Word: lee
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Espionage, movies have taught us, is supposed to be sexy stuff. The rakish secret agent. A blond chanteuse. Cameras masquerading as bow ties. By those standards, the alleged perfidy pulled off by Wen Ho Lee was decidedly G-rated. FBI agents suspect that for more than a decade, while working as a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Lee was surreptitiously downloading millions of lines of classified code from the lab's top-secret computer database and storing the codes on the hard drive of his personal office computer. The actual transfer between systems was pretty...
...Lee was playing with blockbuster material. Known as "legacy codes," the 100 or so calculations that he put on his hard drive contained a gold mine of nuclear secrets--reams of physics equations and weapon-test results and warhead designs--painstakingly amassed by the U.S. since the government began building atom bombs at Los Alamos a half-century ago. When Energy Department officials discovered in March that a mid-level scientist had copied programs from the prized database, they were chagrined. That the scientist was the Taiwanese-born Lee, the same one fired on March 8 amid fears that...
Republicans were using language even less polite last week when news of the possible heist landed in Washington. Congressional leaders were already fuming about disclosures, first made in the March 6 edition of the New York Times, that since 1996 the FBI had been trying to determine whether Lee had given Beijing classified information about the design of America's most advanced nuclear warhead, the W-88, and that in spite of this possibility, Lee had remained at Los Alamos until he was fired on March 8. The Administration tried to sidestep criticism by insisting that any spying that...
...Clinton Administration last week scrambled to contain the damage. Richardson admitted a colossal security breach but said there was no evidence that the Chinese or anyone else had actually obtained the nuclear data from Lee. (Through his lawyer, Lee has denied any wrongdoing.) On Thursday FBI chief Louis Freeh gave similar assurances in a private briefing for the Senate Intelligence Committee. But the Senators came out of the three-hour meeting irate. The most overheated Republicans compared Lee to Klaus Fuchs, the Los Alamos scientist who passed atomic secrets to the Soviets in the 1940s. Even Democrats raged...
...agents combed computer records at Los Alamos, intelligence officials admitted that it might be impossible ever to determine whether Lee had passed the codes on to any foreign governments. Clearly, someone had checked into Lee's machine and accessed them. But, explained an intelligence official, "it's not like going to a simple billing record. The material was accessed, but they don't know by whom. By him? By someone else? They don't know...