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Former CIA Chief Denies Racial Bias

Wen Ho Lee on the day of his release September 13. Photo by Associated Press.

By Matt Kelley/AP

The Energy Departmeent’s former intelligence chief denied that racial considerations led him to target Wen Ho Lee in a probe of alleged Chinese spying at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory.

Notra Trulock told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee Oct. 3 that two former co-workers are lying when they accuse him of racial bias.

“I stopped efforts by [Energy Department] managers ... to compile a database on the ethnicity of American citizens with access to classified nuclear information,” Trulock contended.

However, former Los Alamos counterintelligence chief Robert Vrooman stood by his claim that Trulock and other officials investigated the Taiwan-born Lee because he is ethnic Chinese. Trulock’s predecessor, Charles Washington, has also accused Trulock of racial bias.

“Every time Lee’s motive was discussed it came down to his ethnicity,” Vrooman said. “There was never any other motive discussed.”

The Oct. 3 hearing was the latest of several held after Lee pleaded guilty last month to one count of mishandling nuclear secrets and was released from jail. Lee, 60, had been fired from his Los Alamos job and then indicted on 59 federal felonies for transferring nuclear weapons information to portable computer tapes. Although the charges stemmed from the investigation into possible Chinese espionage, Lee was not charged with spying and has denied he ever planned to give secrets to any other country.

U.S. District Judge James Parker, who presided over the case, has apologized to Lee for ordering him jailed for nine months, saying federal officials misled him about key details, including how damaging Lee’s data would be to national security.

Two Los Alamos experts clashed on that issue at the Oct. 3 hearing. Retired Los Alamos scientist John Richter said the computer files had details of several sophisticated nuclear weapons but not essential information about the manufacturing techniques needed to make them.

Countries like India and Pakistan, which have tested nuclear weapons but do not have the most sophisticated nuclear technology, would have no use for Lee’s data, Richter said. He compared the data to a partial recipe.

“They don’t have the ingredients. They don’t even have the kitchen,” Richter said. “It isn’t going to help them much.”

But Stephen Younger, the associate Los Alamos director in charge of nuclear weapons research, repeated his view that Lee had taken the “crown jewels” of American nuclear weapons design.

“Although the information itself does not convey all of the technology necessary to build deliverable weapons, it could advance the design effort enormously,” Younger said. “In the wrong hands, the information downloaded by Dr. Lee could enable a nation to design relatively crude but nevertheless effective nuclear weapons without nuclear testing.”

Trulock, meanwhile, said neither Vrooman nor anyone else raised racial profiling concerns during the probe. Vrooman said he once left a telephone message for Trulock seeking to discuss his concerns, but Trulock never called back and Vrooman’s supervisor asked Vrooman to drop the issue.

Trulock has since sued Lee, Vrooman, Washington and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, saying their discussions of alleged racial profiling defamed him.

Vrooman said the FBI agents investigating Lee shared his doubts about the case. “I met with the FBI agents weekly, and we always discussed our reservations about this case,” he said. “By December 1998 ... we absolutely thought that Lee was not the right man.”

Trulock said he had given the FBI a list of 12 possible suspects, including Lee and his wife, Sylvia, a former Los Alamos employee. Trulock has said that four others on that suspect list were Asian American, while six were white.

Trulock said the 12 suspects included some who worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, although Vrooman said after the hearing that all 12 were from Los Alamos.

Trulock said Vrooman was the first official to mention Lee as a possible suspect. Vrooman said he brought up Lee’s name because Lee had been investigated in the 1980s for making a phone call to another scientist under a security investigation.