Weapons Lab Official Quits in China Spy Scandal

Yahoo! News ^ | 4/11/03 | Adam Tanner - Reuters

[NormsRevenge]

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A retired FBI (news - web sites) intelligence expert linked to a spy scandal colored by sex and betrayal has resigned as the top security official at a nuclear research lab as officials there review his work for possible security breaches, an official said on Friday,

The resignation follows the arrest on Wednesday of Chinese-American Katrina Leung, charged with serving as a double agent who passed classified national security information to China obtained during a secret 20-year love affair with her FBI handler, James Smith.

Court papers refer to a third person, a former San Francisco-based FBI agent who in recent years has worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in northern California. The papers said that he, like Smith, had an affair with Leung.

A law enforcement official named the man as William Cleveland Jr., who until Thursday headed counter intelligence programs at Livermore, home to some of America's most sensitive nuclear weapons research.

"The employee who was cited in the FBI affidavit has resigned," said laboratory spokeswoman Susan Houghton. "His access to the laboratory has been revoked."

"We met with this employee yesterday; he chose to resign," she said. "Due to the seriousness of the crime, our laboratory director is asking for a thorough review of his work in order to ensure that there were no national security issues compromised."

Court papers said that the former San Francisco FBI agent headed a Chinese counterintelligence squad and had admitted to a sexual relationship with Leung that started in 1988 and continued to 1993 when he retired after 24 years on the job, The affair resumed between 1997 and 1999.

But Cleveland, who speaks some Chinese, has not been charged in the case and the FBI said he is not under investigation. "The agent in that affidavit is not suspected of passing information to this woman Katrina or the PRC (China). We do not suspect him and we are not looking at him at all," said FBI spokeswoman LaRae Quy.

Richard Held, the former head of the FBI's San Francisco office called Cleveland one of the most decent people he knew and said he was saddened by the story. "He was a real professional. He was steeped in that business, he was very knowledgeable," Held told Reuters. "This was a very competent professional who was highly regarded by everybody."

KEEPER OF THE SECURITY FLAME

Cleveland's later job at Livermore was to act as the bulwark against espionage and his advice to employees occasionally appeared in the lab's internal newsletter.

"Espionage is a strange and unusual crime," he wrote in an October 2000 article. "Strange because we usually don't know, for maybe a long time, that it was ever committed. Unusual because it doesn't happen very often."

"Espionage is also a crime that is committed by normally up-standing, law-abiding citizens," he wrote. "Almost every conviction of espionage handed down by a court of law is the perpetrator's 'first offense."'

In that article, he even commented on the paucity of female spies, although by then he had, by his own recent admission, long known and been sexually involved with alleged spy Leung.

"If a determined person is bent on espionage, no security system can prevent him. I say "him" because, interestingly, very few espionage subjects have been women," he wrote. "I've always wondered why that is. Women must be more reliable and trustworthy. (My wife is reading this, so I had to say that.)"

In court papers this week Cleveland said he learned from a top secret source in 1991 that Leung was passing on information to China and warned his then fellow FBI agent Smith, who was visibly upset about the news. Yet Cleveland left it up to Smith to address the problem.

Leung, 49, is in jail pending a hearing next week. Her FBI handler Smith, now retired, was released on bail on charges of gross negligence for allegedly allowing Leung to obtain documents from a briefcase he left open at her posh San Marino home during "debriefing" sessions.

Leung, who runs a business consultancy and a bookstore, was a prominent Los Angeles figure who hobnobbed with politicians, presidents and millionaires.

Cleveland's resignation may also raise new questions about security in the nation's leading weapons labs.

In a report last year, Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey said lax security at Department of Energy (news - web sites) facilities such as the Livermore lab posed "an unacceptable level of risk that terrorists could successfully target these sites."