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From My Country Versus Me
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By Wen Ho Lee with Helen Zia
If I actually had been a spy, I surely would have been long gone with a
one-way ticket out of Los Alamos. But I knew the truth about myself.
Funny thing, though, that truth also kept me in a state of denial. It
was simply inconceivable to me that any rational person who had the
facts could think that I was a spy. As a scientist, I thought of facts
as indisputable. I clung to the simple belief that the facts would
prove the truth, and that in America, a person is innocent until proven
guilty. Until this happened to me, I never thought that what I look
like or where I was born would affect how people saw the facts and
whether they could accept the truth.
On Saturday, March 6, the day after my office was searched, the New
York Times ran this headline on their front page: “BREACH AT LOS
ALAMOS: A special report; China Stole Nuclear Secrets for Bombs, U.S.
Aides Say.” It was a long and sensational story. According to the
Times, China used our nuclear technology to make a great leap in
miniaturizing their newest nuclear warheads, which were remarkably
similar to the W-88.
I did not read the New York Times—I don’t read any newspapers on a
regular basis because I have generally considered the news to be a
waste of my time. At our house, my wife reads the newspaper and will
tell me if there is something that might be of interest to me. My
interests are not complicated: science and math, my family and friends,
classical music, and fishing.
So ordinarily, I would have missed the article. But on that particular
Saturday, my friends Bob and Kathy Clark—the ones who had traveled to
China with us in 1986 as part of the LANL [Los Alamos National
Laboratory] group—stopped by with a copy of the New York Times story,
which they had gotten off the Internet. Bob said, “Wen Ho, you better
read this. There’s something strange happening. You’ve got to take this
seriously. Something’s going on.”
After one look at the headline, my initial thought was, this story has
nothing to do with me. I’m not interested in reading this. But then I
wondered, Are they talking about me? Does anybody else fit this
description? No, it sounds like it’s me.
Alberta called me that morning. She had read the story in North
Carolina. She was very upset and frightened. “Ba, this story is about
you,” she cried. “The Rosenbergs were executed for being traitors! And
the New York Times is saying that you’re worse than the Rosenbergs!”
Alberta read parts of the story to me. Unlike the Wall Street Journal
article in January that mentioned a spy suspect at Los Alamos but gave
few details, the New York Times was much more explicit. They didn’t
identify this suspect by name, but described him as a Los Alamos
computer scientist who is Chinese American and who failed a lie
detector test in February. It said that the “suspect’s wife was invited
to address a Chinese conference…even though she was only a secretary at
LANL”—her husband was the real nuclear weapons expert. Unnamed
officials leaked my personal information to the Times and were quoted
as saying, “The suspect had traveled to Hong Kong without reporting the
trip as required. In Hong Kong…the [FBI] bureau found records showing
that the scientist had obtained $700 from the American Express offices.
Investigators suspect that he used it to buy an airline ticket to
Shanghai.” The article said that the DOE gave the suspect a lie
detector test in December. “Unsatisfied, the FBI administered a second
test in February, and officials said the suspect was found to be
deceptive.”
I was shocked and deeply disturbed that the New York Times could be so
definite that a suspect who fit my description had given nuclear
weapons secrets about the W-88 to China. I knew I hadn’t given any
secrets about the W-88 or anything else, but the New York Times didn’t
bother to point out that they had no proof of any of the allegations,
nor did they ever suggest that I could possibly be innocent. If they
could accept these falsehoods as fact, what else did they get wrong?
They quoted Paul Redmond, the CIA’s former counterintelligence chief:
“This is going to be just as bad as the Rosenbergs….This was far more
damaging to the national security than Aldrich Ames.” On what did this
Redmond, this so-called expert, base his extreme claims? Did the New
York Times even try to substantiate such an extreme comparison?
I’d heard of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the couple who were put to
death for giving secrets from Los Alamos to the Soviet Union in the
1950s during the McCarthy era. That happened before I came to America.
I didn’t know of this Aldrich Ames, but I found out soon enough that he
worked at the CIA and for 10 years sold secrets about America’s spy
apparatus to the Russians; his treachery led to the deaths of many CIA
and FBI sources. Now the New York Times was painting me as worse than
the Rosenbergs and Ames.
I could not understand how such a powerful and influential newspaper
could be so one-sided. As Judge Parker pointed out in his courtroom
apology to me, the case against me was built on misleading
sensationalism, and this newspaper let itself become a conduit for
those lies and leads about me. Maybe that’s how they sell newspapers,
but it came at the expense of my family and me. The New York Times
ought to have apologized to us, because their article pushed Congress,
the DOE, and FBI, and LANL over the edge. According to their article
and the people quoted in it, there was no room for doubt: China got its
nuclear technology by spying on America, the spy was from Los Alamos,
and I was it. Yet not a single one of these assertions has been proved
true.
The article made me sound even more suspicious by printing false
information—outright lies about me that could have been easily checked.
I never took a secret trip to Hong Kong. My trip to the conference in
Hong Kong in 1992 had full LANL and DOE approval. I paid the $700 for
my hotel room and a tour for Alberta with my credit card—there was no
secret ticket to Shanghai or anywhere else! New York Times Pulitzer
Prize-winning reporters who wrote these lies could have found the
facts, had they bothered to question any of the information leaked to
them by the lab, the DOE, and the FBI.
In time, it would become almost routine for me to find vicious,
unsubstantiated lies about me in the news, leaked by politicians and
bureaucrats, all presented as though they were verified facts. I was
learning that the truth is not as simple as I believed....
In February 2001, the New York Times and the Washington Post once again
ran stories with information leaked from the government, this time from
ongoing FBI questioning, which we are not permitted to speak about. The
papers said that I had received a $5,000 consulting fee from Chung Shan
Institute in Taiwan, and that I was being investigated for “small
family accounts in Taiwanese and Canadian banks.” But LANL knew about
and approved my consulting work, which was commonly done by lab
scientists; the Washington Post inaccurately stated that the lab did
not know. The Taiwan bank account was set up for my sister, who had
since passed away, to help her with treatment of some serious health
problems and other family emergencies. It never contained more than
$3,000. My wife opened an account with a Canadian bank when she was
visiting New York—that account never had more than $10 in it, and the
bank finally sent us a letter that they were closing the account
because it was such a small amount. The FBI had that letter from the
bank, but of course they only leaked the information that made me sound
bad.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post has published stories stating that some
government officials are accusing me of being a potential spy for
Taiwan. Does this mean we begin the same farce all over again, this
time with Taiwan as the villain instead of the PRC? And here I thought
Taiwan was an ally that America has sworn to defend. Mark Holscher has
had to tell the newspapers that any suggestion of wrongdoing was false,
and pointed out that these “unnamed government officials” who leak to
the news risk violating federal criminal law by talking about the
investigation.
When I see these reports, I feel very disgusted, as if I’m watching two
gangs of hoodlums—the government and the news—joining forces to keep
the FBI employed and to sell newspapers. I feel that it is
irresponsible for the New York Times to continue to print these leaks,
especially after they printed two long, self-critical yet
self-congratulatory articles which did admit that their tone might have
been more balanced and they might have treated me as more human, but
then also said they had got most of it “right,” and they did nothing
wrong. I agree with one point—they should have treated me more like a
human being instead of just some Chinese dog or cat whose life and
reputation means nothing. In Russia, the government has tortured people
by beating them or sending them to Siberia. Here in America, people can
be tortured by the media, which involves a highly developed technique.
The government gives leaks to reports, and too often, the 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!” This is how torture-by-media works.
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