APAs Fear Backlash From Spy Case
By Perla Ni

Calls for a security crackdown following the firing of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee could lead to more discrimination against Asians and Asian Americans, many scientists fear.
Robert Lee, president of Asian American Manufacturers Association in Silicon Valley, agreed that “in the area of defense, the government has every right to ensure proper security, especially among foreign nationals,” but he added: “If it affects people of Asian descent, that’s a totally different story.”

“I think people really overreacted, at least from what I’ve read... I think the way it’s reported, it’s blown out of proportion.”said California Institute of Technology engineering professor Yu-Chong Tai. “I don’t think there is a loyalty problem among the immigrant scientists.”

The suspicions center around trips that Lee made in the late 1980s, shortly before China came up with nuclear-bomb improvements that took intelligence officials by surprise. The latest edition of Time magazine reports that Lee attended a 1988 seminar in Hong Kong and in the presence of Chinese officials allegedly divulged sensitive information on the miniaturization involved in the design of America’s most modern warhead, the W-88.

The allegations that Lee helped to steal nuclear secrets conjures up suspicion of all foreign-born scientists, Tai said. Indeed, last week, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., urged the Clinton administration to stop U.S.-China scientist exchanges, saying America should “put a moratorium on the exchange of people coming into our labs and our scientists going to their labs and perhaps giving them information.”

Tai said such measures are unwarranted. “Foreign scientists work really hard in this country,” he said. “Already there are a lot of limitations.” In fact, the Energy Department has since 1997 beefed up intelligence budgets, initiated strong background checks of scientists from sensitive countries and required employees to take polygraph tests, according to Secretary Bill Richardson.

But Lee was no foreign visitor. He is a U.S. citizen who had put in more than two decades at Los Alamos, and though reportedly under investigation since 1996, he has not been charged with any crime.

Silicon Valley executive George Koo sees a unwritten context in how the case is unfolding—one that stipulates that all ethnic Chinese, whatever their nationality, are suspect.

Koo, a member of the Committee of 100, an elite group of Chinese Americans, has been following the case in the San Jose Mercury News. In a widely distributed op-ed piece, he noted that articles have “quoted liberally from former CIA officials on the strength of China’s long-term planning and the advantage of having a large number of ethnic Chinese living in the U.S., and that (surprise!) they have strong cultural bonds to their motherland.

“The implication is that this scientist is just the tip of the iceberg—with so many Chinese Americans working in technically sensitive areas, China stands to be the recipient of a bounty of devastating secrets.”

Yet the case is not just about national security—last week’s appointment of Navy Admiral David Jeremiah to head up an independent probe was widely interpreted as an effort to bring some objectivity into the process buffeted by partisan politics. Some Republicans have accused the White House of dragging its feet on the matter, which it learned of in 1995 and 1996—about the time that China attempted to funnel money to Democratic candidates. And as in Donorgate, the new scandal has once again caught Chinese Americans in the middle, some say.

“When the pendulum of U.S.-China relations swings upward, diasporic Chinese overseas, by virtue of their dual identity, backgrounds, and language skills, are viewed positively as ‘bridges’ ... when good business deals materialize, our “middleman” role is encouraged,” wrote San Francisco lawyer Edward Liu in an opinion piece disseminated via e-mail. But “in this latest downward swing of the pendulum, our ‘bridging’ role has now become a liability and an object of suspicion, mistrust and disloyalty.”

“Unfortunately, political turmoil doesn’t make a clear distinction” between Asian Americans and Asians, said Robert Lee. “People are talking about solutions or penalties ... this is premature.”

He and others worry that they will pay an unwarranted penalty in dimmer job prospects. Predicted Tai: “It will have some impact ... it will be more difficult in the federal national labs.”

Lee says the ramifications don’t stop there. “This affects the common person, not just the high-tech defense sector. It reinforces stereotypes of foreigners, and there is enough distrust and misunderstanding ...

“This is a really unfortunate incident. Asian Americans have worked very hard to establish themselves in the American industry; this incident cannot but set us back.”

A Korean American engineer who worked at a government nuclear research facility in Washington state in the late 1970s would agree.

“One day, when we were out through the gate, they stopped us at the gate, and they saw that I was an Asian American engineer,” recalled the scientist, now 67 and retired. “They asked to open the trunk. Then, they searched the trunk.

“The car driver, who is a local Department of Energy engineer, said he had never been [subject to] such an investigation ... I joked, “They thought I came from red China.’ ”

The engineer, who has lived in the United States for more than 30 years, said he heard similar stories from Korean American friends at the time. One of them, a worker at a naval research lab, “told me that he showed his security ID to the admiral, but he was rejected from seeing documents” despite having proper clearance.

“He complained to me ... this is kind of discrimination. He quit and now he’s a professor in Korea in engineering.”

Wen Ho Lee himself has remained silent since his March 8 firing and is rumored to have left the state to live with a brother in the Los Angeles area. The Los Angeles Times has quoted law enforcement officials as saying the investigation had “hit a wall’’ because of Lee’s refusal to cooperate—but also because of the lack of evidence. Newsweek reported that the FBI now believes it has virtually no chance of making a case against him.

Most of the rhetoric against Lee has been “based on emotion.” said Tai. “If they have evidence, they can speak on the evidence.”

However, many of the allegations are in a still-classified report from a special House panel headed by Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif. In a TV interview last week, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay vowed he would fight administration resistance to make almost all of it public.

Said the Texas Republican: “We will have to have a vote of the House in order to declassify that report, and when the American people see what’s in it, I think they will be really outraged.”