Wen Ho Lee

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This is a Chinese name; the family name is Lee.

Wen Ho Lee (Chinese: 李文和; pinyin: Lǐ Wénhé; born December 21, 1939) is a Taiwanese-born American scientist who worked for the University of California at the Los Alamos National Laboratory; a federal grand jury accused him of stealing secrets about the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal for the People's Republic of China (PRC) in December 1999 [1]. After investigators dropped these original accusations, the government conducted a new investigation and charged Lee with improper handling of restricted data, to which he pleaded guilty as part of a plea bargain. 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. [2]

Contents

[edit] Early life

Lee was born in 1939 in Nantou, Taiwan. 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, Taiwan, where he graduated with a bachelor's of science in mechanical engineering in 1963. [3]

[edit] Graduate education and career

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 1969 and became a U.S. citizen in 1974. [4] 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.

[edit] Operation Kindred Spirit

On December 23, 1998, Lee was given a polygraph test by the FBI. He was not told of the reason why, other than that it involves his latest trip to China to escort his nephew. He was told that he passed the test, but was stripped of his Q (classified) clearance in the LANL's classified section. Although he questioned the action against him, Lee followed along, deleting the classified information he held on his computers and moved to the T (unclassified) clearance zone. He was later subjected to three more polygraph tests before being told that re-evaluation of the test results showed that Lee has failed all of them.

[edit] Personal life

Lee is married and has two grown children.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Further reading

  • Wen Ho Lee and Helen Zia, My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused of Being a Spy (Hyperion, 2003) ISBN 0-7868-8687-0.
  • Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman, A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage (Simon & Schuster, 2002) ISBN 0-7432-2378-0.
  • Notra Trulock, Code Name Kindred Spirit: Inside the Chinese Nuclear Espionage Scandal (Encounter Books, 2002) ISBN 1-893554-51-1.
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