Suspected Nuclear Spy Failed Polygraph In '84, Congress Told
WASHINGTON - Wen Ho Lee, who is suspected of giving U.S. nuclear secrets to the Chinese, failed an FBI lie-detector test in January 1984 that sought to determine if he had contact with foreign intelligence services or had improperly shared classified information, members of Congress were told yesterday.
Although the Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear scientist subsequently passed a second FBI polygraph, the incident means Lee was investigated for possible espionage at least 12 years earlier than previous accounts have suggested - and 15 years before he ultimately was fired for security violations.
Lee is now the only suspect in a dramatic FBI investigation, code-named Kindred Spirit and involving dozens of federal agents. The probe has confirmed Chinese espionage of U.S. nuclear-warhead design secrets in the 1980s, and may involve the compromise of highly classified computer programs and data from hundreds of underground nuclear tests and simulations.
But the explosive case also has exposed what Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., called a "tragedy of errors, lost files, omissions and bad judgment" by the FBI, the Energy Department, the Justice Department and other agencies.
Domenici told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that the FBI never informed Lee's supervisors at Los Alamos or the Energy Department, which runs the nation's nuclear-weapons labs, that Lee failed their polygraph test.
The Energy Department's regional office in Albuquerque, N.M., did not learn of the FBI probe until 1989, during a standard five-year review of Lee's top-secret "Q" clearance. It then transferred Lee's personnel file to Energy Department headquarters in Washington.
"The file was lost within DOE headquarters," Domenici said. He added that the Albuquerque office ultimately hired an outside contractor in 1992 to reconstruct the lost Lee file.
The FBI and Energy Department have said that Lee was identified in 1996 as the chief suspect in an investigation into whether Beijing had acquired top-secret details about the shape and design of America's most modern nuclear warhead.
However, Lee's "Q" clearance at Los Alamos was not withdrawn until late last year.
In another apparent mix-up, FBI Director Louis Freeh told Elizabeth Moler, then deputy secretary of energy, in July 1997, that the FBI investigation would not be jeopardized if Lee's security clearance were lifted or if he were transferred to a less sensitive job.
That information was not passed to officials at Los Alamos, lab director John Browne testified yesterday. Moler told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on April 12 that she believed that Lee already had been removed from his job, that his access to classified data had been limited and his travel curtailed.
Still seeking to ensnare Lee, the FBI then tried what it calls a "false flag" operation in mid-1998. Chinese-speaking FBI agents called the scientist and tried to lure him to a meeting by pretending to be Chinese spies. He rebuffed their offer.
Lee was fired in March after failing another FBI polygraph test that focused, in part, on whether he had passed classified data on nuclear warheads while attending scientific conferences in Beijing in 1986 and 1988.
Three weeks after he was fired, the FBI determined that Lee had used a large magnetic tape drive to improperly transfer nearly 2,000 classified computer files on hundreds of underground nuclear-weapons tests and simulations into an internal lab-computer network that is considered vulnerable to outsiders.
Lee was not among those in the lab who was supposed to know how to transfer the files, officials said. He unsuccessfully tried to delete the files from his computer two days after he had failed the polygraph test, but before he was fired.
Several officials said yesterday that the files were accessed at least once after they were moved, but it remains unclear whether anyone other than Lee was involved.
The transfers began in 1983 and ended in 1995, when new lab computer regulations prevented such file transfers.
Los Alamos director Browne said he could think of "no benign reason" for Lee, a senior computer scientist in the weapons division, to transfer the files.
Lee's lawyer, Mark Holscher, declined to discuss Lee's reasons for transferring the files. Lee has not been charged in the case.