Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Thursday, Feb. 27, 2003

That justified alarm has been sounded by the man who directed intelligence operations at the U.S. Department of Energy during the 1990s.

The result of that experience is his book that documents betrayal on a grand scale. Notra Trulock saw it all, and when you read “Code Name: Kindred Spirit,” you will learn the details of what some espionage experts have described as “a shocking, must-read indictment of the FBI and Department of Energy, bureaucratic ineptitude, and high level political malice that poisoned the investigation of Chinese espionage in America’s nuclear weapons labs.”

They could have added other ingredients: massive cover-ups throughout the government, motivated by a culture where back-stabbing spin and public relations and covering your turf were all important, with nary a thought given to the lives of millions of Americans who someday may be killed because of the evidence that the Chinese were stealing America's secrets to build a war machine that might rain missiles on the U.S.

The media, as usual out to lunch on security threats, aided and abetted the cover-up by trivializing the Chinese nuclear espionage scandal as a “political correctness” story.

Congress gets a share of the blame for its unfocused investigations of the scandal and for failing to give it greater priority than the Monica Lewinsky case. Indeed, honest historians will likely look back and declare the biggest scandal of the Clinton years was that the one thing the then president was not impeached for was his administration’s ultimate cover-up of espionage, raising issues of neglecting his sworn duty to “preserve and protect” America.

A half century earlier, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee conducted a thorough investigation that exposed the chicanery in a State Department whose neglect and (to put it kindly) naiveté led to the communist takeover of China in the first place. Those senators, led by the late Nevada Democrat Pat McCarran, were giants in their time.

In the late 1990s, by contrast, “Code-Name: Kindred Spirit” reports on the spectacle of lawmakers wringing their hands at the prospect that Los Alamos and other nuclear labs would get a bad reputation.

Never mind that the ultimate security of innocent Americans may someday be snuffed out because of this. To some in Washington, that was less important than protecting “reputations.”

The labs apparently had not learned anything from previous espionage scandals. Los Alamos, remember, was the scene of nuclear espionage cases involving the likes of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The focus of Operation Kindred Spirit, as the investigation was called, was nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. Evidence had piled up that during his visits to the People’s Republic of China, he had been badgered repeatedly by Chinese scientists to divulge classified information, that Lee had not reported on these visits as required, and acknowledged them only when confronted with evidence that they had taken place.

The investigation showed that Lee had downloaded classified information onto the unclassified Los Alamos computer network around the time of one of his trips to Beijing, that he had built a personal library of nuclear warhead design for more than a decade, failed one polygraph after another had been improperly administered, and succeeded, even though he was under suspicion, in gaining access to classified computers. Qualified scientists testified the tapes contained the “crown jewels” of America’s nuclear secrets.

Thanks to what Trulock says was an incompetent prosecution, 58 of the 59 charges against Lee were dropped. He merely served 227 days in solitary confinement and paid a small fine.

Though a convicted felon, he was a free man, lionized by CBS's “60 Minutes” as a victim of enthic profiling, and was said to be worth “a lucrative book and movie deal.”

Trulock, on the other hand, got the treatment usually accorded one who disrupts the comfort level of the government bureaucracy. He was made a pariah. His reputation was ruined, and the FBI broke into his home without a warrant to walk off with his computer and even wounded his dog.

The reader may want to focus on this book in on-again, off-again spurts - allowing intervals to get his blood pressure back to normal.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
China/Taiwan
Clinton Scandals
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