The US government badly bungled its investigation of Taiwanese-American nuclear weapons scientist Lee Wen-ho (
But federal prosecutor Randy Bellows, who probed the handling of the case by the Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, also concluded that charges against Lee had not been driven by racial bias.
Although the investigation was plagued by "many serious problems, racism was not among them," concluded Bellows, whose report was ordered by former US attorney general Janet Reno and completed more than a year ago.
Only small and heavily edited portions of the document were made public Monday in response to a court order by the Justice Department.
"Had either the FBI or [the energy department] done what it should have done, the FBI could have been investigating in the year 1996 what it is now investigating in the year 2000," wrote Bellows, adding that the probe was "woefully inadequate."
Lee, who helped design nuclear weapons at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was charged in 1999 with failure to follow government rules on handling highly-classified information.
The allegations came after US counterintelligence services obtained evidence that secret designs of the W-88 nuclear warhead used by Trident submarines may have made their way to China.
The FBI and Energy Department security officials had looked into Lee's contacts with a Chinese colleague but never filed espionage charges against him.
In the end, the Taiwanese-born scientist spent nine months in jail before he was released last September as part of a plea bargain agreement.
As part of the deal, the FBI was forced to drop all but one of the 59 charges brought against the scholar.
The case sparked a particularly strong outcry in the Asian American community, whose members have argued Lee had been singled out because of his skin color.
In his probe, Bellows concluded that the investigation may have taken a wrong tack as early as 1995, when suspicions of nuclear secrets leaking to China first surfaced.
At the time, top weapons experts at the Energy Department concluded that that a wide group of department employees had access to data about the W-88, the report said.
But the experts misrepresented these findings to the FBI, leading agents to conclude that Los Alamos was the only source of such information and Lee was the most likely suspect, according to the document.
"The consequences for the investigation caused by the inaccurate representations were profound," Bellows wrote.
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