FBI misled in Energy investigation?

You remember Wen Ho Lee, don't you? The Taiwanese-born Los Alamos weaponeer who had his clearance lifted in December of 1998 – and was fired by DOE Secretary Richardson a few months later – because he was suspected of giving the People's Republic of China (PRC) a blueprint for the W-88 nuclear warhead?

Of course, it later turned out that Wen Ho Lee's clearance hadn't been lifted because the lifting process easily can – and usually does – take years. And Richardson didn't fire Wen Ho. He couldn't. He had no authority to fire him. Wen Ho didn't work for him. Wen Ho Lee was an employee of the University of California, which runs Los Alamos for DOE. The University didn't fire him, either. They gave him early retirement.

TRENDING: Is America having a near-death experience, or is this the end?

No evidence was ever found that Wen Ho Lee – or anyone else at Los Alamos – gave secrets about the W-88 or any other nuke to the PRC. But what they found when they searched Wen Ho's computer in X-Division – days after he retired – blew their minds. After spending many months trying to figure out what he had done, they gave up trying, suddenly threw Wen Ho in prison, kept him in solitary confinement for nine months, threatened him with execution and then, just as suddenly, inexplicably, dropped 58 of the 59 charges against him. Wen Ho pleaded guilty to the only crime they could prove. He admitted that he had mishandled classified computer files.

Big deal.

Well, anyway, Wen Ho Lee is back in the news. Sort of.

Two highly redacted chapters of the highly classified March 2000 "Bellows Report" – formally entitled the "Final Report of the Attorney General's Review Team on the Handling of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Investigation" – were released by the Justice Department last week. The redacted – all classified information deleted – chapters were released because they had become material to a defamation lawsuit filed by Notra Trulock, the former Director of DOE's Office of Energy Intelligence (OEI), against Wen Ho Lee and two of Trulock's own DOE investigators. Reportedly, Trulock has charged that they each – independently – wrongly accused him of singling out Wen Ho Lee for investigation because of his Chinese ancestry!

Well, maybe he didn't do it for that reason, but after reading even the redacted Bellows Report, you'll probably conclude that someone in OEI – probably Trulock – did single out Wen Ho for investigation for some reason.

How did this jihad against Wen Ho Lee get started?

Remember the so-called "walk-in" document? Back in 1995 some guy, later suspected of being a double-agent, reportedly waltzed into a CIA front in Taiwan with what purported to be a highly classified PRC assessment of the U.S. nuke stockpile. Within months a panel of nuke and intelligence community experts – called the Kindred Spirits Assessment Group (KSAG) – was assembled by none other than OEI's Notra Trulock to assess that PRC assessment of our nuke stockpile.

According to the Bellows report, here is what Trulock asked the KSAG to do:

• Establish a chronology of the stages of development of the U.S. weapons design information allegedly copied by the PRC. It would assist ECI's (Energy Counter-Intelligence) investigative planning efforts to know, for example, that U.S. Weapons Laboratory "X" developed stage "A" of the weapons design in question during the period 19xx-19xx. In turn, U.S. Weapons Lab "y" piggy-backed on stage "A" to develop stage "B" of the design during the period 19xx-19xx, etc.

• Identify specific documents that contain the compromised warhead data;

• Determine which program staff at each U.S. Weapons Laboratory worked on specific portions of the design in question

• Determine which laboratories and specific employees eventually had access to the completed weapons design data in question;

• Brief the federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on the results of the intelligence assessment and obtain their concurrence for ECI to initiate and discreetly conduct an Administrative Inquiry (AI).

Well, we don't know what the KSAG found, because their assessment is still highly classified. But we do know one thing for sure – and can guess at another: If someone did brief the FBI on behalf of the KSAG, they misled them. Bellows claims that in the OEI written report, which was issued later, the OEI mischaracterized the KSAG findings – misleading the FBI – causing them to focus almost exclusively on the W-88 and Wen Ho Lee.

Trulock's instructions to the KSAG show that Trulock knew – going in – that some nukes had one stage supplied by Los Alamos and another stage supplied by Lawrence Livermore weapons lab, and asked specifically asked the KSAG to provide him that kind of information. That means that Trulock was somewhat savvy – even before the KSAG assessment began – about how nukes are developed at the nuke weapons labs. It also implies that he must have understood what the resultant KSAG assessment actually said.

In any case, at least partially on the basis of the resultant KSAG assessment, OEI then initiated an Administrative Investigation. There was an existing Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between DOE and the FBI, dated October 1992, controlling the coordination and conduct of counterintelligence activities. The MOU imposed on DOE a requirement that the FBI be promptly notified whenever a DOE Administrative Inquiry was begun. And whenever "a DOE administrative investigation discloses information or allegations of possible intelligence activity or unauthorized contact on the part of DOE personnel with a foreign power, the matter will be promptly referred to the FBI. "

The principle charge made in the redacted chapters of the Bellows Report is that in conducting the AI and in referring the matter to the FBI, OEI misled the FBI about the so-called predicate, that is, the results of the KSAG assessment.

The charge – made officially more than a year ago to Attorney General Reno by Bellows – that DOE had mischaracterized the predicate had also been made more than two years ago by the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the so-called Rudman Report. Rudman also suggested that someone – Trulock? – had similarly misled the Cox Committee, and that the whole Wen Ho Lee affair had been precipitated by that testimony in late 1998.

Was the mischaracterization deliberate? Did OEI deliberately cause the FBI to focus its investigation on Wen Ho Lee? Bellows doesn't say, at least in the redacted chapters that have been released. But, it seems that when anyone half-way knowledgeable about nukes reads the highly classified KSAG assessment, and then reads the highly classified OEI administrative investigation (AI) report, it is immediately obvious to them that the OEI report badly mischaracterizes the KSAG assessment.

Was Trulock knowledgeable about nukes and nuke development? If he was, doesn't it follow that he must have realized that his office – the Office of Energy Intelligence – was misleading the FBI?

You decide for yourself. A central question of both Chapter VI and Chapter VII is "Did the Al report transmitted to the FBI accurately reflect the predicate for the investigation?"

Over and over again Bellows answers that question. No, he charges, the AI report transmitted to the FBI did not accurately reflect the predicate of the investigation. In fact, Bellows charges that the DOE AI report was "blatantly" innacurate about the predicate, that is, the KSAG assessment.
Here is what Bellows says the DOE AI report to the FBI should have said.

'The AI undertaken by DOE should have at a minimum: (1) repeated KSAG's concise and limited assessment of the compromise; (2) identified the universe of locations which received the limited information known to have been compromised: and (3) collated visitation and travel records for those locations within DOE's umbrella. This was not done. Instead, DOE mischaracterized the predicate and then settled on Wen Ho Lee as the "most logical suspect."

Over and over again, Bellows charges that the FBI "was misled" by the OEI AI report and that "By mischaracterizing the predicate, DOE compromised and undermined the FBI's own investigative efforts."

Who settled on Wen Ho as the most logical suspect?, Bellows told the Attorney General that DOE did. Did DOE mislead the FBI? Bellows told the Attorney General over and over that they did.

Related column:

Good grief, Trulock