The Perp Walk
By Emil Guillermo

All the time and money spent for such a massive investigation, and all the public gets is the “perp” walk. “Perp” is short for “perpetrator,” i.e., the one who did it.

Usually, the only time the media gets a good look at the perp is right after an arrest on the walk to the squad car. Or from the squad car to the arraignment site. You get more if you’re on Cops. But those are small fry. The big ones get a photo opportunity. It happens anytime law enforcement bags a game fish.

They want to see the shot of themselves reeling in the big one. But they can’t just stand next to their 100- pound marlin and smile. What would the judge say?

So we have the perp walk. And it almost always revealing in what it says about the perp’s guilt or innocence.

The perps who are usually seen on the news covering their faces, with their heads in their T-shirts or using their coat as a shield from the TV lights and flash cameras? Those are the guilty ones.

And then there are those who just look straight at the media like they’re trying to understand why they’ve been forced into some existential drama.

They’re the ones that are usually getting screwed.

Enter Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwan-born Asian American and former nuclear physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. For more than three years, he has been under suspicion of passing top secrets to China. His every move the last nine months has been carefully observed 24-7 by the FBI. They even got to watch him on 60 Minutes declare his innocence. He’s used to the attention; he’s had as many as 200 FBI agents watching him do everything from pull weeds to buy groceries.

No wonder then that when a federal grand jury finally indicted Lee last week on 59 counts of illegal handling of classified data and gave the green light to make an arrest at his home, Lee didn’t try to cover up. Why should he? He just took his public face time and stared straight into the cameras.

It was a relieved, matter-of-fact look. Maybe that’s because the charade of his freedom was over and his new battle in the courts was about to begin.

Lee was in a kind of strange limbo until then. He was the main focus of a major investigation in search of a spy. But the FBI didn’t have the goods to do a thing with Lee.

How do we know? Law enforcement and government officials-on the condition of anonymity -- revealed to the Associated Press information from classified documents indicating that as early as Jan. 22 of this year the FBI office in Albuquerque wrote to Washington headquarters. The documents said that “it appears” that Lee was not responsible for providing China secret information about the W-88, the most advanced U.S. submarine warhead.

Another memo dated days later on Jan. 29 “continues to insist” that Lee had not disclosed any W-88 secrets.

So why continue the surveillance of an innocent man?

Good question. The FBI believed that in February, after it said Lee failed a lie detector test, he began to delete hundreds of computer files that contained classified data he had transferred.

Suspicious? Or routine? Wouldn’t you want to get rid of classified information in a non-classified computer? Still, it just doesn’t add up to spying.

In fact, the internal documents of last January has actually forced a top FBI official to alter Senate testimony given this past June.

The testimony was that the evidence against Lee made a “compelling case” to focus on Los Alamos as a source of Chinese espionage.

Assistant FBI Director Neil J.Gallagher made the comments. But in November he was forced to take them all back. Gallagher wrote meekly to the Senate: “I believed then that those statements were accurate. I have subsequent to that testimony asked for and become aware of additional facts.”

Details are important in investigations. Gallagher overlooked a key one. At least one of the key internal documents was in the briefing book he used to prepare his testimony.

The documents should come in handy for the Wen Ho Lee defense team. They surface at a time when the FBI has shown it’s not at all infallible. Tell a jury about FBI incompetence after Waco and the false accusation of Richard Jewell as the Olympic Park bomber, and suddenly Wen Ho Lee has another credible line of defense.

So far the best argument they have is that scientists routinely mishandle sensitive material at government weapons labs. And no one’s watching all of them 24 hours a day.

The FBI, in fact, has known based on an interview in 1998 with Lee’s boss that about 250 individuals on average each year had access to W-88 information. That would include contractors and scientists at other labs, who have never been examined.

The FBI’s now saying there’s an expanded investigation underway, and that Lee may not have acted alone. They’re also saying that there’s some new “Chinese” way of spying, which involves a lot of little guys, no one mastermind. It’s a “let a 1,000 spies bloom” approach.

So why harass Lee?

Well, the FBI’s got to show something for all their Wen Ho watching. It may not add up to a spy case. But mishandling secrets can get someone life in prison. Sure, it’s not James Bond material. But at least the FBI gets its perp walk, no matter how flawed.