The Making of a Suspect: The Case of Wen Ho Lee​

By Matthew Purdy

Feb. 4, 2001

The crime sounded alarming: China had stolen the design of America's most advanced nuclear weapon. The suspect seemed suspicious enough: Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-born scientist at Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, had a history of contact with Chinese scientists and a record of deceiving the authorities on security matters.

After a meandering five-year investigation, Dr. Lee was incarcerated and interrogated, shackled and polygraphed, and all but threatened with execution by a federal agent for not admitting spying. But prosecutors were never able to connect him to espionage. They discovered that he had downloaded a mountain of classified weapons information, but he was freed last September after pleading guilty to one felony count of mishandling secrets. Ultimately, the case of Wen Ho Lee was a spy story in which the most tantalizing mystery was whether the central character ever was a spy.

In the aftermath, the government was roundly criticized for its handling of the case; so was the press, especially The New York Times. In an effort to untangle this convoluted episode, The Times undertook an extensive re-examination of the case, interviewing participants and examining scientific and government documents, many containing secrets never before disclosed.

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