Lying About Spying: FBI and DOJ Misconduct Dates Back Decades
FBI agents framed Wen Ho Lee for alleged spying, and never paid the price. But US taxpayers did.
"I feel I was led astray last December by the executive branch of the government through the Department of Justice, through the FBI, and through the US attorney for New Mexico…They did not embarrass me alone, but they embarrassed this entire nation and everyone who is a citizen of it.”
Judge James Parker
As President Trump and his picks to head federal agencies contemplate their first steps, it’s helpful to recall one of the most serious abuses by FBI agents I uncovered as an investigative reporter.
FBI agents framed a Chinese man named Wen Ho Lee for spying.
The government misconduct included, as I reported at CBS News in 2000, claiming Lee failed a lie detector test when he’d actually passed it with flying colors.
Eventually, after I exposed the fraud, Judge James Parker released Lee from prison. He apologized for granting the Justice Department’s request to deny Lee bail and keep him in solitary confinement for a year.
The judge also lit up the government for its misconduct and misrepresentations to the court.
"I feel I was led astray last December by the executive branch of the government through the Department of Justice, through the FBI, and through the US attorney for New Mexico,” said Judge Parker. ”They did not embarrass me alone, but they embarrassed this entire nation and everyone who is a citizen of it.”
There is no public record of anybody being held accountable.
In 2006, the federal government settled a lawsuit filed by Lee over the misconduct. Lee received a settlement of $1.6 million from the government (US taxpayers) and five news organizations that Lee had sued for defamation.
Read on for details and to watch the original video.
Below is a link to one of my video stories on the disturbing case, as well as a transcript of another.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wen-ho-lees-problematic-polygraph/
Watch video of Sharyl’s Feb. 4, 2000 report that’s been wiped from the Internet here
Wen Ho Lee’s Problematic Polygraph
February 2000, by Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News
Wen Ho Lee either passed — or failed — his spy-related polygraphs, depending upon who was interpreting the results.
After getting a passing grade on several lie detector tests, the FBI reversed the results and claims he failed.
We now know the first test was given to Lee on December 23, 1998 by a Department of Energy (DOE) polygrapher in Albuqerque, N.M., where Lee worked as a top secret nuclear scientist.
Because Lee, a Taiwanese-American, had recently been to Taiwan, had visited China in the past, and purportedly had access to America’s top nuclear secrets, the FBI focused on him as the prime suspect in the emerging case of alleged Chinese espionage, a story broken globally in one of my previous reports for CBS News.
Sources say the government pinpointed Lee, even though he had been ruled out as a potential suspect, because they needed a scapegoat. They were embarrassed that the spying had happened on their watch and they had no viable suspects.
The FBI hadn’t been close to making an arrest or even beginning an interrogation of any suspect. But the Department of Energy’s head of counterintelligence, Ed Curran, said he was reluctant to leave Lee in his highly sensitive job in the lab’s X-Division without further investigation once the spying was detected, so he ordered the polygraph test.
FBI agents were standing by during the DOE test, ready to interrogate Lee if his polygraph answers proved to be deceptive.
I have obtained the test and its results, and learned that Lee was asked four espionage-related questions:
“Have you ever committed espionage against the United States?”
Lee’s response: “No.”
“Have you ever provided any classified weapons data to any unauthorized person?”
Lee’s response: “No.”
“Have you had any contact with anyone to commit espionage against the United States?”
Lee’s response: “No.”
“Have you ever had personal contact with anyone you know who has committed espionage against the United States?”
Lee’s response: “No.”
The polygrapher concluded that Lee was not deceptive.
Two other polygraphers in the DOE’s Albuquerque test center, including the manager, reviewed the charts and concurred: Lee wasn’t lying.
The polygraph results were so convincing and unequivocal, that sources say the deputy director of the Los Alamos lab issued an apology to Lee, and work began to get him reinstated in the X-Division.
Furthermore, sources confirm to CBS News that the local Albuquerque FBI office sent a memo to headquarters in Washington saying it appeared that Lee was not their spy.
Here’s where the misconduct enters the picture.
Key decision-makers in Washington apparently stepped in.
Several weeks after Lee passed the polygraph, the DOE decided to assign it the unusual designation of “incomplete.” Officials in Washington also ordered a halt to Lee’s re-instatement to the X-Division.
Now, when FBI headquarters in Washington obtained the DOE polygraph results, they offered a completely different interpretation of the same test: that Lee had failed the polygraph.
The FBI then repeated a polygraph and, again, would later claimed that he failed.
Despite Lee’s supposed failure at the time, sources say the FBI didn’t interrogate Lee in the moment, or even tell him he had failed the polygraph — an odd deviation from procedure for agents who are taught to immediately question anyone who is supposedly deceptive in a polygraph.
Finally, in early March 1999, the FBI did decide to interrogate Lee. It happened to be the day I broke the story of soon-to-be-released congressional report on alleged Chinese espionage at the labs. Following my report, The New York Times published an article that described Lee as a suspect, without using his name. Somebody had leaked those details to the newspaper to put Lee in the media’s crosshairs.
One investigative source tells me that even after the day of belated FBI questioning in March of 1999, the lead FBI agent verbalized that she thought Lee was not the right man.
But a few days later, after the New York Times article following up on my report, the FBI ordered a second interrogation of Lee, this time a “confrontational” style interview.
Sources say the FBI was eager to try to find someone to pin the spying on.
One special agent doing the questioning falsely told Lee no fewer than 30 times that he had failed his polygraphs, and repeatedly demanded to know why.
I obtained a copy of the polygraph questions and results.
Here are some selected excerpts:
FBI special agent: “You’re never going to pass a polygraph. And you’re never going to have a clearance. And you’re not going to have a job. And if you get arrested you’re not going to have a retirement…If I don’t have something that I can tell Washington as to why you’re failing those polygraphs, I can’t do a thing.”
Lee: “Well I don’t understand.”
FBI special agent: “I can’t get you your job. I can’t do anything for you, Wen Ho. I can’t stop the newspapers from knocking on your door. I can’t stop the newspapers from calling your son. I can’t stop the people from polygraphing your wife. I can’t stop somebody from coming and knocking on your door and putting handcuffs on you.”
Lee: “I don’t know how to handle this case, I’m an honest person and I’m telling you all the truth and you don’t believe it. I, that’s it.”
FBI special agent: “Do you want to go down in history whether you’re professing your innocence like the Rosenbergs to the day that they take you to the electric chair?”
Lee: “I believe eventually, and I think God, God will make it his judgement.”
During this time period, Department of Energy officials began leaking to the media that Lee had failed his polygraphs, and that he was “the one” who had given to China information on America’s most advanced thermo-nuclear warhead, the W-88.
A stunning charge that, in the end, investigators were unable to back up.
One question at hand is how could the exact same polygraph charts be legitimately interpreted as “passing” and also, by the FBI, as “failing?”
I spoke to Richard Keifer, the current chairman of the American Polygraph Association, who’s a former FBI agent and used to run the FBI’s polygraph program.
Keifer says, “There are never enough variables to cause one person to say (a polygraph subject is) deceptive, and one to say he’s non-deceptive…there should never be that kind of discrepancy on the evaluation of the same chart.”
As to how it happened in the Wen Ho Lee case, Keifer thinks, “then somebody is making an error.”
I asked Keifer to look at Lee’s polygraph scores. He said the scores are “crystal clear.” In fact, Keifer says, in all his years as a polygrapher, he had never been able to score anyone so high on the non-deceptive scale.
He was at a loss to find any explanation for how the FBI could deem the polygraph scores as “failing.”
The FBI has not explained how or why it interpreted Lee’s polygraph as deceptive.
When asked for an interview, the FBI simply said it would be “bad” to talk about Lee’s polygraph, and that the case will be handled in the courts. The prosecution has not turned over the charts and many other polygraph documents to Lee’s defense team. And so far, the prosecution has withheld other key documents, including the actual charts from the DOE polygraph.
Since Lee was never charged with espionage (only computer security violations), the content of the polygraph may be unimportant to his case. But the fact that his scores apparently morphed from passing to failing fuels the argument of those who claim the government was looking for a scapegoat — someone to blame for the alleged theft of masses of American top secret nuclear weapons information by China — and that Lee conveniently filled that role.
More coverage of Wen Ho Lee case:
It was the end of 1999, if memory serves me correctly, andI was forced to live in Santa Fe to have primary physical custody of my son. New medical practices don't make money, so I moonlighted as the Physician of the Santa Fe Jail where the guest of honor was Wen Ho Lee. He was the only inmate who had actually gotten a physical exam.
The medical services available were very poor but the inmates were sicker than sick... some of the sickest people I have ever seen in one place. I wrote to the NGO in charge of medical services and told them of the dangers. For example, the psychiatrist would only show up every two weeks, but I had inmates slamming their bodies against their cell doors hard enough to break bones.
I was told only the psyhiatrist can Rx psych meds... be that as it may I convinced the nurse to get this poor guy lithium and he stopped slaming into the door.
Ok, my story is a little tangental but it is better than talking about how utterly corrupt Federal law enforcement agencies became.
"There is no public record of anybody being held accountable."
In how many different situations is that statement true? How do we get back to holding "them" accountable?