The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [183]
When the Justice Department could find no evidence that Lee had spied for Beijing, they changed focus, seizing upon the fact that he had improperly handled data within Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lee later admitted that he had moved nuclear codes from a secure computer system to an insecure computer within the laboratory, but claimed he did it only as backup, to protect his files in the event of a system failure.
Most people who have lost important data due to a power-failure crash will understand how such a breach of regulations could occur. In his autobiography, My Country Versus Me, Lee described losing several important files in 1993 after the computers at Los Alamos were converted from one operating system to another. Determined not to experience such a loss again, he decided to make several backup files. Since he lacked his own tape drive, he borrowed one from a friend who worked in the insecure, unclassified region within the laboratory. After making the backups, Lee claimed he left the information on the open system as an extra precaution against future loss, protecting it with three levels of passwords. Later, he acknowledged that this was a mistake and a breach of security, but stressed he did it only “for my convenience, not for any espionage purposes.”
According to Lee’s colleagues, such security lapses were common, and the data Lee had downloaded fell in a gray area of classification: “protect as restricted data,” or PARD. This meant the data had to be handled with care, as it might contain sensitive information, but did not merit the same kind of security precautions as “secret” or even “confidential” data. Scientists could leave PARD on their desks overnight, and a former weapons designer at Los Alamos admitted to the Times that he had committed his own blunder with PARD when the wind blew a sheaf of documents out a window. But after Lee’s arrest, the U.S. government reclassified the downloaded PARD files to a much higher level—as “secret restricted data”—a decision critics described as politically motivated, an attempt to justify what had already been done to Lee.
To put Lee’s actions into context, his supporters pointed to the contrasting treatment of John Deutch, a former director of the CIA, who had committed gross security violations. Wen Ho Lee had transferred PARD information from one computer to another within the laboratory, but Deutch had actually removed top-secret files from the CIA and carried them home in a briefcase. In December 1996, the CIA discovered that Deutch’s unprotected home computer contained seventeen thousand pages of documents that included ultrasecret “black programs,” presidentially approved covert operations, and even a twenty-six-volume personal diary of his tenure at the CIA and the Pentagon. An “alien resident” housekeeper had full access to the room with this computer whenever Deutch and his family were away from home. The computer was routinely used to access the Internet (including porn sites) through America Online, and neither encryption nor a secure phone line had shielded the computer from access by hackers. The CIA also learned that Deutch would leave important memory cards lying around in his car and kept extremely sensitive files on his laptop computer, which could have been easily copied or stolen.
When Deutch learned about the investigation, he immediately began deleting more than a thousand files from his personal computer, and he refused to give interviews to CIA agents on the subject. Given Deutch’s lack of cooperation, the CIA shelved the investigation, even though