U.S. District Judge James A. Parker had ordered Janet Reno and federal prosecutors to disclose by Wednesday, July 5, which country they intend to prove that former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee was spying for. She has apparently not done that and it is not inconceivable that by the time you read this column federal prosecutors will have dropped all charges against Wen Ho Lee rather than comply with the judge's order.

How could that be? Why didn't Janet Reno's Department of Justice immediately reply to Judge Parker that they will prove Wen Ho Lee is, and has been for decades, a "spy," a "mole," a "sleeper," an espionage agent for the People's Republic of China? Thereby hangs a tale.

When the FBI first sought, in 1997, permission to wiretap Wen Ho Lee, a U.S. naturalized citizen, they believed a document supplied them by a PRC "defector" was genuine, and that a handwritten piece of paper stuck inside the PRC document was "evidence" that the PRC had somehow acquired secret design information on the W-88, the warhead contained in the U.S. Navy's Mark 5 Reentry Vehicle.

Suspicion immediately focused on Wen Ho Lee -- even though he was born in Taiwan, not the PRC -- who had worked on the design of the "primary" used in the W-88. However, the attorney general rejected the 1997 request by the FBI to wiretap Wen Ho Lee. It takes quite a bit more than suspicion to justify a wiretap on a U.S. citizen.

So, in mid-1998, Wen Ho Lee -- who is reported to have had for almost 20 years Department of Energy-approved consulting agreements with Taiwanese nuclear research centers -- was allowed to give a series of lectures there. Upon his return late in 1998, Wen Ho underwent the customary "debriefing," whereby DOE intelligence officials assure themselves that no restricted data has been divulged to unauthorized persons. Wen Ho reportedly assured them that none had.

Meanwhile, the Cox Committee -- which had been investigating commercial transfers of U.S. missile and satellite technology to the PRC -- had been informed "in camera" about the PRC document, the suspicion that Wen Ho Lee had been the source of the W-88 leak and the rejection by Janet Reno of the FBI request for a wiretap.

The Cox Committee immediately incorporated in its report the charge that the PRC had infiltrated all the U.S. nuclear labs decades ago, and that over time, had stolen "classified information" on every currently deployed U.S. thermonuclear weapon, including the W-88. The Cox Committee filed its "Top Secret" report on Jan. 3, 1999, and much of it, including Wen Ho Lee's name and what he was suspected of doing, began to leak out immediately. In March, DOE Secretary Richardson gave in to congressional demands that the PRC spy Wen Ho Lee be summarily fired.

While this was going on, the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and, independently, an intelligence community panel of experts had been examining the evidence presented to the Cox Committee. They concluded that the Cox Committee had jumped to unwarranted conclusions, in general, and in the Wen Ho Lee W-88 case, in particular. Contemporaneous news accounts revealed that the secret information cited by the Cox Committee supposed to have been obtained by the PRC about the DOE supplied W-88 was actually information about the U.S. Navy's Mark 5 into which the W-88 fits, and that the information contained in the PRC document was wrong. So Wen Ho was off the hook for the W-88 leak, which had never occurred in the first place.

Meanwhile, the FBI had searched Wen Ho Lee's home and discovered notes in Chinese, listing the contents of seven to 10 computer back-up tapes. The tapes, themselves, have never been found, but once the list had been translated into English, it was discovered to be a list of about 100 of the "legacy" files resident on the secure computer network in X-Division where Wen Ho formerly worked. The Wen Ho Lee notes also reportedly contained instructions, in Chinese, on how to download those files from the secure X-Division network. Apparently Wen Ho Lee had downloaded most of those files in 1993 after he had been told that he might be laid off -- as many of his colleagues and his wife actually were -- and the rest in 1997 shortly before going to Taiwan to present his lectures to the Taiwanese nuclear research centers.

So, when Janet Reno was hauled before the Senate Government Affairs Committee last year to explain "in camera" why she had rejected the 1997 request for a wiretap on Wen Ho Lee, and why she had not yet indicted him as a PRC spy, she is reported to have said that it was not yet clear to her who Wen Ho Lee might have been spying for.

Now it is a year later, Wen Ho Lee has been in solitary confinement for months and hundreds of FBI agents have been literally combing the countryside, even leaping out from behind trees to question firefighters trying to put out the blaze that recently destroyed many houses in Wen Ho's neighborhood. And Judge Parker has ordered Janet Reno to tell him which country she intends to prove Wen Ho Lee was spying for. She has three choices: 1) tell the judge it was the PRC to please congressional PRC haters, and then have Wen Ho's defense team sandbag her; 2) tell the Judge it was Taiwan and infuriate both the PRC haters and the supporters of Chiang's return to the Mainland; or 3) punt. It appears as of this writing that she has punted.