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New York Daily News
Wednesday, May 05, 1999

China Spy Plot: Less
Than What Meets the Eye

There's not much profit in standing athwart a determined, cold-blooded lynch mob (this means you, New York Times). But once again, I rise to stop the hanging of Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese-American nuclear physicist accused, in the press, of spying for China.

Lee may be guilty. Lots of lynching victims were in fact guilty of heinous crimes. But lynching, whether by a mob or by a newspaper, is a disgrace to American standards of fair play. Whipping up a national spy hysteria is no better.

So let's look at the facts. While working at the Los Alamos nuclear-weapons laboratory, Lee apparently downloaded millions of lines of computer code — the so-called "legacy codes" that helped design 50 years' worth of American nuclear weapons — into a computer vulnerable to foreign espionage.

On the surface, this sounds like a monumental act of treason. One of The Times' more hysterical writers predicted that because of this alleged espionage, "America's cities will be less safe in two years than they were at the height of the war."

But before we duck and cover, let's examine what Lee actually did. In computerese, "legacy codes" mean obsolete codes. In the case of nuclear weapons, even old codes would be of interest to China, giving it insights into how we developed our own warheads.

"But this is not a new set of codes, and the codes are not sufficient to develop a nuclear weapon," says a top U.S. nuclear expert. "You would need someone who knows how to run them, and it took me five years to learn just that. Even then, you could not develop a new weapon without testing, and China has committed itself to no nuclear tests."

In addition, Lee's downloaded codes are "two-dimensional," a relatively primitive form of computer modeling compared with the three-dimensional codes that U.S. scientists have used for the past 20 years.

Furthermore, there's no evidence that China actually got the codes that Lee downloaded. FBI agents, posing as Chinese spies, tried to recruit him in a sting operation last summer, and he turned them down. Lee is currently cooperating with the U.S. attorney in Albuquerque, N.M.

There's no doubt that Lee broke the lab rules by downloading the codes. "It's an enormous breach of security," says a U.S. official, "but what you're seeing in the papers is speculation about a worst-case scenario."

Ironically, the real threat to U.S. national security will come if, in an excess of zeal, the U.S. government reinstitutes the draconian security precautions that cloaked Los Alamos during the Cold War. Then, it was sealed off from the world, husbands couldn't tell their wives what they did and security guards followed employees out to dinner.

"First-rate scientists don't want to work in a prison," says John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists. "In the early days, there was some glamor to the job that made up for the restrictions, but now there's more fame and glory in other work."

Adds a government scientist: "I can think of few other things that would turn these labs into second-rate scientific institutions."

Even shutting off visits by Chinese scientists — seemingly a reasonable precaution — would close our eyes to what China knows about developing nuclear weapons.

Crippling the labs would do grave and needless damage to our national security — especially if, imagine this, Wen Ho Lee is innocent.