Cox Report -- W-88

According to the Redacted Report, another Taiwan-born, US naturalized citizen, while employed in "X" division at Los Alamos where the W-88 was designed, visited the PRC in 1988 to give a lecture. He is "suspected" of having given the PRC "classified information on the W-88 warhead and other matters" because some information about the W-88 was included in the PRC Secret document "planted" in 1995, but which purported to have been prepared in 1988.

Wen Ho Lee is not mentioned by name in the Cox Report but his name was leaked months ago by the Administration, which had his personal computer searched, subjected him to "lie-detector" tests, suspended him and then fired him, all between the time the Top Secret Report was submitted to the Clinton Administration for Classification Revue and when the Redacted Report was released to the public. Hence, despite what information may have been unearthed since, the allegations contained in the Cox Committee Report had to have been based upon the suspicions of the Security [DOE and FBI] officials about the closeness in timing between the trip to PRC by Wen Ho Lee and the "date" on the document "planted" with the CIA by the PRC Walk-in.

The initial DOE attempts to wire-tap Wen Ho Lee in 1997 after the Security officials became "suspicious" of him--which were rejected by the Justice Department for lack of "probable cause" -- were not mentioned in the Redacted Report. The disclosure by Chairman Cox in presenting the Redacted Report to Congress of that refusal by Janet Reno was immediately interpreted by virtually one and all to mean that the Attorney General had turned a blind eye to overwhelming evidence of a crime -- as she has frequently been accused of doing in the past. It did not seem to occur to any committee Member that the FBI really had no "probable cause' at that time, no justification for believing that a crime may have been committed. It follows that the Cox Committee had no "probable cause" to accuse the "unidentified Los Alamos suspect" of any crime either.

As to the reports leaked by the Clinton Administration of the "evidence" they found when they searched Wen Ho Lee's computer at his office in a secure area at Los Alamos, that search happened after the Cox Report was 'filed ' and so could not have been included. We don't know if the Panel of Experts had access to what was found there. We know from media reports that, although Wen Ho Lee had been associated with the W-88 design, by 1994 he had been reassigned to work on an 'archiving' project, apparently the Weapons Archiving and Retrieval Project [WARP] or something related to it.

WARP was undertaken because the Clinton Administration signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty [CTBT], and even though the CTBT has never been ratified by the US Senate, the administration unilaterally decided to forego future full scale testing of nuclear weapons for any purpose. Whereupon, Congress required that the President certify annually that the US had no need to test nuclear weapons for any purpose.

The basis for this 'certification' was to be a "Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship" program, which involved total reliance on computer and laboratory simulations of nuclear and thermonuclear 'explosions'. At Livermore that meant using the National Ignition Facility [NIF], a successor to ICF facility that Peter Lee worked on, to simulate thermonuclear implosions and on 'negative alpha' hydro experiments. At Los Alamos it meant gathering together in one database -- on a secure local area network [LAN] server in a common format intelligible to future weapons designers -- all the predictions and test results of all Los Alamos and Livermore important nuclear tests of the past. Wen Ho Lee was apparently involved in this project at Los Alamos and had improperly transferred in 1994 and 1995 many of those files to his office computer, which was not a part of the secure LAN, There is apparently no 'benign' explanation for why he did this, but there is apparently no evidence that he did anything more. He has, of course, 'mishandled classified information', and for that his clearance could be removed -- as it was -- and he could no longer be employed at Los Alamos, since his employment there was contingent upon his being "Q-cleared".

But note again that Congress prohibited in the FY 97 NDAA(after Wen Ho Lee had reportedly already downloaded nearly all the 'legacy' files ) any cooperative nuclear weapons-related programs with the PRC including "stockpile stewardship." Congress must have had some reason for suspecting that the Clinton Administration was engaged in, or was proposing to engage in, some sort of cooperative 'stockpile stewardship' program with the PRC. That is, of course, what Wen Ho Lee was probably doing; preparing to participate in some kind of 'Lab-to-Lab' cooperative stockpile stewardship program with the PRC. It remains to be seen what if anything he had already done by the time Congress prohibited it in FY 97.