`Chinese Spy Scandal' Drags on

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 22, 2000 | by John Elvin

To put it bluntly, there is still no evidence that a crime was ever committed, but we do have a suspect." That's the cynical assessment of alleged spying at the government's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico -- a case detailed in several Insight articles during the last six months -- as viewed by Robert Vrooman, former head of counterintelligence at the lab. The suspect is Wen Ho Lee, a foreign-born weapons designer and archivist being held in solitary confinement without bail while awaiting thai for violating lab-security procedures. Vrooman -- who has been on the warpath since his lengthy career in the spook field was capped with disciplinary action for allowing Lee continued access to nuclear secrets while under investigation -- now travels the country telling the spy story from his perspective.

Vrooman's blunt assessment is that the Clinton-Gore administration went looking for a scapegoat to try to chill the heat over charges that it had facilitated the flow of sensitive technology to China and that China had funneled campaign funds to Bill Clinton, Al Gore and the Democratic Party. Using the controversial technique of racial profiling, Vrooman charges, the administration settled on Taiwan-born Lee to parade before the media as evidence that it was not soft on the People's Republic of China.

Lee had the misfortune of coming to the public's attention during an election-year period. "That's when everything goes crazy" Vrooman said during a visit to Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., where he recently spoke to political-science students and an Asian-American group and also delivered a lecture to the general public. Lee is being used in an effort to quiet a controversy that could hurt Gore's chances in the next election, Vrooman asserts.

After creating a public flap with the "Chinese spy scandal" that baited Congress into debating creation of a whole new oversight bureaucracy for nuclear security, the administration admitted it had no evidence of espionage in the Lee case and would have to go back to "zero" and reinvestigate the matter, according to an Insight report on the situation. In other words, as anyone who has spent any time deciphering Washington's weaselly code words will tell you, they blew it.

As a longtime case officer for the CIA, a Vietnam combat veteran and a political conservative, Vrooman hardly is typical of those raising a fuss about racial profiling these days. Whatever his motives -- they certainly could include bitterness about having an exemplary career tainted by what he perceives as a Clinton-Gore scapegoat ploy -- he is tiding a wave of backlash. Thanks to this mess, future counterintelligence efforts may be inhibited by considerations such as whether the probe is politically correct.