Students said they came away from the talk with a better understanding of the Wen Ho Lee story.
"I thought it was interesting and informative," said Jake Kahn '03. "I didn't know too much about the incidents before."
Chung Lee, a second-year medical student, gave the background on his father's case, which started in 1995 when the U.S. government discovered that the Chinese had the plans for one of the United States' most advanced miniature warheads. The FBI selected Wen Ho Lee from a pool of 100 as the primary suspect. Although he initially passed a polygraph test, he failed a second test in Feb. 1999. After this, the Department of Energy suspended his clearance.
In early March, the government leaked information about an unnamed scientist giving information to the Chinese to The New York Times. The article, according to Chung Lee, began a "media and political firestorm," in which Wen Ho Lee was portrayed as a spy for the Chinese.
But, Chung Lee said, the government did not have enough information to charge his father with espionage.
"Not only did my father not commit espionage, the secrets that China had obtained didn't even come from Los Alamos in the first place," Lee said.
Nevertheless, in December of last year Lee's father was indicted on 59 charges of mishandling classified information and kept incarcerated for nine months.
"These are conditions that a lot of convicted murderers never experience," Lee said of his father's time in prison, where he was kept in solitary confinement with lights on 24 hours a day, initially, and was only allowed to see his family for one hour per week.
Eventually, a judge released Wen Ho Lee when it was determined that the FBI agent who had given testimony had lied and that the information that Lee had downloaded was originally classified as PARD (Protect As Restricted Data), not classified data.
"In hallways they had stacks of PARD info just lying around," Lee said. "A few days after my dad was indicted, the government raised the classification of the codes to top secret."
"Ninety percent of it was already in the public domain," Lee added. In August, Wen Ho Lee was released without bail and agreed to a plea bargain in which 58 of the 59 charges against him were dropped and Lee pleaded guilty to one charge of mishandling classified information. His punishment was the time he had already served.
"My dad is 62. At this point, he just wanted to get on with his life," Lee said in the question-and-answer session following the talk.
Leong offered a broader historical perspective to place the Wen Ho Lee case in. He focused on racial profiling, which he described as "a five-dollar word for stereotyping," and the idea of the "perpetual foreigner."
"There is this assumption that you are foreign even if you were born here," Leong told the predominantly Asian-American audience. "We're not threatened by an English or French accent, but if you speak with an [Asian] accent, the suspicion is ... you're disloyal [and] could potentially be a spy."
"It made me think about the treatment of Asians historically, because I don't get treated that way," said Tim Mak '02.
Leong said that the fact that Wen Ho Lee was Asian led the U.S. government to view him as a potential spy for China, even though he came from Taiwan.
"This type of labeling is not just within our community," he said. "We've got to get a grip on that and see what is going to be the impact on the civil liberties in this country."
Leong also discussed the reporting of the case by the press, in particular The New York Times, which admitted in a Sept. 12 editorial that it had not properly investigated the story. "On this particular story they did an abysmal job," said Leong. "They took leads from the FBI and just ran with them."
"If you just read the headlines, you would think he's a spy," said Joshua Shapiro '01. "It's shocking how far from the truth that is."