The U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Department of Justice Oversight released a report late last month that criticizes the federal government’s handling of the espionage case concerning nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee in 1999, according to a summary of the report in the Congressional Record.

The U.S. investigation of Lee was “so inept that despite scrutiny spanning nearly two decades, both the FBI and the Department of Energy missed repeated opportunities to discover and stop his illegal computer activities,” said the summary.

“As a consequence of these numerous failures, magnetic computer tapes containing some of the nation’s most sensitive nuclear secrets are now missing when they could have been recovered as late as December 1998 and possibly even later,” the summary said.

The report concluded that claims that the investigation of Lee was ethnically biased were unfounded.  “The repeated investigations of Dr. Lee resulted from reasonable suspicions raised by Dr. Lee’s own conduct,” the summary said.  The report indicated that the government’s treatment of Lee after his arrest, which included placing him in manacles and solitary confinement, may have been a tactic to coerce a confession.

The report lists several concerns with the way the Energy Department and the FBI handled the investigation, including:

*         The government had “highly credible” information that Lee had helped the Chinese with computer codes and software, but investigators did not examine Lee’s own computer;

*         The FBI focused excessively on the alleged loss of design information on the W-88 nuclear warhead due to the reliance on the Energy Department’s administrative inquiry.

*          The Justice Department should have approved the FBI’s request for electronic surveillance of Lee.

*         The U.S. claim that Lee had to be banned from communication is “severely undercut” by the failure to obtain any kind of surveillance.  “If the government was truly concerned that Dr. Lee could potentially alter the global strategic balance though phrases as innocuous as ‘Uncle Wen says hello,’ or might send a signal to a foreign intelligence service to extract him, it should have sought to monitor his communications, but it did not.”

*         The Energy Department should not have allowed Wackenhut contract polygraph examiners to administer a lie detector test to Lee, which they later incorrectly reported Lee had passed.

*         Some of the controversial steps in the case appeared to be taken to protect agencies’ image rather than out of concern for national security.

“One great tragedy of the Wen Ho Lee case is that the entire truth will likely never be known” the summary said.  “If the information Dr. Lee put at risk did not fall into the wrong hands, it is a matter of mere luck.  When the nation’s most sensitive nuclear secrets are at issue, it is unacceptable that we should have to rely on luck to keep them safe” (Congressional Record, Dec. 20).

Click here to read the report.

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