By
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - FBI Director Louis Freeh told Congress yesterday that prosecutors could have sent scientist Wen Ho Lee to prison for years but agreed to let him plead guilty to a single charge out of fears atomic weapons secrets would become public at a trial.
"The Department of Justice and the FBI stand by each and every one of the 59 counts in the indictment of Doctor Lee," Freeh told the Senate Judiciary and Select Intelligence committees. "Each of those counts could be proven in December 1999 and each of them could be proven today."
"The facts of this case have not changed, although recent rulings by the trial court posed serious obstacles to proving those facts without revealing nuclear secrets in open courts," he said.
Freeh was joined by Attorney General Janet Reno in defending the government's investigation and treatment of Lee, who was held in solitary confinement without bail for nine months and had to wear leg shackles.
Lee was not present for the hearing. In a statement, his lawyers expressed hope that he will be treated fairly by the government and said the scientist hopes in time "the world will better understand that he has been and continues to be a loyal and proud citizen of the United States."
"Doctor Lee is no hero," Reno said, rejecting his portrayal as a victim. "He is no absent-minded professor. He is a felon. He committed a very serious, calculated crime and he pled guilty to it."
The FBI director acknowledged in written testimony that the agents who interrogated Lee should not have reminded him that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the 1950s for espionage.
"Confrontational interviews often call for tough statements by investigators but that implication was inappropriate," he said. Lee was never charged with espionage.
Reno said Lee was treated no worse than other prisoners in solitary confinement at the Santa Fe County Detention Facility. All were required to wear leg shackles when being moved outside their cells, she said.
Ultimately those shackles were removed and, unlike the other prisoners in solitary confinement, Lee was allowed to have a radio to listen to music, she said.
Lee walked free Sept. 13, sentenced to the time he had served awaiting trial, after he agreed to tell the government what he did with nuclear weapons design secrets he downloaded from computers while employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
"This plea agreement is our best chance to find out what happened to the computer tapes containing some of the nation's most important nuclear designs," Reno said at the joint hearing of the two Senate committees.
The plea bargain, however, prompted U.S. District Judge James Parker to apologize to Lee for the nine-month pretrial imprisonment and to accuse the government officials in charge of the case of embarrassing "our entire nation."
Lawmakers at yesterday's hearing also found much to complain about.
"I believe the FBI's counterintelligence investigation was a gravely flawed exercise characterized by inadequate resources, lack of management attention and missed opportunities," said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala.
"This is a textbook example of how not to conduct an investigation," added Sen. Richard Bryan of Nevada, the top Democrat on that committee, calling it a "Keystone Kops" operation.
Lee's supporters also contend that the fired Los Alamos scientist, a U.S. citizen born in Taiwan and educated in the United States, was targeted because he is Asian-American. Some are demanding a presidential pardon and an apology.
Reno has refused to apologize but has ordered an internal review of Justice Department actions. She and Freeh deny, however, that he was unfairly targeted because he is Asian-American.
Freeh listed several instances starting in 1982 that led them to Lee, including allegations that he had met with and helped Chinese nuclear scientists.
"It is critical to understand that Doctor Lee's conduct was not inadvertent, it was not careless and it was not innocent," Freeh said.
Lee also deleted some files he had downloaded from Los Alamos weapons computers after the FBI questioning began and tried to access secure areas at Los Alamos after losing his security clearance, the officials said.
"After his access was revoked to the part of the lab where the secure computer resided, he tried over and over to get in, including at 3:30 a.m. one Christmas Eve," Reno said.
But convicting Lee likely would have required revealing those secrets in court to prove their importance, "crossing an exposure threshold we had already determined at the highest level of government posed an unacceptable risk," Freeh said.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., asked Reno to appoint an independent investigator, saying Congress and the Justice Department are too close to the matter to be perceived as being fair.
Meanwhile, The New York Times, which played a lead role in bringing the Lee investigation to public attention, said in yesterday's editions that there were flaws in its stories.
In an extraordinary 1,680-word message from editors, the newspaper said an internal review "found some things we wish we had done differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt." The blame "lies principally with those who directed the coverage, for not raising questions that occurred to us only later."
