"When they were beating him up, they were telling him, 'If you know what is good for you, you will keep your mouth shut,'" said his wife, Susan Hook.

But Peter Stockton, a senior investigator at the Project on Government Oversight - a watchdog group that is assisting Tommy Hook - has accused the FBI of leaking another version of events.

In the FBI scenario, described in several New Mexico newspapers, Hook went to the topless bar not to meet a fellow Los Alamos whistleblower – as his wife and attorney have claimed – but because his wife was out of town.

He had several drinks and got a lap dance. When he left the bar, he nearly backed into someone with his car in the parking lot, which touched off the fight, according to the version of events that Stockton says was leaked by the FBI.

A dancer at the bar told the Albuquerque Journal that Hook did get a lap dance. But Hook's attorney, Robert Rothstein, said a private investigator who interviewed several people at the bar told him that Hook "didn't have any interactions with the girls who were dancing there."

Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a group that works with Los Alamos whistleblowers, said Hook is "a shy man, and I can't see him just frequenting a strip bar for no reason. It doesn't jibe."

Hook suffered a fractured jaw, concussion, herniated disk and other injuries. He was released from the hospital Tuesday night. In 2003 Hook and another Los Alamos auditor, Chuck Montano, released an internal report that showed millions of dollars in fraudulent billing at the laboratory.

Hook was scheduled to testify before Congress later this month. The Hook case is just the latest to bedevil the laboratory. Dr. Wen Ho Lee was suspected of espionage but pleaded guilty in 2000 to a charge of mishandling classified data.

Then last year the laboratory was shut down for several months for a security review after a report that computer disks with nuclear weapons secrets had vanished.

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