Book claims Lee Wen-ho's wife helped CIA and FBI

Lee Wen-ho's (李文和) wife, an employee of Los Alamos National Laboratory, worked as a valuable informant for the CIA and FBI in the years before the US government began investigating her husband for alleged spying, according to a new book.

A Convenient Spy, Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage, by journalists Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman, also reports that while Lee was mistreated by prosecutors who jailed him on spying charges with scant evidence, he was a security "nightmare" who brought some problems on himself.

The book, to be published on Jan. 14, paints the US government's probe of Lee as bumbling and often motivated by politics, and suggests that Lee -- a Taiwanese-born naturalized US citizen -- was targeted at least partly because of his race.

The book said that Sylvia Lee, who began working at Los Alamos as a secretary in 1980, began acting as an informant for the FBI about five years later while acting as a translator for Chinese scientists and students who visited the laboratory.

At the same time, the book says, Sylvia Lee was -- like her husband -- copying classified materials onto an unclassified network and arousing the suspicions of authorities because of her contacts in China and difficulty in getting along with co-workers.

Sylvia Lee was so at odds with her boss that at one point, according to the book, she destroyed important and classified files out of anger and might have lost her job at Los Alamos if her CIA handlers had not intervened.

Later, according to the authors, prosecutors used Sylvia Lee's dealings with the Chinese in an effort to prove that she, too, might be a spy.