A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage [Hardcover]

Dan Stober (Author), Ian Hoffman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 8, 2002

No espionage case in recent decades has been anything like the Wen Ho Lee affair. As Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman describe in "A Convenient Spy," an astonishingly inept investigation of a crime that may never have occurred ended in a national disgrace. A weapons-code scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lee was hunted as a spy for China, indicted on fifty-nine counts, and held in detention for nine months as a threat to the entire nation. But after pleading guilty to just one count, he went home -- with an unusual and emotional apology from a federal judge. Prosecutors' claims that Lee had stolen America's "crown jewels" of nuclear security simply evaporated. Yet Lee's motives have never been satisfactorily explained, and his often-repeated excuse that he was just backing up his work files does not stand up to scrutiny.

As Stober and Hoffman report, Lee's lies and his unexplained connections to foreign scientists spanned eighteen years. He was a security nightmare. Tapping at his keyboard, he assembled a private collection of the computer programs used to design America's nuclear weapons, then left them vulnerable to hackers and foreign intelligence services for years. The FBI's belated discovery that he had also put the codes on portable cassette tapes launched a frenzied worldwide search that eventually carried agents to the Los Alamos landfill. And yet today, the tapes have never been found.

In 1995, Lee was just another American, a Taiwanese immigrant striving to support a family he cherished and to make a name for himself in scientific circles. Unknown to him, however, scientists working in the secret world of nuclear-weapons intelligence examined purloinedChinese documents, studied spy reports, and wondered: Had China stolen the secrets of the W88, America's most advanced nuclear weapon? Scientific hunches rapidly evolved into a criminal investigation aimed at Lee. He had been overheard by the FBI while telephoning a spy suspect, and he was warmly embraced by a high-ranking Chinese nuclear-weapons official whom he wasn't supposed to know. The FBI noted that he was "ethnic Chinese." And in this uncertain period after the Cold War, many politicians played up China as a threatening new enemy. Energy Secretary and vice presidential hopeful Bill Richardson was eager to fire Lee and appear decisive in protecting national security.

In this stormy confluence of intelligence and politics, Lee became a convenient spy. But was he guilty?

Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman tell the story of the Wen Ho Lee fiasco dramatically and authoritatively, providing an objective account that no partisan version of the story can match.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Like many spy stories, there's much that's unknown about the case of Wen Ho Lee, the Taiwanese-American scientist jailed for almost a year in 1999 and 2000 on charges of spying for China before being released with the judge's apology. This exemplary investigative report by journalists Stober (a Pulitzer winner who writes for the San Jose Mercury-News) and Hoffman (of the Albuquerque Journal) goes a long way toward filling in the blanks. They first give a biographical sketch of Lee from his childhood in Taiwan to his college days, marriage and up-and-down engineering career before he arrived at New Mexico's Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in 1978. At Los Alamos, he first built computer models of nuclear reactors before creating and maintaining the codes used by bomb designers. The authors also detail the rivalries and confusion among politicians, government investigators and agencies and media outlets exploring the case. Congress and the media, they write, "were locked in a game of one-upsmanship, describing Lee's crime in ever more superlative-laden rhetoric." The authors also show how the case against Lee intersected with the burgeoning political and scientific relationship between the United States and China during the 1980s and 1990s. The book is full of new information, and, to the authors' credit, even where they're unsure of the answer, they soberly explore all the possibilities. Agents, John Brockman, Katinka Matson. (Jan. 14)Forecast: This will run up in bookstores against Wen Ho Lee's own book, also due out in January from Hyperion (and tightly embargoed). Whether that volume spurs sales of this one or each cannibalizes the other may depend on the respective review and media attention each book receives.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In December 1999, Wen Ho Lee, an immigrant from Taiwan who worked on nuclear weapons research and development at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was accused of downloading top-secret material and an open-access portion of the lab's computer network onto tapes (which he claimed he destroyed) and then handing them over to Beijing (and perhaps Taipei as well). This convoluted case wound up making Lee into a minor folk hero and leaving the federal government with egg on its face when he was set free in September 2000 after pleading guilty to a minor charge. International, domestic, and bureaucratic politics were all involved in this shadowy scenario, as were personal egos and perceptions. After completing this book by journalists Stober and Hoffman, who relied largely on unattributed interviews, readers will have to decide for themselves whether Lee was a devious spy or an eccentric victim. This title should be placed alongside Wen Ho Lee's forthcoming My Country Versus Me (Hyperion, 2002) and is suitable for public and academic libraries. Daniel K. Blewett, Coll. of DuPage Lib., Glen Ellyn, IL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (January 8, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743223780
• ISBN-13: 978-0743223782
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,760,645 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A missed opportunity, April 2, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage (Hardcover)

This book could have been the definitive, unbiased account of this whole ugly situation. Unfortunately, the authors appear to have had very little access to Lee himself, or his family, and so this book does not feel complete. This book is strongest when discussing the failings of the FBI and CIA, but it is weaker when discussing its main subject, Wen Ho Lee. Stober and Hoffman's depiction of Lee sometimes seems unnecessarily dark, like the shadowy picture of Lee on the book cover. For example, they exonerate him as a spy, but repeatedly mention that Lee was a mediocre talent at the labs. It's not clear why this even matters, but even if it did, Los Alamos is an elite lab that could have hired anybody it wanted - even an average performer there is probably quite decent by outside standards.

I also wonder how well the authors understand Lee and his background. For example, they accept at face value reports that Lee was seen hugging a foreign weapons scientist, suggesting suspicious intimacy with the "enemy". But Lee himself always strenuously denied that the "hug" ever took place, and Lee himself comes from a generation and a culture where public displays of intimacy are not terribly common. Hoffman and Stober choose to believe a culturally incongruous report, and not Lee. Why?

Did Stober and Hoffman not push hard enough for more access to Lee and his family? Was Lee advised by his lawyers not to talk to Stober and Hoffman? Whatever the case, this book missed a golden opportunity to present two complete sides of a very complicated case. The authors probably did the best they could with the material they had, and their descriptions of Lee's egomaniac accusers Notra Trulock and Bill Richardson are very eye-opening. However, the title should be reversed to "The Politics of Nuclear Espionage, and Wen Ho Lee".

21 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book on all aspects of Wen Ho Lee controversy, January 10, 2002

By 

Frank (Stockton CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage (Hardcover)

It was a difficult job to write a book which completely, and yet readably, presents the background and all aspects of the Wen Ho Lee controversy.
On the one hand, Wen Ho Lee's supporters present a view of a scientist who, for no reason except his national origin, was persecuted by the government.
On the other hand, the Justice Department portrayed Lee as an evil and incredibly dangerous master spy.
The truth is not just in the middle, but multi-faceted.
Wen Ho Lee acted suspiciously. He contacted, and gave non-classified information to, foreign governments. He repeatedly downloaded very comprehensive and secret information on the US atomic bomb program to non-secure computers and tape drives - a security lapse which could have been devastating.
On the other hand, the Justice Department was operating under political pressure to find a scapegoat to prove the administration was not "soft on China." They held Lee without bail, in solitary confinement, under threat of life imprisonment, for 278 days, with no evidence that Lee gave secret information to a foreign government. (In comparison, when John Deutch, former CIA Director, was discovered to have stored very sensitive national security secrets on his internet-connected home computer, which was used by a household member to access pornographic internet sites, nothing was done to him except that he lost his security clearance.)
The book gives plausible reasons that Lee may have downloaded the information, consistent with Lee's character and past actions, which do not involve spying.
This is a very well-written, balanced, and thorough book; I recommend it to anyone who wishes to learn more about the Wen Ho Lee controversy.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, January 21, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage (Hardcover)

I've followed this case in the news and was very disturbed by both the government's actions and the media's complicity in the grossly unfair treatment of Dr. Lee. This book exposes a lot of the government's wrongdoing, but it whitewashes the media's role, maybe because the authors were among the press corps.

I was disappointed on a few levels. First, that authors rely only on an Anglo spy expert to explain China, Chinese culture and Chinese people, including Chinese Americans. THis biased view only perpetuates the same attitudes that lead to Dr. lee's incarcration to begin with, and its too bad the book is still doing that.

Second, it bothered me that the book made it seem that the authors had spoken with Dr. Lee and his family and friends so much that they knew what he was thinking and what his motives were. I went to a book reading by Dr. Lee and learned that they never spoke to him or his family and that there are many errors in the book. Now I question the accuracy of what they wrote about him.

I was hoping for an unbiased, objective book, but i was disappointed.