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WND Exclusive REMEMBER LOS ALAMOS
FBI begs Wen Ho's wife
for missing nuclear tapes
Violating plea bargain, Lee stiffs feds, forcing them to turn to spouse for help
Posted: November 27, 2001
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Paul Sperry
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON -- Former nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee has broken his plea agreement by failing to help FBI agents recover classified computer tapes he stole from Los Alamos National Laboratory. But instead of refiling dropped charges against him, federal prosecutors are pumping his wife for clues to the missing tapes, WorldNetDaily has learned....

Lee was caught downloading from a secret lab computer network so-called legacy codes covering the entire history of the U.S. nuclear-weapons program – including large volumes of bomb-testing data used in developing nuclear weapons through computer simulations. The codes are considered extremely valuable to China. He then copied them onto 10 portable computer tapes.

Six of them are still missing.

Lee was released Sept. 13, 2000, after nine months in solitary confinement, on his guilty plea to a single felony count of mishandling classified information. He acknowledged copying secrets onto tapes and removing them from Los Alamos.

The U.S. government dropped 58 other charges – including injuring the U.S., aiding a foreign nation and violating the Atomic Energy Act, which could have brought a life sentence – and gave him immunity from prosecution provided that he tell authorities what he did with the tapes and cooperate in ongoing espionage investigations.

But despite intensive debriefing by the FBI, Lee has not adequately explained why he copied the files to the tapes and what he did with the tapes. The tapes remain missing. Authorities don’t buy his innocent claim, first made on CBS' "60 Minutes," that he copied the information to back up his work, because numerous measures had been built into Los Alamos’ computing system to protect against file loss. Lab physicists, moreover, testified that there was no legitimate reason for one scientist to have made backups of the entire library of source codes, since they normally work on just one small piece at a time. Authorities also say Lee’s claim he tossed the missing tapes in a trash bin behind his office at Los Alamos didn’t check out. And why toss those, yet keep the others?

Under the terms of his plea deal, Lee agreed to disclose such information