Chinese spy gets slapped

Editor's note: In collaboration with the hard-hitting Washington,
D.C. newsweekly Human Events, WorldNetDaily brings you this special
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WND's on-line store.

By Terence P. Jeffrey

© 2000, Human Events

This is the story of a spy who got away.

Or, more precisely, it is the story of a man who gave U.S. nuclear
secrets to the People's Republic of China and for his crime was
sentenced to 12 months in a halfway house.

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It is yet another story of the decline of the Justice Department
during the presidency of Bill Clinton and the attorney generalship of
Janet Reno -- a tale woven from twisting and overlapping strands of
bureaucratic timidity, indifference and, perhaps, something far more
troubling than that.

In a public hearing on April 5, 2000, frustrated because the Justice
Department was stonewalling his special subcommittee investigation of
the case, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said, "It may well be that the
Justice Department is guilty of obstruction of justice."

But that is jumping ahead a bit.

This spy story begins in 1984 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory
in New Mexico, one of three laboratories, along with the Sandia National
Laboratory (also in New Mexico) and the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory (in the San Francisco Bay Area), at which the U.S. Department
of Energy develops and designs nuclear weapons.

Hydrogen bomb in a bottle

At the time, Los Alamos employed a 45-year-old scientist named Peter
Hong-Yee Lee. Lee was an immigrant from Taiwan who, in 1975, armed with
a Ph.D. in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology,
became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He went to work for TRW, a U.S.
defense contractor, then for the Lawrence Livermore Lab, and then, in
1984, for Los Alamos.

Lee's work at Los Alamos was connected to a program on the cutting
edge of nuclear-fusion technology that 16 years later is still not fully
developed. It involved a device called a hohlraum, which the U.S.
government intends to use as the basis for creating computer models to
simulate hydrogen bomb detonations.

A hohlraum is a windowed capsule made of gold about the size of a
large Tylenol tablet. Into it is inserted a hollow plastic ball about
the size of a BB pellet. The interior of this ball is coated with a
frozen combination of deuterium and tritium, the two elements that, when
subjected to intense heat and pressure, cause the thermonuclear fusion
of a hydrogen bomb.

According to relatively recent publications in technical journals
such as Science, in a hohlraum, if it works right, dozens of extremely
high-powered lasers are aimed into the interior of the gold capsule
(suspended in a fortified chamber), striking it at equidistant points
around its periphery, causing it to emit an evenly distributed burst of
x-rays just before it explodes. The x-rays instantly condense the
deuterium and tritium in the now-vaporized plastic ball to 20 times the
density of lead and to a temperature hotter than the surface of the sun.

It's like having a pinhead hydrogen bomb blow up in a bottle.

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The value of this to the U.S. nuclear weapons program is immense. At
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory today, the government is
building a machine called the National Ignition Facility, a 192-laser
hohlraum device. Together with what will be the most powerful computer
ever built, and 50 years of data collected from more than 1,000 nuclear
test explosions, the NIF is designed to test the viability of aging U.S.
nuclear warheads without actually exploding them underground. The device
also will advance research toward the potential commercial use of
nuclear fusion for energy-generating purposes.

So far, U.S. taxpayers have spent an estimated $6 billion developing
the expertise to construct this nuclear-testing machine.

It was with some of that expertise in his head that Peter Lee
traveled to China for a three-week visit, starting just before Christmas
1984.

While in China, Lee spoke with members of the China Academy of
Engineering Physics, or CAEP, the branch of the Chinese government
responsible for all of China's nuclear weapons development programs.

On Jan. 9, 1985 -- according to unclassified information put together
by Specter's investigators and from sworn public testimony by the FBI --
a CAEP scientist visited Lee in his Beijing hotel room. He told Lee that
China was a poor country and that it needed his help. He said he wanted
to ask Lee some questions about classified information and that Lee
could answer the questions merely by nodding his head yes or no.

To illustrate what he was interested in, the scientist drew a diagram
of a hohlraum and then started asking Lee questions. Lee then had what
the FBI describes as a "detailed conversation" with the scientist, in
which he revealed information that he knew to be classified.

Two hours in Beijing

The Chinese scientist then asked Lee if he would meet the next day
with other Chinese scientists who also wanted to ask him questions. He
agreed.

The next morning, Lee was escorted to another Beijing hotel to meet
with these scientists, who also worked with CAEP. One of those present
at this meeting was Yu Min, who has been called the "Edward Teller" of
China's nuclear weapons program.

In a meeting that lasted "approximately two hours," the FBI later
testified, Lee "answered questions from the group and drew several
diagrams for them, including several hohlraum diagrams, specific numbers
which described the hohlraum design and experimental results, and he
discussed some problems the U.S. was having in its weapons research, in
simulations programs."

Lee also discussed with the Chinese scientists a classified paper he
had written in 1982.

Twelve years later, when Lee's 1985 disclosures were finally
revealed, the Department of Energy went to work to produce a formal
"impact statement" on the damage he had done to U.S. national security.
Written by DOE Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Development
Robin Staffin, DOE Senior Intelligence Officer Notra Turlock, and DOE
Director of Security Affairs Joseph S. Mahaley, the impact statement was
completed on Feb. 17, 1998.

The three officials certified that Lee had given the Chinese
information that "remains an integral part of the U.S. nuclear weapons
program" and that was appropriately classified as "Secret/Restricted
Data," a category reserved for nuclear-weapons-related information.

The DOE officials also certified that the program Lee was working on,
and about which he divulged information to the Chinese, "when developed
in conjunction with an already existing nuclear weapons program, could
result in the design of more sophisticated nuclear weapons."

The "data provided by Dr. Lee," the Department of Energy concluded,
"was of significant material assistance to the PRC in their nuclear
weapons development program. For that reason, this analysis indicated
that Dr. Lee's activities have directly enhanced the PRC nuclear weapons
program to the detriment of U.S. national security."

Yet, when Lee returned from Beijing on Jan. 19, 1985, his superiors
at Los Alamos did not know what he had done in China. So, he continued
his work in the nuclear weapons program.

'Royal Tourist'

In 1991, Lee left Los Alamos to work again for TRW. But he continued
to be involved in nuclear-weapons-related technology.

TRW was then just starting a research program with the Department of
Energy's Lawrence Livermore lab, the British government, and other U.S.
defense contractors, that was aimed at developing a radar system that
could track submerged submarines.

The basic idea was to bounce radar waves -- beamed from various
platforms, including airplanes -- onto the surface of the sea as
submarines were known to be crossing under it. Researchers would then
work on isolating and screening out all of the radar effects caused by
the natural actions of the weather and water. If all or most of the
natural effects could be screened out, any remaining effect might be
traceable to the movement of the submarine.

If such a telltale effect could be isolated in a radar image, it
would give the United States the ability to track super quiet,
sonar-proof enemy submarines of the sort that could carry nuclear
missiles aimed at America.

Conversely, if an enemy developed this capability, it would be able
to track, and perhaps destroy, previously invulnerable U.S.
nuclear-missile submarines.

Lee worked in an unclassified branch of this research, attempting to
define the radar signature of the sea surface. But he was also given a
Secret clearance for the work and allowed to attend semiannual briefings
at the Lawrence Livermore lab, where scientists working in the
classified sectors of the program briefed their colleagues on the
progress they had made.

In April 1991, about the same time Lee started on the radar project
at TRW, the FBI received "sensitive information" about him that caused
the bureau to open an espionage case. In 1993, the FBI upgraded the case
to a full investigation code-named "Royal Tourist," probably in
reference to Lee's frequent travel to China. (Between 1980 and 1997, he
visited Beijing five times.)

In early 1994, the bureau determined it needed to put Lee under
electronic surveillance and prepared the special Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act warrant needed to do so.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires that the FBI show
the Justice Department probable cause for believing someone might be
involved in espionage or terrorism. When both the FBI director and the
attorney general (or their designated deputies) sign off on a FISA
warrant application, the bureau is allowed to take the application to a
special federal judge who sits in a secured courtroom within the Justice
Department building. If the judge approves the warrant, the FBI can
begin surveillance on a subject. But the bureau must seek re-approval --
back through the Justice Department -- every 90 days.

In the 20-year history of FISA, the Justice Department has only twice
refused to allow the FBI to take a warrant application to the court. But
that, too, is jumping ahead.

In February 1994, there was no such problem. The Justice Department
concurred with the FBI that Peter Lee should be placed under electronic
surveillance. A FISA judge approved the warrant.

Every 90 days, for more than three years, the FBI went back to
Justice for re-approval of the warrant. Every 90 days, Justice approved.

As the Department of Energy would later report in its official impact
statement, "After 1987, and until 1997, Dr. Lee continued to exchange
numerous letters with his Chinese colleagues. These communications
contain details to other, non-ICF [hohlraum] related classified
programs. Many of these messages describe activities at LLNL [Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory] far beyond his area of assignment,
although none was specifically found to contain classified information.
Given the nature of the subjects addressed, however, and his access to
other program areas in the laboratory, there is a strong possibility
that in addition to the classified ICF-related data, other information
may have been passed by Dr. Lee that would have caused serious damage to
national security."

Another Beijing vacation

Then on April 30, 1997, while under FBI surveillance, Lee departed
on another Beijing vacation.

In a travel-request form that he filled out for TRW before his
departure, Lee said he was going to China for the fun of it, and would
pay his own expenses. In reality, the Chinese government was paying for
the trip through a subsidiary of the China Academy of Engineering
Physics.

In January 1999, the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security
and Military Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China --
referred to as the Cox Committee after its chairman, Chris Cox, R-Calif.
-- completed a report that detailed what Lee did on this trip. The
report was partially declassified in May 1999.

Said the Cox Committee: "Lee ... passed to PRC weapons scientists,
classified research into the detection of enemy submarines under water.
This research, if successfully completed, could enable the PLA to
threaten previously invulnerable U.S. nuclear submarines.

"Specifically, on or about May 11, 1997, Lee gave a lecture in
Beijing at the PRC Institute of Applied Physics and Computational
Mathematics (IAPCM). Among the attendees were nuclear weapons
scientists from the IAPCM and the China Academy of Engineering Physics
(CAEP).

"Lee described for the PRC weapons scientists the physics of
microwave scattering from ocean waves. Lee specifically stated that the
purpose of the research was anti-submarine warfare.

"At one point in his presentation, Lee displayed an image of a
surface ship wake, which he had brought with him from the United States.
He also drew a graph and explained the underlying physics of his work
and applications. He told the PRC scientists where to filter data within
the graph to enhance the ability to locate the ocean wake of a vessel.

"Approximately two hours after his talk was over, Lee erased the
graph and tore the ship image 'to shreds' upon exiting the PRC
institute."

When Lee returned from Beijing, the FBI decided to have him in for a
little chat. An agent from the bureau's Los Angeles office met with Lee
on June 25, 1997, for a "non-confrontational interview." In this
interview, as Daniel Sayner, the assistant special agent in charge of
the FBI's Los Angeles office, later testified, "Lee lied to the FBI,
stating that he engaged in no technical scientific discussion with the
People's Republic of China, PRC, and that he paid for the trip himself."

Lee then filled out a post-travel questionnaire for TRW in which he
again lied about the trip. Later that summer, the FBI called Lee in for
follow-up interviews.

"On Aug. 5 and Aug. 14, 1997," testified Sayner, "agents interviewed
Peter Lee in a Santa Barbara, Calif., hotel room. During these
interviews, Peter Lee confessed to the agents that he had knowingly lied
on both his foreign travel form and post-travel questionnaire regarding
the purpose of his trip to PRC and his foreign national contacts during
that trip.

"Peter Lee admitted that he traveled to the PRC with the intention of
giving scientific lectures to the PRC scientists. In addition, Peter Lee
admitted to agents that he lied when he said that he had not received
requests from foreign nationals for technical information and lied when
he said no attempts were made to persuade him into reviewing or
discussing classified information.

"Peter Lee admitted he had received requests from foreign nationals
for technical information and attempts were made to persuade him into
reviewing/discussing classified information. Lee also admitted that he
did not report personal contacts with several PRC scientists in January
1993 and April 1994, when they visited the United States.

"In answer to specific questions, Peter Lee continued to claim that
he had paid for his trip to the PRC with his own money."

Lee agreed to take an FBI polygraph test in the future and to hand
over to the bureau "receipts which would verify that he paid for his May
1997 trip to the PRC."

Several days after his Aug. 14 FBI interview, Lee contacted a
government scientist in China and, according to Sayner's testimony,
"requested him to provide receipts indicating that he had made that trip
to PRC and asked him if those receipts contained his and his wife's name
in English and that they were paid in cash.

"On Sept. 3, 1997," Sayner said, "Peter Lee then provided agents of
the FBI with copies of the hotel and airline receipts for his 1997 May
trip to the PRC, which appeared to indicate that Peter Lee paid cash to
cover his expenses for the trip. Peter Lee did not pay ... for the trip
to the PRC."

On the same day he gave the FBI the bogus receipts, Lee had a stroke
of luck: The FBI's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to keep
him under electronic surveillance expired and was not renewed. Just why
it was not renewed remains a matter of dispute.

Sayner explained the FBI's view on March 29 in sworn testimony to
Specter's subcommittee. It came in an exchange with Sen. Robert
Torricelli, D-N.J.:

Torricelli: "When the FISA coverage of Dr. Lee expired in September
1997, was there consideration made to reapply for FISA coverage?"

Sayner: "Yes, senator."

Torricelli: "And what was the determination?"

Sayner: "We made an application to our headquarters and there was
discussion between our headquarters, and there was between our
headquarters and Department of Justice to renew at that time."

Torricelli: "And what was the determination."

Sayner: "Not to renew."

Torricelli: "And on what was that judgment based?"

Sayner: "I think one of the key points was the information in the
preceding 90 days, which you have to use to renew FISAs, was stale."

Torricelli: "So, stale is considered only 90 days?"

Sayner: "Yes."

Torricelli: "Is that a -- do you consider, based on your experience,
that that is an operational standard in all cases in which you've been
involved?"

Sayner: "I can't really speak for negotiations between our
headquarters and DOJ, but --"

Torricelli: "The only thing I know that goes stale in 90 days is a
loaf of bread. ... So who made this judgment ultimately not to proceed
with the FISA request?"

Sayner: "It would be the Department of Justice Office of
Intelligence Policy Review."

Torricelli: "And to the best of your knowledge that is where the
judgment was made?"

Sayner: "Yes."

This characterization was contested by the Department of Justice. A
week later, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, explained the department's
position as Specter convened another subcommittee hearing.

"We have uncovered a discrepancy since last week's hearing," said
Grassley, "and I think it's something we need to get to the bottom of.

"Last week, we received testimony from the FBI's Daniel Sayner, from
the Los Angeles office. He was asked about the FISA coverage expiring
September '97 and if there was a request for it to be renewed. Mr.
Sayner said yes, but ... it was turned down by the Justice Department
because the activity in question was stale.

"This week, representatives from the Justice Department briefed us
that there was no such record of their turning down a FISA renewal, and
they would never have characterized the activity as stale for what they
called obvious reasons."

The remarkable timing and lack of a Justice Department record are
only the first and second odd circumstances surrounding the cancellation
of Lee's FISA warrant. The third is even more curious: The Peter Lee
warrant cancellation came within weeks of the Justice Department's
refusal to allow the FBI to go to the FISA court and request a warrant
to begin surveillance on Dr. Wen Ho Lee, a scientist suspected of
nuclear espionage at the Los Alamos National Lab.

And it gets yet curiouser.

In a March 7 hearing, Specter asked FBI Director Louis Freeh to
quantify how unusual it was for the Justice Department not to approve an
FBI request to seek a FISA warrant.

Specter: "Do you know, Director Freeh, how many times there has been
a declination, a refusal by the Department of Justice to forward the
FBI's request to a court for a FISA warrant?"

Freeh: "It's been a very rare occasion, in my experience."

Specter: "Has there been any occasion, other than this one, with Dr.
Wen Ho Lee, to your knowledge?"

Freeh: "There have been occasions where, you know, the application
has gone back and forth between the department and the FBI, which is
exactly the way the process is designed, as a collaborative process. So
the application is not rejected, but it's sent back for additional work
and review. In this particular case, there was a rejection at the end of
all the deliberations. And this was a very rare case in my experience."

Specter: "Do you know of any other case where there was a rejection
at the end of the deliberation -- the back and forth process, as you
describe it?"

Freeh: "Only one other case."

Was the Peter Lee renewal request the "one other case" where Justice
flat-out denied the FBI the authority to go to the FISA court for a
warrant? Specter did not ask at the hearing, and committee sources say
they do not now know the answer.

FBI confronts Lee

But in September 1997, the FBI knew it was time to fish or cut bait.
So, they dropped a line in the water with a big hook on it.

"On Oct. 7, 1997, Peter Lee voluntarily underwent a polygraph
examination at the FBI office in Los Angeles, Calif., which was
administered by the FBI polygraphy examiner," Sayner said. "According to
the polygraphy examiner, the examination results indicated deception on
three pertinent questions, which were: Have you deliberately been
involved in espionage against the United States? His answer: No. Have
you ever provided classified information to persons unauthorized to
receive it? Answer: No. Have you deliberately withheld any contacts with
any non-U.S. intelligence service from the FBI? No."

Now the FBI confronted Lee. "Agents then conducted a videotaped
interview of Peter Lee immediately following the administration of the
polygraph examination," said Sayner. "Peter Lee was told that he
appeared to have been deceptive in answering the three questions
described above. Peter Lee confessed that he had, indeed, been
deceptive.

"In summary," said Sayner, "Peter Lee then confessed to having
communicated classified national defense information to representatives
of the PRC, knowing that it could have been used by the PRC to its
advantage. Specifically, Peter Lee confessed to having passed classified
national defense information to the PRC twice in 1985 and to lying on
his post-travel questionnaire in 1997.

"When asked why he did it," said Sayner, "Peter Lee told agents that
he did it because the PRC is such a 'poor country' -- quote -- and one
of the scientists asked for his help. Peter Lee said he wanted to bring
the PRC scientific capabilities closer to the United States."

Lee then described for the FBI, in recorded confessions, some of the
details of his 1985 and 1997 trips to China.

Justice prevents arrest

The FBI brought the information to Jonathan Shapiro, who worked in
the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central Division of California.
Shapiro -- now chief of staff to Cruz Bustamante, the Democratic
lieutenant governor of California -- was a prosecutor with stellar
credentials. A Harvard grad with both a bachelor's and master's degree
in history, he attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he
received a second master's degree, before moving on to Boalt Hall, the
law school at the University of California at Berkeley.

After law school, Shapiro passed up the chance to work at a
high-powered Los Angeles law firm so he could take a $27,000-per-year
job as a trial attorney with the Criminal Division of the U.S. Justice
Department. After two years in Washington, he moved back to California
to become an assistant U.S. attorney. He had spent seven years in the
federal courts trying and convicting criminals when the FBI came to him
with the Lee case.

Shapiro confessed to a passion for national security: "My father was
a Russian language specialist for four years in the U.S. Air Force, 17
miles off the Siberian Coast, monitoring Soviet air traffic during the
Korean War," he would later tell the Specter committee. "In my family,
we take these secrets kind of seriously."

His first instinct, he said, was "to put cuffs on" Lee "and let him
taste incarceration."

"From my standpoint," Shapiro said, "the most important leverage that
we could have had on Peter Lee was through an arrest, and it was my
desire to arrest him as soon as the confession was obtained."

But because it was an espionage case, Shapiro needed to get approval
for the arrest from the main office of the Justice Department. The
approval was denied, and Lee was left free on the streets.

Shapiro discussed the denial with the committee:

Grassley: "[W]hy weren't you allowed to arrest Mr. Lee, and did main
Justice have a rationale?"

Shapiro: "As I recall, senator, the request was made of main Justice
from the U.S. Attorney's Office after my supervisors at the U.S.
Attorney's Office reviewed the matter for some period of time. The
affidavit was sent to main Justice, and the decision not to go forward
with the arrest, as I recall -- and I don't have documents here, but as
I recall -- the decision was based in part because of the need for an
assessment of the information that Peter Lee had passed.

"That is, main Justice did not want to proceed with an arrest warrant
until they had an opportunity to assess what it is that he passed to
determine, first of all, if in fact it was classified."

There was a debate, Shapiro explained, as to which laws should be
cited in an indictment of Lee. There were three possibilities: 18 USC
1001, which makes it a felony to give a false statement to a federal
agency; 18 USC 793, which makes it a felony to communicate national
defense information to people not entitled to it; and 18 USC 794, which
makes it a felony to communicate information to a "foreign power" that
"directly concerned nuclear weaponry, military spacecraft or satellites,
early warning systems, or other means of defense or retaliation against
large scale attack ... or any other major weapons system or major
element of defense strategy."

The 793 law carried a 10-year statute of limitations and a maximum
penalty of 10 years in jail. The 794 law had no statute of limitations
and carried a maximum penalty of capital punishment.

Said Shapiro: "I think they [the Justice Department] felt if you're
going to arrest somebody on 1001, but you're going to make reference to
potential 794 charges, this becomes a very public case. My feeling was,
obviously, that the complaint and the arrest warrant would be sealed and
that we wouldn't necessarily have to get into that. Nevertheless, DOJ
had to go to the Navy, had to go to the Department of Energy and had to
get information before they could make an assessment as to the damage,
before they could give me the approvals."

During this time, the un-arrested Lee was a risk to flee the country.

"As a result," said Shapiro, "I asked, and the FBI agreed, at some
expense, to place Mr. Lee on 24-hour, seven-day-a-week surveillance, my
fear being that he would flee. And so my concern from that period of
time in the case was that we not lose him and allow him to avoid
prosecution entirely."

Meanwhile, the Navy and the Department of Energy took dramatically
different approaches to the case. The Department of Energy started a
laborious process -- that involved, among other things, carefully
reviewing Lee's taped confessions -- that ended on Feb. 17, 1998, with
the "impact statement" that concluded unambiguously that "Dr Lee has
confessed to compromising classified nuclear weapon design information"
that "in conjunction with other information, was of material assistance
to the People's Republic of China in advancing their nuclear weapons
program" and that "reasonably could be expected to cause serious damage
to U.S. national security."

Never reviewed Lee's material

The Defense Department turned over the question of what damage Lee
had caused with his radar ocean imaging revelations to J. G. Schuster,
Jr., head of the Navy's Science and Technology Branch. Schuster later
testified to Specter's committee that he never reviewed either the
transcripts or the tapes of Lee's confessions before writing a
three-paragraph memo on the subject. He based his judgment on reading
Lee's published works and reviewing an unclassified draft of an
affidavit prepared by one of the FBI's investigative agents.

Schuster's opinion was a monument to ambiguity. The "signal analysis
techniques briefed by the subject are UNCLASSIFIED when applied to
environmental data," he said. But, he added, "[a]ny application of the
technique to submarine wake signatures ... would be classified at the
SECRET level."

Further, he said, "The material that was briefed appears to have been
extracted from a CONFIDENTIAL document."

But then: "Given that the CONFIDENTIAL classification cannot be
explicitly supported by the classification guides and that material
similar to that briefed by the subject has been discussed in
unclassified briefings and publications, it is difficult to make a case
that significant damage has occurred."

Therefore, even though he did not think Lee's radar revelations did
"significant damage," he concluded that "bringing attention to our
sensitivity concerning this subject in a public forum could cause more
damage to national security than the original disclosure."

In sum, it was the Navy's opinion that Lee's radar leaks to the
Chinese did not significantly damage national security, but that
prosecuting Lee for making those leaks would damage national security.

Shapiro recognized that this Navy memo would be damaging to his case
against Lee's 1997 disclosures, but he was undaunted. He had a counter:
Dr. Richard Twogood, the Lawrence Livermore labs program leader for the
radar program, had reviewed the tapes of the Lee confessions.

"Peter himself admitted that he passed confidential information --
stated it was confidential," Twogood told the Specter committee. "When I
saw the videotape and the audiotape, my immediate response was that it's
at least, and I thought it was likely, DOD Secret."

Twogood, an authorized classifier, determined on further study that
it was indeed Secret, and was ready to testify to that effect, even
though he almost certainly would have been attacked by Lee's defense
attorneys, who would have used against him both the Navy memo and his
own uncertain first impression.

Shapiro was ready to charge Lee not only with lying to a federal
agency but also with a Section 794 espionage charge on the 1985 hohlraum
disclosures and a 794 espionage charge on the 1997 radar disclosures.

"In my view," Shapiro told the committee, "coupling the 1985 charge
with the 1997 charge, with what I thought was a dead-bang case -- and I
think there's total agreement on the false statement, the 1001 case --
those counts added together. I felt I was going to convict him of
something, and I had a very strong sense that at sentencing all that
information could have been considered by a judge."

But the Justice Department would not allow it.

John Dion, the acting chief of the Justice Department Internal
Security Section, and Michael Liebman, the criminal division attorney
immediately supervising the case, decided Shapiro should go for a plea
agreement. John Keeney, then the acting assistant attorney general in
charge of the criminal division, approved it. He also testified that he
never discussed the case with Janet Reno. The same attorney general who
has become fixated on deporting Elián González apparently had no
interest at all in providing leadership in the prosecution of one of the
most important spy cases in recent history.

So the bureaucrats of the Justice Department denied Shapiro the
authority he wanted to charge Lee with the more serious 794 espionage
offense. But they allowed him to bluff Lee by using the threat of such a
charge as leverage in negotiations.

What Justice wanted was for Lee to waive the 10-year statute of
limitations on a lesser 793 espionage charge for his 1985 disclosures,
plead guilty to a 1001 false statement charge for filing false travel
reports in 1997, and agree to cooperate with the FBI. In return, they
would ask the sentencing judge to give Lee a short period of
incarceration.

A 1997 espionage charge -- for the radar ocean imaging disclosures --
was not even put on the table.

Lee grabbed the deal.

On Dec. 8, 1997, he agreed to cooperate with the FBI and pleaded
guilty to one count of violating 18 USC Section 793 and one count of
violating 18 USC 1001. The ballgame was over.

"The FBI conducted a polygraph to Dr. Lee on Feb. 26, 1998," Sayner
testified in the Specter committee, "which showed deception when asked
whether he had lied to the FBI since his first polygraph. The FBI
followed up with additional discussions after which ... Dr. Lee's
counsel advised that he would not submit to further polygraph
examinations."

The sentencing hearing was held March 26, 1998. Federal District
Judge Terry Hatter presided. A liberal's liberal, he achieved fame in
1993 by ruling that President Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" policy
on homosexuals in the military unconstitutionally barred homosexuals
from military service. In Specter's committee, Shapiro painted a
delicate prosecutor's portrait of him: Hatter, he said, "is seen as
being a little lenient at sentencing."

At his own sentencing, Lee told the judge he had disclosed
information to the Chinese because of his "camaraderie" with Chinese
scientists.

"Words cannot describe how remorseful I feel for the terrible mistake
I made," he said. "I violated a sacred oath to protect our nation's
secrets."

The judge gave the spy a five-year suspended sentence, a $20,000 fine, 3,000 hours of community service, and ordered him to spend one year in a halfway house.

For months, as Arlen Specter struggled to get information out of the Justice Department to complete his investigation of this case, the Department stalled. Finally, he determined to subpoena the so-called line attorneys involved in the case -- men such as Shapiro and his supervisor, Liebman.

Janet Reno vehemently objected to the move. It was the morning after an April 4 meeting with Reno on this subject that Specter, in a hearing, revealed, "It was only last night that we received from the Department of Justice, information that the Department of Energy damage assessment had been provided to the Department of Justice, a fact concealed from this committee

"We're going to inquire about that as well. It may well be that the Department of Justice is guilty of obstruction of justice, and we intend to get to the bottom of that."

When supervising Criminal Division attorney Michael Liebman finally appeared before Specter's committee, under subpoena, on April 12, he said that he thought too much radar ocean imaging technology had been made public by the government itself, through websites and other means, to make a 794 indictment viable for Lee's 1997 disclosures. He also explained that he had not approved the tough 794 indictment of Lee's hohlraum disclosures that Shapiro wanted because the administration had started declassifying hohlraum technology in 1993 "for reasons that included the fact that the rest of the world was catching up." That, of course, was eight years after Lee had illegally leaked the information.

But in his prepared written testimony, Liebman made a truly stunning revelation: "Another reason for the declassification [of hohlraum technology], I was told," he said, "was that the DOE considered it to be in the U.S. national interest to educate countries on how to simulate nuclear weapons explosions in a laboratory setting, in order to discourage them from actually detonating nuclear devices." In other words, an illegal act of espionage that contributed to nuclear weapons development in a communist power in 1985, became in 1993, an act that forwarded the policy of the Clinton administration to help such a power develop nuclear weapons. This, at least, is what a Justice Department lawyer seemed to be claiming, under oath, in a public hearing, in carefully prepared written testimony. This is unlikely to be the last extraordinary revelation from Sen. Specter's special subcommittee investigation.

During one recent hearing, Specter warned a Justice Department witness that, in its failed 1997 campaign finance investigation, the Senate Government Affairs Committee "was worn out by the responses of the minority and the responses of the people who came in from the government.

"And," said Specter, "we're not going to be worn out."

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