Wen Ho Lee or Li Wenho (Chinese: 李文和; pinyin: Lǐ Wénhé; born December 21, 1939) is a Taiwanese-American nuclear scientist and a mechanical engineer who worked for the University of California at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
A federal grand jury indicted him on charges of stealing secrets about the U.S. nuclear arsenal for the People's Republic of China (PRC) in December 1999.
In June 2006, Lee received $1.6 million from the federal government and five media organizations as part of a settlement for leaking his name to the press before any charges had been filed against him.
[2] Federal judge James A. Parker eventually apologized to Lee for denying him bail and putting him in solitary confinement.
Taiwan was placed under martial law; his brother died when he was a conscript and his commanding officers allegedly would not allow him to take medicine.
He worked as a scientist in weapons design at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in applied mathematics and fluid dynamics, from that year until 1999.
[5] Part of his defense rested on a graymail strategy, which tried to compel prosecutors to release large amounts of classified material related to nuclear weapons.
[5] It raised issues, similar to those in the Valerie Plame affair, of whether journalists should have to reveal their anonymous sources in a court of law.
[5] The federal judge who heard the case during an earlier appeal said that "top decision makers in the executive branch...have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen.
"[5] After an intelligence agent from the People's Republic of China (PRC) gave U.S. agents papers which indicated that they knew the design of a particularly modern U.S. nuclear warhead (the W-88), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) started an investigation codenamed "Operation Kindred Spirit" to look into how China could have obtained that design.
Lee admitted that he failed to report this contact and approach by individuals requesting classified information as required by security regulations.
Although he questioned the action against him, Lee went along, deleting the classified information he held on his computers, and moved to the T (unclassified) clearance zone.
On March 6, The New York Times published an article on the W-88 case, "China Stole Nuclear Secrets for Bombs, U.S. Aides Say,"[11] again without naming the suspect.
On March 8, 1999, Lee was fired from his job at Los Alamos National Laboratory for failure to maintain classified information securely.
According to Louis Freeh and Janet Reno, they were left with no option but to plea out Dr. Lee in order to find out where the missing tapes were, and not risk sensitive government information by bringing it to trial.
Dr. Lee was freed, and at plea admitted to having made copies of the tapes which he later destroyed, according to his book My Country Versus Me, and other sources.
In 2003, he wrote a memoir, My Country Versus Me, in which he describes his love of classical music, literature, poetry, fishing in the mountains of New Mexico, and his dedication to organic gardening.
As evidence of such racial profiling, he cited cases of several scientists of non-Han Chinese ancestry who were responsible for similar security transgressions but were able to continue their careers.
A condition of the United States portion of the settlement, $895,000, is that it is to be applied only to lawyer's fees and the taxes on the media's payments, since the government insisted that they would not pay anything that would be perceived as damages to Lee.
[28] The 2007 play Yellow Face by Asian-American playwright David Henry Hwang places this incident in the context of a greater number of cases dealing with racial profiling against Asian Americans, particularly the Chinese during the 1990s.