By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 16, 2000; 12:00 AM

As an expert in Chinese counterintelligence, Paul D. Moore has long been skeptical of the Kindred Spirit spy case, doubting whether his erstwhile colleagues at the FBI would ever catch a Chinese mole at Los Alamos National Laboratory or anywhere else in America's sprawling nuclear weapons complex.

But after listening to FBI Director Louis J. Freeh describe Wen Ho Lee's "history" with the FBI to Congress three weeks ago, Moore had to admit that the former Los Alamos physicist could scarcely have done more to trigger the suspicion of counterintelligence investigators.

This is not to say that Lee is a spy or justify the government's 59-count indictment against him for downloading nuclear secrets onto portable computer tapes – charges reduced to a single felony in a plea agreement last month. Rather, Moore said, Freeh's description helps explain why counterintelligence agents developed such an interest in Lee and found it impossible to let go of their suspicions.

"You have tremendous reasons for suspicion here," said Moore, who recently retired as a senior counterintelligence analyst specializing on China.

Freeh began his version of the Wen Ho Lee story with Lee's 1982 call to a fellow Taiwanese American scientist at Lawrence Livermore suspected of leaking neutron bomb secrets to China, which the FBI picked up on a wiretap. "He offered to help that person identify who had brought him to the attention of the authorities," Freeh said.

Lee initially denied even knowing the other scientist but eventually admitted making the call after the FBI told him they had it on tape. Although he agreed to help the FBI catch the Livermore scientist, the die was cast.

More than a decade later, Freeh went on, the FBI started investigating Lee again in 1994 after he was observed warmly embracing a visiting Chinese weapons scientist named Hu Side in such a way that it was clear the two knew each other, even though Lee had never reported meeting Hu during two previous official trips to China. The investigation was still open when the Department of Energy identified Lee in 1996 as the most probable suspect in a new investigation into how China obtained secret information about the miniaturized W-88 warhead – largely because of these past suspicions.

Two years later, in late 1998, just as FBI investigators had come to the conclusion that they had no evidence linking Lee to the stolen W-88 information, he admitted during a DOE polygraph that he had been approached in his hotel room by Hu and another top Chinese weapons scientist in 1988 and asked for classified weapons information. Lee said he gave the Chinese no classified information and passed the lie detector test. But the FBI's suspicions grew. Agents consider Lee's failure to report that espionage solicitation as a bright red flag – on a scale with the 1982 call.

Then, three months later, after Energy Secretary Bill Richardson fired Lee from his job at Los Alamos for breaking security regulations, Los Alamos computer specialists and FBI agents discovered that he had downloaded 406 megabytes of highly sensitive nuclear weapons simulation codes in such a way that seemed to drive investigators suspicions off the charts. If most security violations are the equivalent of driving 65 miles per hour in a 55 mph zone, Lee's Los Alamos colleagues like to say, Lee's downloads were the equivalent of breaking the sound barrier – in front of an elementary school at recess.

"It is critical to understand that Dr. Lee's conduct was not inadvertent, it was not careless and it was not innocent," Freeh said. "Over a period of years, Dr. Lee used an elaborate scheme to move the equivalent of 400,000 pages of extremely sensitive nuclear weapons files...

"Dr. Lee carefully and methodically removed classification markings from documents; he attempted repeatedly to enter secure areas of Los Alamos after his access had been revoked – including one attempt at 3:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve; and he deleted files in an attempt to cover his tracks before he got caught."

Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' government secrecy project and an outspoken critic of the government's prosecution of Lee, criticized Freeh in an interview last week for doing nothing more than restating the government's failed case. He also criticized Congress for holding a hearing at which only the prosecution testified.

Mark Holscher, one of Lee's lead attorneys, added in an interview that Freeh's testimony simply could not be taken at face value. Take Lee's 1982 call. It was nothing more than an expression of support and sympathy from one Taiwanese American scientist to another, Holscher said. Lee knew nothing, Holscher said, about the other scientist's espionage involvement.

Besides, Holscher said, the government has lost its tape of the call and now has only a one-page summary of what was said in which Lee's name is spelled wrong. Who knows what he actually said.

Moore, then a young FBI counterintelligence agent, remembers how troubling he found the call, given what he recalls as an offer by Lee to help his fellow Taiwanese American scientist thwart a U.S. government investigation. Forever thereafter, Moore said, Lee was destined to rise on any list of possible suspects in future espionage probes – as, indeed, he did in 1996.

"Counterintelligence – and especially counterintelligence analysis – is not about what's certain and it's not about what's possible," said Moore. "It's about what's probable. And the probabilities work both ways."

Some events work in Lee's favor. He passed a polygraph in which he was asked about the true nature of the 1982 call, Moore said. He passed another in 1998 after revealing his hotel room contact with Chinese weapons scientists. Lee also declined, Moore noted, to take part in a so-called "false flag" operation run at him by the FBI, in which an FBI agent posing as a Chinese intelligence operative asked Lee for a meeting.

And no master spy would have downloaded so many highly sensitive files, Moore said, and left them sitting there on his open computer at Los Alamos for lab officials to find, as they eventually did.

Indeed, benign explanations can be offered for almost everything Lee did, Moore said.

His supporters, for instance, believe Lee downloaded the nuclear secrets after receiving a layoff notice from Los Alamos in 1993 so that, in the event he was forced to leave the lab, he would not lose access to his life's work.

But what are the probabilities, Moore said, that Lee's 1982 call to an espionage suspect, his failure to report a 1988 clandestine espionage solicitation in Beijing, his lies to the FBI and, eventually, his highly suspicious downloads, were all benign? "You go to any counterintelligence professional and he'll tell you, this guy is up to something...You accumulate suspicions as you go along and you have to ask yourself, is it proper to go deeper into a case as your suspicions all add up?"

If the case hadn't been leaked to the press, Moore said, the government most likely would not have charged Wen Ho Lee for his downloads – because the FBI would not have wanted to walk away from the possibility that he might have been a spy.

FBI agents would have watched him, and waited for him to make a mistake, as they watched and waited for Peter Lee, a Chinese American weapons scientist who formerly worked at Los Alamos, to make a mistake, which he finally did in 1997 – after 12 years.

Once the case was leaked, however, the FBI found itself in "an impossible situation," Moore said, caught between Congress's desire to catch a spy on one hand and the reality of Chinese espionage on the other. Most people in Congress –and the public – erroneously assume that where there's espionage, there must be evidence of espionage. But with China, Moore said, that just isn't the case.

The Chinese don't pay for information. The Chinese don't ask for entire documents, employing a maddeningly slow thousand-grains-of-sand approach instead. And they don't target people – drunks and malcontents – with obvious vulnerabilities.

The Wen Ho Lee case, Moore said, became a tar baby, and the FBI grabbed on with both hands, unable to get anywhere but unable to stop, especially with Congress breathing down its neck.

"To say that these things do not have a political dimension is just crazy," Moore said. "Still, the basic problem is, they're looking for things that aren't there."