiercely proud of that fact. That his story is also uniquely American is the most important lesson he can teach us.