Lee's Nuke Secrets Couldn't Build Bomb

WASHINGTON, Sep 28, 2000 -- (Reuters) CIA Director George Tenet said nuclear secrets downloaded by scientist Wen Ho Lee would offer another country "a graduate course in nuclear weapons design" but not the means to build a weapon, a written statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee said.

"This information would help primarily from a design perspective, providing significant insight and guidance almost equating to a graduate course in nuclear weapons design," Tenet said in the unclassified statement.

"But for a country to design, develop, test and deploy a nuclear weapon, more is required than design codes," his statement said. To make a nuclear weapon, a country would need fissile material, technology to build the device and engineering expertise for delivery, Tenet said.

"The actual value of the information depends in large part on the capabilities of the country or group that received it," he said.

A CIA spokesman on Wednesday confirmed the statement had been delivered to the committee on Monday but would not comment further on the analysis, which went into more detail in a classified version.

The CIA did not play any decision-making role in the question of whether Lee should be prosecuted, Tenet said.

SCIENTIST GUILTY ON ONE COUNT

Lee, 60, pleaded guilty earlier this month to one of 59 original felony counts for downloading nuclear weapons design secrets to a non-secure computer while previously employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico,

The plea agreement freed Lee from jail and requires him to tell prosecutors what happened to missing tapes containing the nuclear secrets.

Lee, an American citizen born in Taiwan, was initially portrayed as a spy for China but espionage charges were never filed against him due to lack of evidence.

The CIA analyzed the value of the information to countries with nuclear weapons programs that were "robust," had little or no testing, limited but high technological capabilities, and without technological capabilities, Tenet said. One of the countries analyzed was China.

The CIA was asked at a Dec. 4, 1999, meeting at the White House Situation Room to summarize the potential value of the information the FBI said was on the tapes, Tenet said.

"Based on FBI's verbal summary of the tapes, they appeared to contain U.S. nuclear weapon design codes and specific descriptions of the materials and geometry of several nuclear weapon primaries and secondaries," Tenet said.

One question raised in the Lee case has been how valuable the secrets that were downloaded were, whether they were the "crown jewels" of U.S. nuclear designs or mainly information that was widely known.

"It was exactly the right question to ask, namely if someone did get hold of this information what could they do with it? And the answer is different people could or could not do different things," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists project on government secrecy.

"The other government witnesses begin and end with the presumption that we're talking about the crown jewels," he said. "But it really will be necessary to probe more deeply and it looks like CIA has made some movement in that direction."