symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 13, 2000 | by Notra Trulock, | Sam Cohen

Q: Did Wen Ho Lee compromise crucial U.S. nuclear secrets?

Yes: Chinese hackers likely obtained specific weapon designs and physical properties from Lee's computer files.

No harm, no foul: That's what Wen Ho Lee's defenders want us to believe about the nuclear-weapons information he admits to placing on missing computer tapes, 17 at last count. Sure he pled guilty to one felony charge -- out of a 59-count indictment -- that he mishandled classified information after the government's case against Lee crumbled before U.S. District Judge James A. Parker's eyes.

Many were not surprised: Hadn't Los Alamos National Laboratory weapons designer John Richter testified that "99 percent of the downloaded information had already been made public"? The combination of the FBI's admission of "misleading" (a polite euphemism for lying) a federal judge and Richter's testimony pretty much destroyed whatever chance the federal government had of making its case against Lee. So does this mean that the "materials" Lee spent years transferring to an unclassified computer system and downloading on the missing tapes at Los Alamos National Laboratory are not important or critical to our national security?

Not according to Attorney General Janet Reno or FBI Director Louis Freeh, who underscored the seriousness of Lee's actions in creating a "portable library" of nuclear secrets in their recent congressional testimony. Unfortunately, neither Freeh nor Reno has much credibility these days. Freeh's FBI bungled this investigation from day one and then repeatedly "misled" congressional committees and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) to cover its tracks. FBI agents in Albuquerque told Parker some real whoppers during Lee's detention-hearing testimony.

Richter's testimony was a "get-out-of-jail" card for Lee. Richter is a legend within the nuclear-laboratory community. He personally is responsible for 40 nuclear tests at our Nevada Test Site. When Richter speaks, people listen. When Richter told Parker that 99 percent of the Lee materials were already available in the open literature, Richter was reinforcing what the judge had already heard from other prominent lab scientists, such as Harold Agnew and Walter Goad. Goad is a fellow emeritus at the Los Alamos National Laboratory who alleged that characterizations of the Lee materials as "the crown jewels" represented "unbridled exaggeration" which reminded him of the McCarthy era. Agnew is a much-revered former director of the Los Alamos lab who declared that "the present value to a foreign power of any code for U.S. nuclear-weapons design was long ago diminished by the wide distribution of the underlying science and engineering of the United States' and other nations' nuclear design codes. This information has been widely available in the open literature."

According to Agnew, even if the Chinese, for example, got their hands on these materials, neither they nor any other nuclear state would use these codes to further their own nuclear program. Such statements more than undercut testimony by the director of Sandia National Laboratory, Paul Robinson, or the associate laboratory director for nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, Stephen Younger. Both had testified as to the sensitivity and uniqueness of the materials, to say nothing of their classification. Added to this was Robert Vrooman's "expert opinion" that Lee is simply "naive," does not represent any type of espionage threat and, to top it all off, is actually a victim of ethnic profiling. No harm, no foul.

The question we are left with, though, is: "Did Lee's actions compromise our nuclear secrets?"

The answer to this questions seems to be an unequivocal yes. In the good old days, such as in the infamous John Walker or Aldrich Ames spy cases, there would be a full-scale damage assessment that would identify the magnitude of the possible loss or any vulnerability that the compromise of these secrets might open up in our nuclear arsenal. But that was then, and this is now.

Don't look to the Energy or Defense departments for such an assessment; "not interested" seems to be their attitude. As for the intelligence community, its 1997 report to the National Security Council was pathetically lame and remains a first-class example of the politicization of intelligence under the Clinton administration. Finally, in 1999 under prodding from a Republican-controlled Congress, CIA Director George Tenet and the U.S. intelligence community shook off their lethargy and produced a "damage assessment" of China's acquisition of U.S. nuclear-weapons information in general. Tenet's conclusion:

"China obtained by espionage classified U.S. nuclear-weapons information that probably accelerated its program to develop future nuclear weapons. This collection program allowed China to focus successfully down critical paths and avoid less-promising approaches to nuclear weapon designs." (Emphasis added.)

Tenet's assessment noted the existence of "significant deficiencies" in China's weapons program, but warned that "the Chinese almost certainly are using aggressive collection efforts to address deficiencies as well as to obtain manufacturing and production capabilities from both nuclear and non-nuclear sources." So we have a set of intelligence-community findings that the Chinese have obtained classified U.S. nuclear-weapons information on "a variety of U.S. weapons-design concepts," including the W-88 warhead for the Navy's Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile. We have these findings validated by a group of senior experts, including one nuclear-weapons scientist at least as prominent as Agnew, et al.: John Foster of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Although largely ignored by the national media, Tenet's assessment still stands as the official U.S. intelligence-community position on Chinese nuclear espionage. Please note that the assessment is limited in scope, but it is better than nothing.