Wen Ho Lee, Free, Still Faces Challenges
Sep. 14 -- Wen Ho Lee may finally be free, but his ordeal is far from over.
Though highly educated and a qualified nuclear scientist, and though he has been exonerated of virtually all the charges levied against him in a government investigation into alleged spying of U.S. nuclear secrets for China, he is shadowed by the questions posed over his trustworthiness.
He must now deal with the legacy of months in the public eye, the loss of his job at one of the most prominent research laboratories in the country, and a felony conviction on his record for life.
“This is going to be worse than a returning prisoner of war,” says Phyllis Hedges, an acquaintance of the Lee family and a Los Alamos attorney. “A prisoner of war wouldn’t be in the public eye for so long, and wouldn’t have suffered this volatile trauma.”
Legal Debt, Dim Job Prospects Lee, 60, “can be in real trouble because of his age,” said Kent Dedrick, a former physicist involved with the Wen Ho Lee defense fund, and may find it hard to get a new job.
Lee’s expertise is in a field of physics most applicable to defense interests, but it is unlikely he will get such work with a felony record, several acquaintances said.
His wife is retired, and the couple’s son is in medical school. Their daughter works in the computer field in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Lee will also have to deal with millions of dollars of reported debt for legal expenses accrued during his incarceration.
Lee was arrested last December on 59 counts of illegally copying design secrets, amid government allegations that China was spying on the Los Alamos nuclear lab’s weapons designs. He was held for nine months in solitary confinement.
He was never charged with espionage, and the government never presented solid evidence to support all its claims. On Wednesday the scientist pleaded guilty to one felony count of downloading nuclear weapons design secrets to a non-secure computer as part of a plea bargain. The other 58 charges were dropped.
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