Albuquerque Journal Wen Ho Lee is going free.
September 10, 2000
Wen Ho Lee To Be Freed
By Ian Hoffman
Journal Staff WriterWeeks of plea talks ended this weekend in a deal for the jailed Los Alamos nuclear-weapons scientist to serve no more jail time in exchange for pleading to a single felony and divulging the precise fate of seven unaccounted-for tapes of U.S. nuclear-weapons data to federal agents, sources told the Albuquerque Journal.
The deal closing one of the nation's most bedeviling spy cases without any proof of actual espionage was clinched Friday and Saturday by Lee's defense and prosecutors.
Lee, 60, would walk free out of the federal courthouse in Albuquerque on Monday afternoon, after U.S. District Judge James A. Parker conducts a 2 p.m. hearing on the plea agreement.
An federal appeals court hearing in Denver set for Monday on whether Lee should be released was canceled.
The plea marks collapse of a prosecution that admitted using false or incorrect testimony to keep Lee jailed and that critics say overreached its knowledge of nuclear-weapons science.
"It's clear today that the prosecution dramatically overstated its case," said Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert for the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C.
"There's something anti-climatic about a plea agreement because this case started out in such grandiose terms with literally the fate of the world held in the balance," Aftergood said. "I think everyone is owed an explanation of exactly what occurred here and why and how it can be avoided in the future."
Prosecutors had vehemently protested Lee's release from jail and even proposed incarceration at his suburban home in White Rock under a degree of surveillance, searches and phone taps found only in Mafia cases.
Just days ago, lead prosecutor George A. Stamboulidis argued those conditions were still "full of holes" and that Lee posed such a danger to U.S. and world security that "hundreds of millions of people could be killed."
"Here, national security is at stake," Stamboulidis told U.S. District Judge James A. Parker.
"I'm just delighted," said former Los Alamos weaponeer John L. Richter. Outside of Lee's attorneys, Richter dealt the most devastating blows to the prosecution, along with Harold Agnew, former Los Alamos National Laboratory director, and physicist Walter Goad.
Together, they said Lee's taped collection of weapons designs and simulations were not nearly so valuable, so equal to weapons themselves, as prosecutors and executives at Los Alamos and Sandia national labs claimed in court and in Congress.
"The only reason I got involved was (Los Alamos nuclear weapons chief Stephen) Younger's statement that a single person could change the global strategic balance," Agnew said Saturday by phone. "That was the basis of the panicking of the politicals that they had to do something. And that started this entire witchhunt. I thought it was outrageous to put a guy in solitary really based on that one person's statement."
Richter used data like Lee's to invent 45 nuclear warheads and bombs, yet was outraged at the government for prosecuting and jailing him.
"The kind of espionage that hurts is (CIA turncoat Aldrich) Ames, where 10 people are shot and 50 people are imprisoned. But these things aren't going to kill anybody," Richter said at his home Saturday.
"Yes, they're valuable," he said. "But you're shooting yourself in the foot and limping around on the world stage to put a man in jail like this. After all, what are all these missiles and bombs for? They're for protecting these freedoms."
Prosecutors had wielded their most damning evidence to keep Lee jailed. Yet Parker found they failed to provide "clear and convincing evidence" that Lee must stay in solitary confinement.
Prosecutors could not persuade Parker to a reasonable certainty that Lee was filled with criminal intent and his tapes were the "crown jewels" of U.S. nuclear-weapons science.
How likely then could prosecutors win over 12 individual jurors on the much higher standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt?
Prosecutors were hit by damaging rulings in two other quarters. Parker had ordered them to turn over hundreds of pages of documents and evidence suggesting investigators singled Lee out because he is ethnic Chinese. Perhaps more significantly, Lee attorney John D. Cline persuaded Parker that Lee needed to use vast amounts of classified weapons data to make his defense. Prosecutors were proposing unclassified substitutions for that data but faced the prospect of exposing "the crown jewels" of U.S. nuclear weapons data to sustain a prosecution aimed at protecting them.
But even as prosecutors and defense attorneys fought over those issues and Lee's release, they also were engaged in mediation on a plea bargain, guided by Senior Judge Edward Leavy of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Those talks, begun at Parker's insistence in July, turned heavily on Lee trading his cooperation for pleading to lesser charges and a lesser potential sentence.
Lee has agreed to a full debriefing by the FBI, after he is released, on the reason he created the tapes and precisely what happened to the seven still unaccounted for, sources said. He also has agreed to plead to one of the 59 felony charges against him, namely that he "willfully" downloaded a single group of files onto a single tape.
Lee and his family sued the FBI, the Justice Department and the Energy Department last December, alleging agency officials violated his privacy by leaking his name to the media and wrongly painting him as a Chinese spy.
The plea agreement does not require Lee to withdraw his suit, sources said. But it also does not provide for any back pay or other concessions from the government.
"It sounds as though an implicit acknowledgement is all the defense will receive," said Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. "So who is going to apologize to Wen Ho Lee for the last nine months in solitary confinement and who is going to be held accountable for the misleading testimony?"
Lee's family and friends plan to greet the scientist outside the courthouse after the 2 p.m. hearing, then gather 5 p.m. for a welcome party hosted by Don and Jean Marshall, next-door neighbors and fellow Los Alamos scientists who had been willing to post their home as part of Lee's proposed $1 million bail. With the plea agreement, Lee would apparently be freed unconditionally.