Wen Ho Lee

The 2010 short film The Profile and its animated remake (the 2017 short film Disk 44), both by American film maker Ray Arthur Wang, are inspired by the Lee case.

The 2007 play Yellow Face by Asian-American playwright David Henry Hwang places this incident in the context of a greater number of cases dealing with racial profiling against Asian Americans, particularly the Chinese during the 1980s.

President Bill Clinton issued a public apology to Lee over his treatment by the federal government during the investigation. Lee filed a lawsuit to gain the names of public officials who had leaked his name to journalists before charges had been filed against him. It raised issues similar to those in the Valerie Plame affair, of whether journalists should have to reveal their anonymous sources in a court of law. Lee's lawsuit was settled by the federal government in 2006 just before the Supreme Court was set to decide whether to hear the case. The federal judge who heard the case during an earlier appeal said that "top decision makers in the executive branch...have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen."

The short story "Amnesty" in the 2005 edition of Octavia Butler's collection Bloodchild and Other Stories was inspired by the government's treatment of Lee.

Lee is now retired and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife. He also has two grown children – a son, and a daughter, Alberta, who at one time was an intern at Los Alamos Laboratory. In 2003, he wrote a memoir, My Country Versus Me, in which he describes his love of classical music, literature, poetry, fishing in the mountains of New Mexico, and his dedication to organic gardening. He also charges that his Asian ethnicity was a primary factor behind his prosecution by the government. As evidence of such racial profiling, he cited cases of several scientists of non-Han Chinese ancestry who were responsible for similar security transgressions but were able to continue their careers. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh categorically denied these charges.

The 2001 play The Legacy Codes, by American playwright Cherylene Lee, deals with the Wen Ho Lee case.

Dr. Lee spent nine months incarcerated in solitary confinement with limited access to family. His treatment, which included constant shackling, was inconsistent with treatment of other prisoners at the Santa Fe County detention facility, and became a source of great controversy for the DOJ. In September 2000, Judge Parker ruled that the government was required to disclose the information on the tapes. According to Louis Freeh and Janet Reno, they were left with no option but to plea out Dr. Lee in order to find out where the missing tapes were, and not risk sensitive government information by bringing it to trial. Dr. Lee was freed, and at plea he admitted to having made copies of the tapes which he later destroyed, according to his book My Country Versus Me, and other sources.

A federal grand jury indicted him on charges of stealing secrets about the U.S. nuclear arsenal for the People's Republic of China (PRC) in December 1999. After federal investigators were unable to prove these initial accusations, the government conducted a separate investigation and was ultimately only able to charge Lee with improper handling of restricted data, one of the original 59 indictment counts, to which he pleaded guilty as part of a plea settlement. In June 2006, Lee received $1.6 million from the federal government and five media organizations as part of a settlement of a civil suit he had filed against them for leaking his name to the press before any formal charges had been filed against him. Federal judge James A. Parker eventually apologized to Lee for denying him bail and putting him in solitary confinement and excoriated the government for misconduct and misrepresentations to the court.

On December 10, 1999, Lee was arrested, indicted on 59 counts, and jailed in solitary confinement without bail for 278 days until September 13, 2000, when he accepted a plea bargain from the federal government. Lee was released on time served after the government's case against him could not be proven. Part of his defence rested on a graymail strategy, which tried to compel prosecutors to release large amounts of classified material related to nuclear weapons. He was ultimately charged with only one count of mishandling sensitive documents that did not require pre-trial solitary confinement, while the other 58 counts were dropped.

The FBI interviewed Dr. Lee on March 5, and he consented to a search of his office. On March 8, 1999, Lee was fired from his job at Los Alamos National Laboratory for failure to maintain classified information securely. However, FBI investigators soon determined that the design data the PRC had obtained could not have come from the 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 LANL.

Lee did not get the attention of the FBI again for 12 years until 1998. The FBI had lost the file on Lee from the 1983 and 1984 meetings with him, and had to reconstruct the information. In 1994, a delegation of Chinese scientists visited Los Alamos National Laboratory in an unannounced capacity for a meeting. One of the scientists visiting was Dr. Hu Side, the head of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics. He also was credited with the design of the small, W88-like weapon. However, despite the visit being unannounced, Lee showed up to the meeting uninvited.

This alarmed LANL officials who contacted the FBI, which opened up another investigation of Lee. On December 23, 1998 Lee was given a polygraph test by Wackenhut, a DOE contractor. He was not told of the reason why, other than that it involved his latest trip to China to escort his nephew. During the questioning, he admitted that he had, in fact, met with Dr. Hu Side in a hotel room in 1988 and that Hu had asked him for classified information, which he refused to discuss.

In 1982, Lee was recorded on a wiretap speaking with another Taiwanese-American scientist who had been accused of espionage. Lee offered to the scientist to find out who had turned him in. When confronted by the FBI about this incident, Lee said he did not know the scientist, until the FBI demonstrated proof of the conversation. Despite some evidence that could have kept the case open, the FBI closed this file on Lee in 1984.

Lee came to the United States in 1965 to continue his studies in mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University. He received his doctorate in mechanical engineering with the specialization in fluid mechanics in 1969 and became a U.S. citizen in 1974. He was employed at industrial and government research firms before he moved to New Mexico in 1978. He worked as a scientist in weapons design at Los Alamos National Laboratory in applied mathematics and fluid dynamics from that year until 1999. He created simulation software for nuclear explosions, which were used to gain scientific understanding and help maintain the safety and reliability of the US nuclear weapons arsenal.

The Department of Justice constructed its case around the only real evidence of malfeasance, the downloading of the restricted information. It ultimately employed an unusual strategy of trying to prove that in addition to illegally handling information, Dr. Lee had an "intent to injure" the United States by denying it the exclusivity of the nuclear information. Lee was indicted on 59 counts, 39 of which were for mishandling information under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, and 20 of which were for lesser violations of the Espionage Act. (The original Atomic Energy Act, also known as the McMahon Act, was passed in response to the case of Cambridge physicist Alan Nunn May after he confessed to giving Manhattan Project secrets to the USSR.) Janet Reno confirmed with CIA Director George Tenet and FBI Director Louis Freeh that if the presiding judge rules that the government must reveal in open court what specifically was on the tapes, the prosecution would have to plea out the case or risk jeopardizing state secrets.

In My Country Versus Me, Lee describes life as being harsh. His father died when Lee was very young. His mother suffered from asthma and eventually committed suicide so that she would not 'burden' the family. He was a young boy in Taiwan when Republic of China (ROC) forces violently suppressed the February 28 Incident of 1947. Taiwan was placed under martial law; his brother died when he was a conscript and his commanding officers allegedly wouldn't allow him to take medicine. Lee, however, overcame these odds. He had what he describes as a wonderful teacher in the 6th grade who encouraged his intellectual abilities. Eventually, he made his way to university, where he became interested in fluid dynamics and studied mechanical engineering at the university.

Wen Ho Lee or Li Wenho (Chinese: 李文和; pinyin: Lǐ Wénhé; born December 21, 1939) is a Taiwanese-American scientist who worked for the University of California at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He created simulations of nuclear explosions for the purposes of scientific inquiry, as well as for improving the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Wen Ho Lee was born on December 21, 1939, to a Hoklo family in Taiwan during Japanese rule. He graduated from Keelung High School in the northern part of the island in 1959, after which he attended National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering in 1963.