"It's an astonishing development and an amazing retreat by the government," stated Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, one of the many scientific and civil liberties organizations that has spoken out in Lee's defense.

As part of a plea-bargaining arrangement, Lee agreed to plead guilty to one count of unlawful gathering of national defense information. Lee pays no fine, nor is he to be subjected to any probation. He has already served seven months in prison.

Lee, a U.S. citizen, had been a target of a U.S. government "investigation" that goes back to at least 1995, as part of the U.S. rulers' ongoing campaign of slanders and threats against the workers state in China.

Beijing has reportedly succeeded in developing a sophisticated miniaturized nuclear weapons delivery system similar to Washington's W-88 nuclear warhead, which allows multiple atomic weapons to be loaded onto a single missile. Washington pointed to China's self-defense move as a justification for launching a "spy scare" campaign, claiming some individuals must have passed these U.S. nuclear weapons secrets to China.

In the midst of this witch-hunting campaign, Lee was fired in March 1999 from his job at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where he had worked for 20 years as a scientist with a specialty in writing computer programs. No espionage charges were ever brought against him, however.

Instead, Lee was arrested on 59 felony counts of mishandling classified information stored on computers at the government lab. Held without bail, he was accused of downloading restricted materials to unsecured computers and tapes. In pursuing this case the U.S. government aimed to further curtail democratic rights and strengthen the arbitrary powers of the executive branch of government.

Lee, in turn, filed a lawsuit against the FBI and the Justice and Energy departments, charging that he was being singled out for prosecution because he is of Chinese origin. Under the plea bargain arrangement Lee agreed to drop this suit.

A broad array of Asian-American organizations rallied around his case. Three major scientific academies--the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine--issued an open letter to U.S. attorney general Janet Reno condemning Lee's incarceration.  
 
Judge sets bail and home detention
On August 24 Judge James Parker of the U.S. district court in Albuquerque, New Mexico, ordered Lee, who had twice been denied bail, to be released on a $1 million bond under an extremely strict form of home detention until the opening of his trial, scheduled for November 6.

Under Parker's draconian rules, Lee was to be barred from speaking to anyone except his wife, two children, and lawyers. His wife, Sylvia Lee, was to fax the FBI four hours before she planned to leave the house and would be subjected to FBI searches on entering and leaving their home. In addition, the judge ordered removal of all electronic communication devices except for one telephone line, which would be tapped. Lee would have had to wear an electronic bracelet and be subjected to video surveillance.

On August 31, the day prior to Lee's scheduled release, about 30 FBI agents invaded his home and spent more than 12 hours allegedly searching for the missing computer tapes.

The Clinton administration, however, was determined to keep him behind bars. Hours before Lee was to leave the prison, the Justice Department went over the head of the judge presiding over the case and got two federal appeals court judges from the 10th Circuit in Denver to issue an emergency order blocking his release.

From the beginning the government had no case against Lee except for hearsay and innuendo. At the time the 59-count indictment was announced in December, government witnesses charged that Lee had downloaded the "crown jewels" of the nation's weapons program with secrets so highly classified they could "change the global strategic balance." Judge Parker based his initial refusal to grant bail on this testimony. At the time, the judge asserted that there was "clear and convincing evidence" that Lee was a threat to "national security."

By mid-August, however, several Los Alamos officials admitted that 99 percent of the information Lee supposedly copied was already in public literature. Testifying before Parker's court, John Richter, a retired nuclear weapons physicist with the Department of Energy, declared that all this information was available in scientific journals and the Energy Department's unclassified library in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

In fact, the data downloaded was not even classified as secret or confidential by the government until after Lee had downloaded it.

Also last month, the chief government witness, FBI agent Robert Messemer, admitted that the testimony he had presented in December about Lee's actions was false. This testimony was key in denying bail to Lee, the judge acknowledged. Among other phony accusations, Messemer charged that Lee had used subterfuge to gain access to a colleague's computer to download files, and that he had failed to report contacts with Chinese scientists during a 1986 visit approved by Los Alamos National Laboratories to a conference in Beijing.  
 
Speaking Chinese forbidden
At Lee's first bail hearing shortly after his arrest, it was Messemer who convinced the judge that Lee had to be isolated from others because "a single utterance" might give away national secrets. Parker agreed and issued an order that prohibited Lee from speaking Chinese with his family.

According to an article in the September 6 New York Times, Parker now admits that "Dr. Lee had not only done little to conceal his downloading, and knew full well that there were monitoring systems that would detect what he was doing, but at one point when he was trying to erase some files he called an open help line at the laboratory to seek assistance."

Although its case against Wen Ho Lee blew up in a fiasco, Washington continues its pressures against the Chinese workers state and its probes to curb democratic rights.

"Back to Square One: With Plea Expected in Los Alamos Case, Mystery of Lost Nuclear Secrets Deepens," the front-page headline of a September 12 New York Times article declares. "An investigation that began eight years ago as an effort to determine how China obtained highly classified information from American weapons labs," the article states, "appears to be back where it started, with the mystery still unsolved." The implication, of course, is that some culprits need to be found to "solve" the alleged mystery.