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Wen Ho Lee Wikipedia

Wen Ho Lee (李文和, pinyin: Lǐ W?nh?) (born 1939) is a Chinese American computer scientist who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and was accused of stealing secrets about the U.S.'s nuclear weapon|nuclear arsenal, though later acquitted.

The investigation into whether China had conducted successful nuclear espionage occurred after a an intelligence agent from the People's Republic of China (PRC) gave U.S. agents papers which indicated that they knew the design of a particularly modern U.S. warhead (a compact thermonuclear design used for MIRVed warheads). In particular, Lee was suspected for having given the PRC copies of "weapons codes," computer code used for simulations of nuclear testing. The advantage of such codes would not be that they would necessarily tell a PRC scientist how to develop a weapon, but would have given the PRC the results of many American tests, which would potentially allow them to make up for the fact that they had performed a relatively few number of tests before halting their testing program.

It was soon determined that the design data the PRC had obtained could not have come from Los Alamos Lab, because it related to information that would only have been available to someone like a so-called "downstream" contractor, meaning one involved in the final warhead production process, and this information was only created after the weapon design left the Lab.

After an intensive forensic examination of Lee's office computer, it was determined that he had backed up his work files, which were not classified at the time, onto tapes, and had also transferred the files from a system used for processing classified data onto another, also highly secure, system designated for unclassified data. With this in hand, the government then retroactively redesignated the data Lee had copied, changing it from its former designation of PARD (Protect As Restricted Data) to a new designation of Secret, giving them the crime they needed for a formal charge. Lee was arrested in December 1999 but freed in August 2000 after he accepted a plea bargain from the federal government.

Wen Ho Lee pled guilty to one felony count of improperly downloading classified data. In return, the government released him from jail and dropped the other 58 counts of illegally downloading classified data from the computers at the Los Alamos weapons lab. The judge assigned to hear the case apologized for Lee's nine months of incarceration.

Born in Nantou, Taiwan, Lee got his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Cheng Kung University. He received a Doctor of Philosophy|Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 1969.

Last Modified:   2005-02-25