The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [184]
The disparity between the Justice Department’s handling of the two cases was stunning. While Wen Ho Lee—a man never formally charged with espionage—was imprisoned and denied bail, Deutch, who had committed far graver offenses against national security, never spent a single night in jail. The only penalty he suffered was the removal of his security clearance, two and a half years after his security breach was discovered. Meanwhile, his life and career went on as usual. When Deutch failed in his efforts to become secretary of defense, he went back to teaching chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More significantly, Deutch may have abused his power as former director of the CIA to obstruct justice. He recommended Nora Slatkin, a CIA official overseeing the internal investigation of Deutch’s security lapses, for a top executive position at Citibank. After Deutch resigned as director in 1996, he joined the board of Citibank, and in 1997, Slatkin became a vice president there.
The double standard in the Lee and Deutch cases infuriated people both inside and outside the Chinese American community. “Deutch can get away with anything because his racial and class background enables him to behave like he owns the country and even if he has done anything illegal, he retains his privilege,” Ling-chi Wang, head of the Berkeley ethnic studies department, wrote in a public e-mail. Indeed, Deutch’s violations caused no great public outcry, no public debate about whether he, like Lee, might have been guilty of espionage. Robert Scheer, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wondered if this was because “Deutch is a leading member of the old-boy intelligence establishment, and Lee is not.” Others wondered how much of the case was driven by racism. Robert Vrooman, former head of counterintelligence at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told the Washington Post he believed that the federal government had targeted Lee because he was ethnic Chinese, and that the entire investigation was “built on thin air.”
Critics began to compare the handling of the Lee case with the conduct of foreign dictatorships during the cold war. In a New Mexico jail, Lee had endured conditions that few convicted felons face: for more than two hundred days, he lived in solitary confinement and was shackled in chains whenever he stepped out of his cell, which was one hour a day for exercise, and one hour a week to see his family. “While Deutch has been coddled,” Robert Scheer wrote for the Los Angeles Times, “Lee sits in a solitary jail cell after having been lied to by the FBI, which, acting like goons from some totalitarian country, told him he had failed the lie detector test that they knew he had easily passed.” Many people believed Lee was imprisoned without bail so he would plead guilty under pressure. “This case stinks and the resolution doesn’t make it smell any better,” said Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. “If he pleaded innocent, he had to remain in jail, but if he pleads guilty, he gets out of jail—it is so Soviet. It is un-American.” Fang Lizhi, the renowned scientist and human rights activist who had escaped from the PRC after the Tiananmen Square massacre, compared Lee’s experience in jail with human rights abuses in mainland China. The extraordinarily brutal conditions of Lee’s incarceration led even Plato Cacheris—the attorney for Aldrich Ames, the convicted spy for Moscow—to comment that Wen Ho Lee