The Wen Ho Lee Scandal

For those of you watching with interest – perhaps with horror – the Wen Ho Lee saga as it has been unfolding, there are several bits of pertinent information that you may not have been given – until now.

  1. Chairman Chris Cox – of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China – wants to be Speaker of the House.

  2. DOE Secretary Bill Richardson – former representative for New Mexico’s 3rd District (which includes Los Alamos) – wants to be governor of New Mexico.

  3. The Board of Regents of the University of California operates – and has operated from Day 1 – the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for the Department of Energy.

After completing most of its assigned work about People’s Republic of China launches of U.S. satellites, almost as an afterthought, the Cox Committee listened to some testimony from DOE "counterspooks" about Clinton administration so-far successful attempts to thwart their investigation and prosecution of PRC "moles" at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. Cox took all this testimony at the eleventh hour from the aggrieved "counterspooks" – who were not experts on nukes – and as Cox Committee Member John Spratt later wrote, "The committee did not have time to call the senior statesmen of the nuclear labs, like Harold Agnew (from Los Alamos) and Johnny Foster (from Lawrence Livermore) for their perspective. Partly because of haste, there are statements in the report that will not stand scrutiny."

Indeed they would not. The "classified" version of the Cox Committee report was filed on Jan. 3, 1999, and much of it was promptly leaked. By the time the "redacted" version of the Cox Committee Report was made available on March 25, 1999, much of the damage to the labs and lab scientists had already been done.

Even though most of the Cox Report was about missile guidance systems and satellite launches, the media frenzy that developed – after the classified version was filed, but long before the "redacted" version was made available to the public – was mostly about the charges in Chapter II of the "decades long" penetration of the U.S. nuke labs by PRC moles. The name of one suspected PRC mole – Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee – was almost immediately leaked. It was also leaked that the counterspooks had evidence that Wen Ho had given the secret of the W-88 to the PRC back in 1985.

There were congressional demands that Wen Ho be fired, and two days later Secretary Richardson announced that he had fired Wen Ho Lee. Of course, he had not actually fired him. Wen Ho was an employee of the University of California and Richardson – as Secretary of Energy had no authority to fire him. But he could, and perhaps did, threaten to take away the UC contract to manage Los Alamos if they didn’t fire him. Which they did, instantly, without due process.

The Cox Committee Report charged that the PRC had infiltrated Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore "decades ago" and had, over a period of time, stolen the "crown jewels" of the U.S. nuclear weapons research and development programs. Nevertheless, Chairman Cox said we should not blame the PRC for its spying, nor did Cox blame – much to Richardson’s relief – the Clinton administration for allowing the spying to happen. (In fact, just to show how little blame Cox attaches to President Clinton and the PRC, Cox voted for Perpetual Normal Trading Relations with the PRC, a vote that would appear to be anathema to the Cox Report.) After all, most of the PRC spying, according to Cox and Richardson, happened under previous Republican administrations.

So who did Chairman Cox and Secretary Richardson blame?

The UC Board of Regents, that’s who. After filing his report, Chairman Cox publicly demanded – and other congressmen joined in the chorus – that the contract to manage Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos be taken away from the University of California. That was just fine with governor-wannabe Richardson, who has long wanted to take the contract to operate Los Alamos away from UC and give it to the University of New Mexico.

So where does Wen Ho Lee fit into all this? Cox and Richardson were beginning to look like fools for blaming UC, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. The Cox Report charges that Richardson et al. leaked about moles and nukes, in general, and about Wen Ho Lee, in particular, had turned out to be groundless.

But wouldn’t you know it, after Richardson had "fired" Wen Ho, the countersnoops searched his office and his computer and all his local area network transactions, and they discovered that Wen Ho had apparently copied – they can’t find the copies – a huge number of "legacy" files. None of these so-called legacy files were classified, individually, but when taken in aggregate, the Richardson claim is that they amount to a collection of the U.S. nuke "crown jewels."

Now, all this alleged spying by Wen Ho took place on President Clinton’s watch and there is good reason to blame Clinton nuke policies towards the PRC for it. Nevertheless, governor-wannabe Richardson and speaker-wannabe Cox will try to tell you the Wen Ho discovery proves that they knew what they were talking about – when they were demanding that the contracts to manage Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore be taken away from the UC Regents – all along. But they didn’t.

June 12, 2006