FBI may question former Los Alamos scientist again

Lee agreed to the interrogation as part of a plea deal inSeptember that ended the government’s criminal case against him for allegedly illegally downloading nuclear weapons design secrets at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

U.S. Prosecutors agreed to drop all but one of 59 felonycharges against Lee if he would tell them what happened to seven missing computer tapes that they alleged contain nuclear weapons designs secrets. Lee has said he destroyed the tapes but never publicly disclosed what happened to them.

Lee also had not yet provided a verifiable explanation ofwhy he downloaded U.S. Nuclear weapons secrets to portable computer tapes while working at Los Alamos and what he did with the tapes, the Post quoted its sources as saying.

During the questioning Lee disclosed having further dinnermeetings with Chinese and Taiwanese nuclear weapons scientists. He also revealed a modest bank account in Taiwan into which he put part of a $5,000 fee he received in 1998 from that country’s leading military research center, the Post reported.

Many of the details revealed by Lee were not known toprosecutors at the time they arranged the immunity deal.

DEVELOPING NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Most prominent among them was his disclosure that in 1998 hereceived $5,000 from the Chung Shan Institute of Science and Technology, outside the Taiwanese capital of Taipei. The institute allegedly was involved in past efforts by Taiwan to develop nuclear weapons, the Post reported.

It said FBI investigators and Justice Departmentprosecutors were trying to decide whether to request that U.S. District Judge James Parker in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to authorize additional time to question Lee under oath.

Because of Lee’s new disclosures, the government has beenlooking into the possibility that Lee may have accumulated numerous nuclear weapons secrets from computers at Los Alamos with the intention of aiding Taiwan, the country of his birth, which has long feared an attack from the communist mainland, the Post reported.

Further fueling the U.S. Government’s suspicions, Lee alsosaid he had reviewed on his office computer classified data about the three newest U.S. Nuclear warheads: the W-87 warhead used on the Peacekeeper ICBM, the W-88, used on the submarine-launched Trident missile, and the W-80, used on the Tomahawk cruise missile, the sources said.

Lee, a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos, was arrested inDecember 1999 and spent the next 278 days in jail, much of it in solitary confinement, on charges of illegally copying and storing what prosecutors called "the crown jewels" of U.S. Nuclear weapons design secrets.

Sources in the U.S. Government and Congress accused theTaiwanese-born U.S. Citizen of being a spy for China but he was never charged with espionage.

Despite the new information about Taiwan, sources close toLee told the Post nothing new emerged to challenge Lee’s insistence that he never knowingly showed or gave classified information to any foreign individuals.

In any event, his statements "all came under immunity andcan’T be used against him to build a [criminal] case," the Post quoted one source close to Lee as saying.