7/17/00 12:45 p.m.
“Racial Profiling” Meets National Security
They're not being unfair to Wen Ho Lee.

By John Derbyshire, NR contributing editor

he case of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos researcher currently being held for security violations, is beginning to emit a strong odour of bureaucratic obstinacy. Under suspicion since 1996, Lee was fired from his job in March last year, and in November was imprisoned. Bail has been denied twice.

Lee's trial is scheduled for November; but from what we have seen of the case being assembled by the Department of Justice, it is unlikely that Lee has done anything worth severe punishment. Certainly we know nothing at present to indicate that he had any improper contacts with mainland-Chinese authorities. Ordered by the federal district judge in the case to come up with a list of countries Lee might have approached, the Justice Department could do no better than the following: Switzerland, Germany, France, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, and Hong Kong (when it was still a British colony — these approaches were made in 1993). Even those overtures seem to have been in pursuit of a new job, not espionage contacts. The most probable motive for Lee's having transferred computer files from a place where they belonged to a place they didn't is career enhancement. (He was doing it most busily when the lab was downsizing.)

Lee himself has played the race card, charging the authorities with "racial profiling" — of picking out himself, among many others who had been similarly lax, because of his Chinese origins. The cry has been taken up by the "Asian-American" lobbyists, among whom the Lee case is now a cause celebre. It is hard to feel much sympathy with this complaint. As with the similar bellyaching about police preferring to pull over black motorists, the "racial profiling" charge places a malign construction on perfectly rational motives. The mainland Chinese were known to have obtained, by espionage, details of the W-88 nuclear warhead. Lee was known to have done some of the work related to that warhead. Lee was Chinese: a Taiwan-born Taiwanese, to be sure, but with a wife who had mainland relatives. Lee had made several trips to mainland China, and spoken with senior officials. The fact that investigators have been able to make nothing of this — Lee's lifestyle does not indicate sudden wealth, he seems not to care for mainland ideology, and his wife turns out to have been travelling as an FBI informer! — does not vitiate the reasonableness of the original suspicions.

National-security investigators are supposed to be suspicious. In a case involving Chinese espionage, who more naturally falls under suspicion than Chinese-born personnel? Dr. Aaron Lai, another Los Alamos researcher, has whined to the newspapers that "if you have relatives in sensitive countries, you are under the microscope." Well, duh.

If Lee, in the interests of resume-padding, has committed illegal breaches of security, he ought to be prosecuted for that. So, to shut up those tiresome race lobbies, should anyone else guilty of similar breaches — former CIA Director John Deutch, for example. In the meantime, is there any prospect of calm discussion on the following points?

• Why, sixty years after the Manhattan Project, can our most sensitive defense-research installations not get along without employing foreign-born scientists?

• How, in the middle of a long soft peace, with no credible enemy facing us, do we persuade people (including defense researchers) to take national security seriously?

The U.S. government now generates 20,000 new secrets a day. More than 4,000 federal officials have the authority to generate secrets. The depository of national secrets includes material ranging from the CIA's current budget to a 1912 recipe for invisible ink. Has "secrecy inflation" devalued our really important secrets?