The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [185]
In the fall of 2000, to salvage a rapidly eroding case against Lee, the Justice Department worked out a plea bargain with his attorneys, dropping all but one of the fifty-nine counts in exchange for his agreement to cooperate with federal authorities. The judge later apologized to Lee, asserting that he had been “terribly wronged” and admitting that federal prosecutors had “embarrassed our entire nation.” It was later discovered that several government leaks to the media were not only lies but also violations of U.S. law. The following year, declassified portions of an eight-hundred-page report commissioned by Attorney General Janet Reno concluded that “the FBI has been investigating a crime which was never established to have occurred.”
The incident left a lasting wound on the psyche of the Chinese American community. They would remember not only the unbounded arrogance of the Justice Department but also the role of an irresponsible press that fanned flames of racist paranoia across America. During the Lee investigation, the media exploited cruel caricatures of the Chinese, reminding historians of the racist cartoons that led to the exclusion era of the nineteenth century.
A big part of Lee’s problems must be laid at the feet of the well-respected New York Times, whose reporters and editors too gullibly did the government’s bidding by running unsubstantiated government leaks on its front page. Within days, the Lee story degenerated into an orgy of yellow journalism across the nation. Talk-radio and television hosts lumped together all ethnic Chinese—Chinese Americans and foreign Chinese nationals alike—as potential spies.59 Major newspapers drew fantasies of millions of Chinese united by a nefarious master scheme to commit espionage. “China’s spying, they say, more typically involves cajoling morsels of information out of visiting foreign experts and tasking thousands of Chinese abroad to bring secrets home one at a time like ants carrying grains of sand,” the Washington Post wrote. “The Chinese have been assembling such grains of sand since at least the fourth century B.C., when the military philosopher Sun Tzu noted the value of espionage in his classic work, ‘The Art of War.’ ”
Eventually the New York Times faced criticism, both within the organization and by outsiders, for its careless reporting of the Wen Ho Lee case. In the series of articles that started it all, the Times reported a mysterious $700 withdrawal that Lee had made from an American Express office in Hong Kong, and speculated that he used it to buy an airplane ticket to Shanghai. It was later discovered, however, that the money had in fact been used by his daughter on a sightseeing tour outside Hong Kong. No detail was too small to be interpreted as possible evidence of Lee’s guilt. When Lee was warmly greeted by a PRC nuclear expert at a public function in Los Alamos, as scientists greet foreign colleagues whenever and wherever they meet, the Times wrote that the Chinese scientist hugged Lee “in a manner that seemed suspiciously congratulatory.”
The Chinese American community would also remember offhand comments made by certain politicians during the Wen Ho Lee affair that revealed the depth of their anti-Chinese feelings. In March 1999, Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, told the NBC program Meet the Press, “We’ve got to remember the Chinese are everywhere as far as our weapons systems, not only in our labs that make our nuclear weapons and development, but also in the technology to deliver them. We’ve seen some of that. They’re real. They’re here. And probably in some ways, very crafty people.” Though a spokesperson from his office later explained that Shelby meant Chinese spies, not Chinese Americans in general, his remarks infuriated the Asian American community. “He doesn’t distinguish between Chinese foreign nationals, Chinese graduate students, and Chinese Americans, some of whom are fifth-generation Californians,” Frank Wu, a Howard University law professor,