Wen Ho Lee’s 1999 arrest taught Chinese Americans that their country may never trust them.

Wen Ho Lee, who in 1999 was accused by the U.S. Justice Department of being a Chinese spy, on Dec. 15, 2000, in his Los Alamos, New Mexico, home.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Thomas Michael Alleman/Liaison/Getty Images and iStock.
 

On March 6, 1999, the New York Times published an explosive report by James Risen and Jeff Gerth that a spy at Los Alamos National Laboratory had given U.S. nuclear secrets to China, including the design of the most advanced American warhead, the W-88. The story reverberated in the halls of the Capitol, where Republican leaders had long been trying to pin the Clinton administration for ignoring the dawn of a new cold war. The unnamed spy was described as “Chinese-American.”

Two days later, before any arrest or charges had been made, the Times identified the suspect as Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwan-born scientist, and reported he’d just been fired from the lab. The original story had forced the FBI into a rushed interrogation of Lee, in which an agent threatened Lee by comparing him to the Rosenbergs; Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, desperate to prove his department was not as hapless as it seemed, directed that Lee be fired without review. Intelligence official Notra Trulock, a central figure in the original Timesstory, would later say that it was Richardson who had leaked Lee’s name to the press. Lee was the only suspect under investigation.

In the months that followed, no charges were brought. Dozens of agents descended on Los Alamos, New Mexico, to prove what had become accepted fact in Congress and in the public eye: that Wen Ho Lee had betrayed the country he was a naturalized citizen of, and in the worst possible way. He’d given China the keys to the destruction of the United States. When in December Lee was finally arrested, he was charged not with nuclear espionage, for which there was no evidence, but with 59 counts of downloading restricted data to unrestricted systems. Prosecutors told the court that the knowledge Lee possessed threatened the safety of every single American, and he was placed—before trial—into 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, shackled for his one hour of exercise. To prevent him from passing secrets, he was forbidden to speak in Mandarin during family visits.

Nine months later, in September 2000, Lee pleaded guilty to one felony count of mishandling data and was released. Thus ended, at least officially, the 18-month fiasco that exposed an American security apparatus as both too vulnerable to political influence and too unchecked in its investigative and prosecutorial abilities, all in the name of the national interest.

It can be easy to forget the enormity of the Wen Ho Lee debacle. Nearly every assumption the government made—that China had acquired a miniature-warhead design through espionage, that Los Alamos had been its source, and that it had done so using intel from a “master spy”—was refuted by the facts. After Lee’s release, the New York Times conducted an internal investigation, detailing what “we wish we had done differently” in its one-sided and sensationalist stories but retaining a defiant tone that disappointed critics who believed the paper had stoked the entire ordeal. (In 2006, Lee would receive a settlement from the government and several newspapers including the Times for the leaking of his name.) The federal judge, in releasing Lee, offered an extraordinary and emotional apology, firing a salvo at the executive branch for drumming up the case and causing “embarrassment to our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen in it.”

As purely a story of government overreach and journalistic malpractice, the Wen Ho Lee case is worth revisiting. But as China, a nation the U.S. courts and distrusts in equal measure, looms ever larger on the world stage, Chinese espionage cases have been on the rise—many of them eerily reminiscent of Lee’s. Suspects are branded as traitors, with the might of the government arrayed against them, because they are Chinese. It’s become clear that despite the embarrassment the Lee case brought to multiple branches of government, it was not the closing chapter to an ugly period of suspicion and prejudice—it was the beginning.

Guoqing Cao and Shuyu Li, scientists at Eli Lilly, were arrested in October 2013 for passing $55 million worth of secrets to a Chinese drug company. They were jailed and then placed under house arrest; the charges were changed to wire fraud and then dropped in December 2014. The proprietary information they passed was not proprietary after all.

Sherry Chen, a hydrologist at the National Weather Service, sent publicly available info to an old classmate in China and referred that person to a colleague for further information. The colleague reported her as a potential spy, and she was arrested in October 2014. Charges were dropped in March 2015, but the National Weather Service has refused to give Chen her job back.

Xiaoxing Xi, then chair of the Temple University physics department, was arrested in May 2015 for sending plans to a device used in semiconductor research, known as a “pocket heater,” to China. The plans were not of a pocket heater; investigators without the proper scientific background had mixed them up. The charges were dropped in September of last year.

Other similar cases are on the way to trial. The espionage suspicions these days often center on corporate secrets, rather than government ones, but the course of the cases is familiar: sudden arrests and long investigations during which any minor slip-up—even forgetting a date during an interrogation, as happened to Sherry Chen—becomes a lie that proves the crime. In the months or years that it takes to exonerate a suspect, lives are ruined. George Koo, a business consultant and member of the influential Chinese American advocacy group the Committee of 100, described this to me as the government’s “first-move advantage,” one that distorts the justice process. Given the power, resources, and secrecy involved in espionage prosecutions, the burden of proof nearly always ends up with the defense.

Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/09/the-case-of-scientist-wen-ho-lee-and-chinese-americans-under-suspicion-for-espionage.html