Wen Ho Lee biography

Synopsis

Nuclear Weapons Career

Born in 1939, in Taiwan, China. After earning his master's degree and doctorate in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University, Wen Ho Lee joined the staff of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1978. He and his wife Sylvia, who also worked at Los Alamos, have two children, Alberta and Tse Chung. In the late 1990s, Lee became the focus of a federal investigation aimed at uncovering the possible sale of U.S. nuclear secrets to China. Though he lost his job at Los Alamos and spent almost a year in jail as a result of the government’s suspicions, 58 of 59 felony charges against Lee were eventually dropped and he was released. Los Alamos, created during World War II for the purpose of building the world’s first atom bomb, is one of three national weapons labs owned by the Department of Energy and a major site of the U.S. government's nuclear weapons research. In the late 1970s, Lee began working in the laboratory's X division, which designed U.S. bombs and warheads. In his position as a midlevel scientist, Lee specialized in simulating shock waves generated by nuclear blasts using computers.

Espionage Scandal

The case against Wen Ho Lee began in 1995, when a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative in Asia was approached by a Chinese source who handed over a Chinese government document claiming that the country's weapons designers had obtained highly classified and specific details of the W-88, a state of the art thermonuclear warhead that was intended for use by U.S. missile submarines. Though the document was nearly seven years old and was believed by some to be a plant by the Chinese government, the Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) concluded that a massive security leak had occurred at the weapons lab at Los Alamos.

The official FBI investigation began in May 1996. As one of only 12 people who had both access to the information about the W-88 (he was a member of the team that designed the trigger mechanism for the warhead) and access to Chinese officials and scientists (he had visited Beijing and had attended a seminar in Hong Kong in 1988, which corresponded with the date of the document in question), Wen Ho Lee quickly became the government's prime suspect. Lee retained his highly sensitive position at Los Alamos until March of 1999, prompting questions about inadequate security precautions at the laboratory and drawing fire from critics of the Clinton administration for failing to follow through with information about the Chinese espionage that they received as early as the summer of 1997.