Tiger Trap

by David Wise

  The prosecution was derided because the government had thrown fifty-nine counts at Lee and was able to convict him of only one. But the unusual length of the indictment was a result of the fact that each count listed a separate file that Lee had "removed" or altered and copied.

  The plea agreement was almost derailed when at the last minute Lee mentioned to the lawyers that he had not only downloaded the codes and copied them onto tapes, he had also made copies of the tapes. He claimed he had thrown the tapes into a dumpster near his office in the lab. The FBI later assigned a hapless team of agents to dig through the city dump looking for the tapes, but they were never found.

  In the aftermath of the case, Brian Sun, an astute Los Angeles lawyer who later represented J.J. Smith in the PARLOR MAID case, brought an invasion-of-privacy suit on behalf of Wen Ho Lee against the government for leaking Lee's name to the press. In 2006 the suit was settled for $1,645,000, with five news organizations agreeing to pay almost half that amount.

  The news outlets were not named in the suit, but joined in the settlement to avoid having their reporters punished and possibly jailed for refusing to name their sources. The reporters had been held in contempt of court and ordered to pay fines of $500 a day, but the fines were suspended while they appealed.

  And so the saga was over, with no real winners. The case was a fiasco, and a tragedy. The evidence suggests that Wen Ho Lee may have been singled out, at least in part, because he was a Chinese American. That should never have happened. There were certainly other significant factors that led to the focus on Lee; his actions had led to two previous FBI investigations.

  Although critics blamed Trulock for the Wen Ho Lee debacle, he did alert Congress and the public to the fact that China had somehow obtained details of the nation's most sophisticated nuclear weapon. And responsibility for mishandling the Wen Ho Lee case was shared among a wide spectrum of officials at DOE, the Department of Justice, the federal prosecutors in Albuquerque, and the FBI.

  As an Asian American casualty of government misconduct, Wen Ho Lee was a deeply flawed hero. He pleaded guilty to a felony, mishandling defense information. He lied to the FBI, denying that he had called the TIGER TRAP scientist until confronted with the wiretap evidence. He downloaded thousands of classified nuclear weapons files to an insecure, unclassified computer system and then onto tapes, for his own, still unclear, reasons. Several of those tapes were never found. He concealed his contact in China with Hu Side, China's top nuclear weapons designer, the scientist who built that country's small nuclear warhead.

  He had very smart lawyers and a shrewd sense of public relations—his appearance on 60 Minutes was a brilliant move, although he never convincingly explained to Mike Wallace exactly why he had downloaded all those files. But he was jailed and held under excessively harsh conditions, and the government bungled the case against him at every turn. He was portrayed to the public as a dangerous spy yet never charged with espionage or found guilty of espionage.

  Almost forgotten amid the furor over the Wen Ho Lee case was the still-unanswered question that started it all—the mystery of who stole the design of the W-88 warhead and gave it to China.

  Chapter 10

  SEGO PALM

  ROBERT M. "BEAR" BRYANT was raised on a farm in Springfield, Missouri, went to law school at the University of Arkansas, and then joined the FBI. He rose through the ranks to head the national security division, and in 1997 was named the bureau's second in command, as deputy director.

  By September 1999, Bryant was unhappy with the Wen Ho Lee investigation, which was dragging on and seemed no closer than ever to discovering how China had acquired the dimensions of the W-88 warhead. In fact, there was so much controversy over the botched probe of Wen Ho Lee that the larger question seemed in danger of being lost in the shuffle.

  Bryant reached his decision. The FBI needed to launch a separate, major investigation of how China had gained access to the secret of the nation's most advanced nuclear weapon.

  He knew whom to call. Steve Dillard, the special agent in charge in Jackson, Mississippi, had worked for Bryant in Kansas City, Salt Lake, and at headquarters. He had run the section in charge of foreign counterintelligence and espionage and over the years had earned Bryant's complete trust.

  A thin, bespectacled, soft-spoken man, Dillard was pleased to be back in his native Mississippi. He grew up in New Albany (pop. 7,607), in the hill country in the northeast corner of the state, and had a master's degree in sociology and criminology, as well as a law degree. In manner and appearance, he could easily be mistaken for a college professor rather than the counterspy and FBI veteran he was.

  Dillard recalled how his Mississippi idyll ended. "I got a phone call out of the blue from Bob Bryant. He said the FBI was taking a hit in congressional hearings and in the national media." Bryant bluntly laid out his concerns and asked Dillard to fly back to Washington and take a look at the origin and status of the Wen Ho Lee investigation.

  "I asked that a copy of the Albuquerque field office case file be shipped in to FBI headquarters," Dillard said. "I came in to headquarters on a Monday morning and over the next three days, read both the headquarters and the Albuquerque files."

  On a secure phone, Dillard made several calls to the field office in Albuquerque and to CIA headquarters. On Thursday afternoon, he reported his conclusions to Bryant, who had him brief FBI director Louis Freeh the next morning. In the afternoon, Dillard and Freeh met with the attorney general, Janet Reno.

  Early the following week Reno, Freeh, and Dillard sat down with Secretary Richardson at the Department of Energy. The FBI would continue its investigation of Wen Ho Lee, they told Richardson, but it also would open an "overall investigation" of the documents obtained in 1995 from the walk-in, including the one displaying the measurements of the W-88, "to examine other potential areas of compromise."

  Dillard was given carte blanche to assemble as big a staff as he needed. The new, broader investigation of the W-88 compromise was given a secret code name: SEGO PALM, named after a plant, Cycas revoluta, native to southern Japan that is poisonous to humans and animals.

  Soon, Dillard put together a task force of three hundred people in eleven government agencies. He worked from FBI headquarters, but also enlisted several agents at the Washington field office. One, Dave Lambert, served as case agent at the field office for the new investigation. Lambert was one of the two FBI men who later interviewed the walk-in and judged him authentic, not a plant as the CIA contended.

  Most members of the task force were from the Defense Department. There were researchers, and agents from a little-known Pentagon unit, the Counterintelligence Field Activity. A large group of translators worked on the walk-in documents, mostly from the FBI and the CIA, although some were from the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

  The investigation was, to say the least, challenging. How China had accomplished its coup of obtaining the W-88 data, the source or sources of the documents or information that had ended up in Beijing, the individuals who might have passed the secrets, exactly when that had occurred—all were unknowns, the answers locked in the minds and files of Chinese intelligence half a world away across the Pacific.

  Bryant and Dillard recognized that there was no assurance the new investigation would discover the answers. Even so, Dillard was startled by what he had found even as he was assembling the huge task force.

  The administrative inquiry by DOE's intelligence branch, Dillard said, reported that the information in the walk-in document "had to have come from X Division within Los Alamos, and Wen Ho Lee was the only person in X Division who could have compromised the information. It was completely wrong."

  The internal evidence in the W-88 document made that clear, Dillard said. "In any nuclear weapon, you have the physics package and the delivery system," he continued. "The physics package is the configuration and parts of the two-stage bomb itself. The delivery systems are the mechanisms we use to deliver the bomb to the ta
rget—the ICBMs, the submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and the strategic bombers. This document had a small amount of information about the physics package, but it had even more stuff dealing with the delivery system. That meant that DOD, the Defense Department, not DOE, was the proprietor of the majority of the information in the document."

  Although that did not exclude Los Alamos and the Energy Department as the source of the leak, it suggested that the Pentagon was a more likely place to look. The information in the W-88 document, Dillard said, was not only "all over" the Defense Department and DOE, "it was in Trident submarine manuals, and some of it had even been shared with the Brits."

  Under an agreement reached in 1982, Britain was allowed to equip its submarines with Trident II missiles. "It had been public knowledge for nearly a half century that the US and the Brits had a cooperative and shared arrangement for their nuclear weapons programs. We've even had our scientists from DOE's national laboratories detailed to the British nuclear weapons facilities at Aldermaston and Burghfield."

  Dillard was not saying that the walk-in's information had leaked from Britain. His point was that the Energy Department's analysts "failed to perceive that the material could have been compromised through various components of the US government, including the Defense Department, possibly even through a foreign government."

  After China tested its small warhead in 1992, the Energy Department pulled together about two dozen scientists in its KINDRED SPIRIT advisory group. That in turn led to the DOE administrative inquiry that produced the forty-four-page report to the FBI stating that Wen Ho Lee was "the only individual" who could have leaked the information about the W-88. The administrative inquiry had supposedly drawn upon the findings of the KINDRED SPIRIT advisory group. Dillard resolved to dig deeper; he decided that the FBI would talk to the advisory group.

  "I couldn't believe that two dozen of our weapons scientists could be so wrong. By that time, the original members of the group had scattered around all over the country. I had our agents locate and interview every single member of the original group. Only about four or five of that group said that it had to have originated in Los Alamos and X Division. The rest of them, along with me and my FBI and Justice Department colleagues, thought that idea was baseless."

  According to Dillard, "about twenty members of the advisory group said they could not identify the source of the information in the walk-in document. But what DOE sent to the FBI was the administrative inquiry which pinpointed not only X Division, but specifically Wen Ho Lee."

  The Bellows Report, the exhaustive review of the Wen Ho Lee case, agreed that DOE had sent the FBI on a wild-goose chase. But it was equally critical of the FBI for unquestioningly accepting DOE's conclusion and focusing all of its resources on Wen Ho Lee. It faulted "the FBI's own lack of investigative interest in looking beyond Wen Ho Lee."

  But for Dillard, that was ancient history. He had now been assigned to the investigation that should have taken place three years earlier. And the trail was cold.

  The Chinese, he realized, could have obtained the information about the W-88 not only from Los Alamos, where the warhead was designed, or from elsewhere in DOE, but from a much broader spectrum of agencies within the government—from the Pentagon, the armed services, hundreds of defense contractors, even the British. Pinpointing the source of the leak was proving nearly impossible.

  Nor did the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI help matters. When the bureau wanted to interview the walk-in, the CIA said he was inaccessible. Dillard thought otherwise, and the FBI found him, living in the United States.

  Doug Gregory and Dave Lambert, the two agents who interviewed the walk-in, concluded he had not been sent by Chinese intelligence. Unlike the CIA's view, their assessment was that he was not controlled. However, the walk-in was unable to shed any light on the source of the W-88 document.

  Dillard did not confine his investigation to the W-88, although that was the major focus. Although only a few documents in the walk-in's trove dealt with nuclear weapons, there were others of counterintelligence interest, including classified US documents containing data from the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force.

  In a vault in the basement of the CIA, languishing in dust-covered boxes, Dillard was astonished to find thousands of documents that had never been translated when they were brought out by the walk-in four years earlier. Now they would have to be examined by the task force.

  It was slow and painstaking work. The titles of the documents were translated first. Dillard assigned priority to those that looked the most interesting. These were summarized, and if they had intelligence value, some of the full texts were translated. But there was nothing in the other material that gave any clue to the origin of the W-88 document.

  Dillard was hoping to find a document, somewhere inside the defense and nuclear weapons establishment, that might match up to the details in the Chinese document. Then it might be possible to zero in on a US agency or even one of its components in the search for the source.

  But there was a problem. Some US documents contained data about the fission and hydrogen bombs inside the warhead. Other documents dealt with the delivery vehicle itself. But few combined the two. The fact that the Chinese W-88 document contained data about both the physics package—the bombs—and the outer shell or nose cone made it likely, Dillard concluded, that the information obtained by China had come from more than one document.

  While SEGO PALM was under way at FBI headquarters in 1999, others were also trying to solve the mystery of the W-88 leak and the documents obtained from the walk-in. At Los Alamos, Robert Vrooman, who headed counterintelligence at the lab for a decade, wrote a memo reporting that four scientists at the lab believed that the documents originated with a defense contractor in Colorado Springs that manufactured subcomponents for much of the US nuclear arsenal.

  Dillard also looked at defense contractors in California, Florida, Texas, Nevada, and elsewhere. In trying to pinpoint the source of the W-88 document, the FBI sought help from the Navy, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, as well as the Pentagon and DOE.

  Dillard's task force also had to look at several other locations. The warhead was designed at Los Alamos, but DOE's Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque did the engineering of the W-88, and many nonnuclear elements are manufactured at DOE's Kansas City site. Tritium, a key component of hydrogen bombs, comes from DOE's Savannah River plant near Aiken, South Carolina. The warhead itself was assembled at Pantex, the DOE plant, northeast of Amarillo, Texas.

  At Los Alamos, meanwhile, Ken Schiffer, a Chinese counterintelligence specialist at the FBI for twenty-nine years, had retired and in 1998 became director of internal security at the laboratory. Schiffer, too, asked three nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos to analyze the W-88 document for clues as to its origin.

  Schiffer had an unusual background. He grew up near Sheridan, Wyoming, where his father raised horses and cattle and later bought a ranch in Kaycee, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid territory. Schiffer, who joined the bureau after graduating from the University of Colorado, had entered and won prizes in rodeos and continued competing during his FBI career. Possibly he forgot he was not on a bronco in February 1970 when he wrecked an FBI Plymouth Fury III.

  As punishment he received a letter of censure from J. Edgar Hoover—"It is clear that you did not give proper attention to your driving" —and in addition was ordered to Chinese-language school. Apparently the FBI chief suspected there were spies in the nation's Chinatowns, because Schiffer was required to learn Toishan, a Cantonese dialect spoken by many of the older immigrants who came to the United States and opened Chinese restaurants.

  Schiffer, who framed Hoover's letter and put it on the wall of his home, much to his wife's dismay, might never have become a Chinese counterintelligence agent had he not wrecked the Plymouth. In the 1980s he ran the China squad at the Washington field office, then worked at headquarters, and later supervised counterintelligence in San
Diego.

  The Los Alamos scientists reported to Schiffer that the walk-in's document on the W-88 appeared to match a 1986 "interface" document from an earlier stage in the development of the warhead. The term is used to describe a progress report on a project. When the Pentagon wants a new nuclear weapon, an interface document is generated and sent to DOE and the labs, which design the weapon.

  Schiffer relayed the scientists' conclusions to the FBI, but their findings did not bring the bureau closer to determining how the Chinese had acquired the details of the warhead. And because the document had circulated back and forth throughout the labs and the Pentagon, even if China had acquired it, there was no way to tell at what point in the loop it might have been intercepted.

  One cause of contention among the intelligence experts who analyzed the walk-in's documents was a very slight discrepancy between the measurements of the W-88 in the Chinese document and the true size of the warhead. The Chinese data was said to be one millimeter off.

  Ken Schiffer said the discrepancy could be explained by the fact that the walk-in document was based on dimensions in the 1986 document. "This was an early stage that changed later on."

  Ray Wickman, who headed the FBI's China squad and later worked in counterintelligence at DOE, offered a different reason for the minuscule variance in the Chinese data from the actual dimensions of the warhead. "The US document had measurements in inches. The Chinese document had dimensions in millimeters. If you translated the US document into millimeters and rounded off the number and then translated it back to inches there could be a slight discrepancy."

  About six months into the SEGO PALM investigation, Dillard decided to call in the Jasons. A secretive, elite group of the nation's top scientists, Jason—the organization uses the singular rather than the plural form of the name—probably has about fifty members, only some of whose identities are known. Twice a year, the group prepares studies for the Pentagon and the intelligence community. Most of its reports are classified.