NATIONAL SECURITY: THE SPY MESS
The backlash to the Chinese spy scandal is in full flower. The former head of counterintelligence at Los Alamos, Robert S. Vrooman, told the Washington Post that not only is suspected spy Wen Ho Lee innocent, he is the victim of racist scapegoating, the high-tech equivalent of Driving While Black: Call it Researching While Asian. (Bear in mind that Vrooman, who has been humiliated, has an interest in minimizing security lapses that occurred on his watch.) Meanwhile, Notra Trulock, the Energy Department security official who a few months ago was a hero for breaking the spy scandal, has resigned from the department, accused of targeting Lee unfairly. The idea that China spied at all-instead of picking up information from the Internet or other open sources-is now in doubt, making the whole fuss seem a creation of the fevered imagination of a few paranoid white males.

But not so fast. Wen Ho Lee may or may not be guilty of passing to the Chinese design information for the W-88, America's most advanced warhead. But there was a legitimate reason to suspect him. In the early 1980s, Wen Ho Lee reportedly told another U.S. scientist under suspicion for giving the Chinese neutron-bomb secrets, "I can help you-I can tell who ratted on you"; he failed to inform security officials of his various contacts with PRC scientists; he agreed to meet with an FBI agent posing as a Chinese official; he failed two lie-detector tests; and, of course, he downloaded massive amounts of material from a classified to an unclassified computer. His defenders seem to want affirmative action for security risks: Minorities can meet lower security standards to ensure that no minority pressure group will ever have reason to cry "racism." (Foreign intelligence agencies will no doubt be impressed by our commitment to diversity.)

Even so, critics of the handling of the Lee case do have a few legitimate complaints. Energy secretary Bill Richardson-who always has a keen eye for the PR bottom line-fired Lee at an internationally broadcast press conference, a breach of procedure that served only to imply that the culprit had been nabbed and the problem solved. So too, investigators, if they were right to suspect Lee, probably focused on him, to the exclusion of others. One reason we may never know about Lee's guilt or innocence is that the probe of his conduct was egregiously mishandled, plagued by amateurish bungling by both Energy and the FBI.

But there can be no serious doubt that the U.S. labs have an appalling security problem and that the Chinese took advantage of it. Consider Vrooman's defense of Los Alamos: It had spread the W-88 information so far and wide that the Chinese could have gotten it from any number of sources. Now, that's comforting. There is a reason that the Cox report (which did not mention Wen Ho Lee) concluded that the W-88 data had been stolen, and that the report was passed by a 9-0 bipartisan vote. Even the administration's own review panel concluded that the Energy Department "has embodied science at its best and security of secrets at its worst." The Chinese and other adversaries of the United States would be happy to see us continue in that tradition, with a strong dose of PC sensitivity policing thrown in.