New York Press - September 26, 2000
Wild Justice Alexander Cockburn
The Disgrace of the Times
The collapse of the government's case against Wen Ho Lee last week represents one of the greatest humiliations of a national newspaper in the history of journalism. One has to go back to the publication by the London Times of the Pigott forgeries in 1887 libeling Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish nationalist hero, to find an equivalent debacle. Yet not a whisper of contrition, not a murmur of remorse, has as yet agitated the editorial pages of The New York Times, which now righteously urges the appointment of a "politically independent person of national standing to review the entire case."
No such review is required to determine the decisive role of The New York Times in sparking the persecution of Wen Ho Lee, his solitary confinement under threat of execution, his denial of bail, his shackling, the loss of his job, the anguish and terror endured by this scientist and his family. On March 6, 1999, the Times carried a report by James Risen and Jeff Gerth entitled "Breach at Los Alamos," charging an unnamed scientist with stealing nuclear secrets from the government lab and giving them to the Chinese People's Republic. The espionage, according to a CIA man cited by Risen and Gerth, was "going to be just as bad as the Rosenbergs."
Two days later Wen Ho Lee, an American of Taiwanese descent, was fired from his job. Ahead of him lay months of further pillorying in a racist witch-hunt led by the Times, whose news columns were replete with more mendacious bulletins from Risen and Gerth, and whose op-ed page featured William Safire using their stories to launch his own calumnies against Wen Ho Lee and the Clinton administration.
Guided by Safire, the Republicans in Congress pounced upon the Wen Ho Lee case with ardor approaching ecstasy. By the spring of 1999 their efforts to evict Bill Clinton from office for the Lewinsky affair had collapsed. They needed a new stick with which to beat the administration and The New York Times handed it to them. In Safire's insinuations, the Clinton White House was but an annex of the Middle Kingdom, and the transfer of U.S. nuclear secrets merely one episode in a long, dark narrative of treachery to the American flag. Former U.S. Sen. Warren Rudman went on NBC's Meet the Press and declared flatly, "The agenda for the body politic is often set by the media. Had it not been for The New York Times breaking the story of Chinese espionage all over the front pages, I'm not sure I'd be here this morning." The most preposterous expression of the Republican spy crusade against the Clinton administration came with the release of the 900-page report named after California Rep. Christopher Cox, filled with one demented assertion after another, including the memorable though absolutely false claim that "the stolen information includes classified information on seven U.S. thermonuclear warheads, including every currently deployed thermonuclear warhead in the U.S. ballistic missile arsenal."
Yet Risen and Gerth's stories had been profuse with terrible errors from the outset. Their prime source had been Notra Trulock, an embittered security official in the Dept. of Energy intent upon his own vendettas within the department. Risen and Gerth swallowed his assertions with disgraceful zeal. From him and other self-interested officials they relayed one falsehood after another: that Wen Ho Lee had failed a lie detector test; that the Los Alamos lab was the undoubted source of the security breach; that it was from Los Alamos that the Chinese had acquired the blueprint of the miniaturized W-88 nuclear warhead. Had The New York Times launched its campaign of terror against Wen Ho Lee at the height of the Cold War, it is quite likely that Wen Ho Lee would have been swept to his doom, most likely with a sentence of life imprisonment amid vain efforts by his defenders to get the scientist a fair hearing. It is doubtful that U.S. District Judge James Parker in New Mexico would have had the courage to denounce the Justice Dept. for a shabby case and to order the release of Wen Ho Lee after harshly criticizing the 59-count government indictment and the "demeaning, unnecessarily punitive conditions" in which Wen Ho Lee had been held. But we are no longer amid the fevers of the Cold War. And though the Pentagon has wanly tried to foment a budget-boosting campaign to suggest that China represents a fearsome military threat, it has not been taken with any great seriousness. The exaggerations of Chinese might are simply too egregious.
So, in these post-Cold War years, Wen Ho Lee did have his sturdy defenders. Some were government officials evidently appalled by the Times' campaign. Some commentators, most notably Lars-Erik Nelson of the Daily News, were scathing about the case against Wen Ho Lee. In July 1999 the New York Review of Books published a long piece by Nelson that explicitly criticized the witch hunt and noted the malign role of the Times. Nelson pointed out how many of the supposedly filched "secrets" had been publicly available for years.
By September of 1999 The New York Times had evidently entertained sufficient disquiet to publish a long piece by William Broad that decorously-though without any explicit finger-pointing -undermined the premises of Risen and Gerth's articles. None of this helped Wen Ho Lee escape terrifying FBI interrogations, in which an agent flourished the threat of execution. He was in solitary, allowed to exercise one hour a day while shackled, kept in a constantly lit cell. (Such horrible conditions and worse, it should be noted, are the lot-year after year-of thousands of prisoners in so-called Secure Housing Units in prisons across the U.S.) Even near the end, when it was plain that the government's case was falling apart, Attorney General Janet Reno's prosecutors successfully contested efforts to have Wen Ho Lee released on bail. And when Judge Parker finally threw out almost the entire case, the prosecutors continued to insist, as has Reno, that their conduct had been appropriate throughout.
The New York Times, without whose agency Wen Ho Lee would never have spent a day in a prison cell, perhaps not even have lost his job, is now, with consummate effrontery, urging that an investigation of the bungled prosecution take place. On Sept. 16 Times columnist Anthony Lewis excoriated Reno's Justice Dept. and proclaimed piously that "this country's security rests in good part on having judges with the character and courage, like Judge Parker, to do their duty despite prosecutorial alarms and excursions." No word from Lewis about the role of his own newspaper. Lewis knows well enough, as does everyone at the Times, the infamous role played by Risen, Gerth, Safire and the editors who condoned their stories and columns. No doubt even had Lewis noted the role of the Times, an editor would have struck the tactless phrases from his column. But if ever there was an occasion for self-criticism by a newspaper, it is surely this one. In an extraordinary breach of conventional decorum the President of the United States has criticized his own attorney general for the way Wen Ho Lee has been maltreated. Yet the editors of The New York Times can admit no wrong. Risen and Gerth are not required to offer reflections on the outcome of the affair.
When the forgeries of Richard Pigott, who was described in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica as "a needy and disreputable Irish journalist," against Parnell were exposed, he fled to Madrid and there blew out his brains. The London Times required years to efface the shame of its gullibility. Would that The New York Times were required to admit equivalent error. But it won't. Next year it will no doubt preen amid whatever Pulitzer awards are put its way by the jury of its friends. This is no-fault journalism, and it's a disgrace to the Fourth Estate.
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Inside.com - September 26, 2000
The Times's Remarkable Mea Quasi Culpa on the Chinese Spy Story By David Carr
The placement of Tuesday morning's note from the editors of the New York Times -- in re: the paper's coverage of Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee -- suggests seriousness of purpose, a remarkable pause point in the pissing match over the paper's role in the espionage case.
The 1,600-word ''From the Editors'' note fascinates because the Times almost never retreats from and rarely apologizes for the fundamentals of their coverage. The editors did both on Tuesday, albeit with archetypal Timesian subtlety. There had been a plan to launch a defense/explanation of the Times's coverage in last Sunday's Week in Review section, but internal disputes over language and tone reportedly delayed the document until today. That the note came to rest on page 2 -- home to admissions of smaller, factual transgressions -- is semiotically significant.
And if you look past the fudges, parsing and omissions that characterize all corporate documents, the note is an amazing thing. The Times admits that it was part of the story, admits it created some of the frenzy through the tone of its reporting and admits that its editors failed to do their job.
Typically, when a newspaper is being pursued, it rolls the reporter out of the back of the truck to keep the bad guys from gaining. The Times's editors placed the blame squarely on themselves.
For those of you who think that the federal government operates in a vacuum, a little review: On March 6, 1999, the Times published a 4,000 word piece by Jeff Gerth and James Risen that suggested that China had accelerated its nuclear program by exploiting massive leaks out of Los Alamos made possible by a then-unidentified Chinese-American scientist. Two days later, Wen Ho Lee was fired from Los Alamos. Nine months later he was indicted. This month, after many months of confinement (sometimes solitary), he plea-bargained down to a single count of mishandling of secret information. Lee is hardly an innocent -- his plea is conditional on him explaining his deeply troubling behavior -- but the judge who approved the agreement scathingly rebuked the government's handling of the case, saying that it had ''embarrassed this entire nation and everyone who is a citizen of it.''
In that paradigm, the Times stands as an unindicted co-conspirator. The paper indisputably pushed along the investigation with a tone that was equal parts Chicken Little and Spanish Inquisition. After the March 6 article, it took six more months before the Times began issuing institutional correctives in the form of William Broad's more nuanced stories. (In the editors' note, Broad's stories are transformed into a natural advance on Gerth and Risen's story by a reporter who was in custody of more and better information.)
While standing by its reporting and reporters, the Times's note admits mistakes were made. It's a shocking document by its very existence. Observers who are standing by with the machetes are going to have to come to grips with the fact that an organization as seemingly monolithic and self-assured to the point of arrogance as the Times actually took the time to look inward.
Yes, the paper goes to some lengths to parse its role -- occasionally heading into a Gore-ian ''no controlling legal authority'' motif. But the crux of the story suggests the editors realize that investigators questioning Wen Ho Lee waved the initial Times story in his face with good reason. There was no presumption of innocence in the paper's coverage, a hell of a lapse for a paper that ferociously defends human rights at every turn.
''(L)ooking back, we also found some things we wish we had done differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt,'' the note reads. ''In those months, we could have pushed harder to uncover weaknesses in the FBI case against Dr. Lee. Our coverage would have been strengthened had we moved faster to assess the scientific, technical and investigative assumptions that led the FBI and the Department of Energy to connect Dr. Lee to what is still widely acknowledged to have been a major security breach.''
The more significant mea culpa goes to the more significant transgression. The Times can use the vagaries of the reporting process and a misguided, ass-covering government to explain informational lapses, but there was no one pushing the Times's tone over the top in inexplicable ways. Known for keeping a skeptical monocle on every wiggle and wobble from the government, the paper bought in to thinly sourced hysterics and let talented investigative reporters have their way with a journalistic operation usually ruled by imperial editors.
''Passages of some articles also posed a problem of tone,'' the note continues. ''In place of a tone of journalistic detachment from our sources, we occasionally used language that adopted the sense of alarm that was contained in official reports and was being voiced to us by investigators, members of Congress and administration officials with knowledge of the case.''
It's an important admission that suffers from a fudge in the middle of it. Just because some nitwit in the bureaucracy with his own agenda compares Wen Ho Lee to the Rosenbergs before he's even been questioned doesn't mean you're supposed to put that in the paper. But the Times did. The framing of the case using the Rosenbergs is the single most transgressive element of the paper's coverage, but it goes unmentioned. The heat of the moment explains everything and excuses nothing.
Of course, in the midst of the catfight, the Times manages to show some claws. The Wall Street Journal's coverage, which played an important, reasoned role in the Wen Ho Lee affair, is acknowledged, but then editors sniff that it went off ''without the details provided by The Times in a painstaking narrative.'' How trite.
Those who dare question the Times's coverage are bitchily dismissed as ''competing journalists and media critics and defenders of Dr. Lee.'' Everybody -- including the Times -- has motive post-fiasco, but the reason that the paper's reporting came under attack was that it was deeply flawed in its initial stages. The Times assigned and prominently published correctives, while denying that's what they were. When Robert Schmidt pointed out the discrepancy in the November 1999 issue of Brill's Content, he was greeted with outrage from the Times and an angry letter from investigations editor Stephen Engelberg attempting to rebut the article's conclusions. But the note from the editors is per se evidence that the story and other criticism stung -- and were in large part right. As one Times reporter told Inside on Monday, ''The government has a lot to answer for, but so do we.''
Left unmentioned in today's note from the editors is the editorial page's miserable performance in this whole matter. Both the Times's editorial page and op-ed columnist William Safire, accountable not to executive editor Joseph Lelyveld but publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., were in high dudgeon when Lee was a free man and even higher dudgeon when he was wrongfully imprisoned. It was a disgusting spectacle, with both the edit page and the Clinton administration turning on a dime and then pointing at each other as the author of the mayhem. (The note does a fine job of sawing off the limb that columnist Safire has climbed out on by continuing to condemn Lee, most recently in a vituperative column on Monday.)
Editorial bluster aside, the Times did a more-than-decent job of getting its arms around its role in the story. Much of the paper's outstanding coverage of the case in the past year has been lost in the dust-up over its initial over-reach. Now perhaps the Times can get back to covering Lee -- ''our coverage of this case is not over,'' the note concludes -- instead of their backsides.
In the middle of the note, there's a refreshing suggestion that the people who run the paper are the ones to blame. Typically, when a newspaper is being pursued, it rolls the reporter out of the back of the truck to keep the bad guys from gaining. The Times's editors placed the blame squarely on the inhabitants of the corner office, namely themselves. Engelberg's name may be unstated but his wrist has surely been whacked -- and Lelyveld and managing editor Bill Keller are nowhere near blameless, either.
''In those instances where we fell short of our standards in our coverage of this story, the blame lies principally with those who directed the coverage, for not raising questions that occurred to us only later,'' the note reads. ''Nothing in this experience undermines our faith in any of our reporters, who remained persistent and fair-minded in their newsgathering in the face of some fierce attacks.''
This means that Gerth, who has taken hits for his Whitewater reporting and stories about satellite technology transfer in addition to the Wen Ho Lee investigation, will live to fight another day. One of the people who competes with him at another national newspaper says that is as it should be. ''Usually when there is trouble, the editors start machine-gunning the reporters,'' he says. ''These guys did what good investigative reporters do, which is go out and be aggressive and write it aggressive. This was an editing error. Instead of taking out the hype and innuendo, they hyped it more.''
In general, Gerth's non-Times peer was surprised and impressed by what the Times wrote Tuesday morning. ''They're the Times. They could have blown it off and told everybody to pound sand and they didn't do that. It was an impressive mea culpa, one that came very close to the mark.''
He suggests that the Times's chief sin is a failure to understand its throw weight in Washington. And it's a misunderstanding that continues in spite of Wen Ho Lee. The Times loves to influence governance when a great civic good is under way, but seems mystified when people try to lay Wen Ho Lee at its feet.
The ultimate culpability does, as the Times rightly insists, belong to the government, for it put the head of Wen Ho Lee on the pitchforks of the mob. But the Times was in there big time. And the editors should know as much, even if they won't say it out loud. Their coverage has a causal relationship with the outcome -- but for Gerth and Risen's initial story, Wen Ho Lee would have been an asterisk and not a chapter in the history of espionage.
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New York Times - September 26, 2000
From THE EDITORS
On March 6, 1999, The New York Times reported that Government investigators believed China had accelerated its nuclear weapons program with the aid of stolen American secrets. The article said the Federal Bureau of Investigation had focused its suspicions on a Chinese-American scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Two days later, the government announced that it had fired a Los Alamos scientist for "serious security violations." Officials identified the man as Wen Ho Lee.
Dr. Lee was indicted nine months later on charges that he had transferred huge amounts of restricted information to an easily accessible computer. Justice Department prosecutors persuaded a judge to hold him in solitary confinement without bail, saying his release would pose a grave threat to the nuclear balance.
This month the Justice Department settled for a guilty plea to a single count of mishandling secret information. The judge accused prosecutors of having misled him on the national security threat and having provided inaccurate testimony. Dr. Lee was released on the condition that he cooperate with the authorities to explain why he downloaded the weapons data and what he did with it.
The Times's coverage of this case, especially the articles published in the first few months, attracted criticism from competing journalists and media critics and from defenders of Dr. Lee, who contended that our reporting had stimulated a political frenzy amounting to a witch hunt. After Dr. Lee's release, the White House, too, blamed the pressure of coverage in the media, and specifically The Times, for having propelled an overzealous prosecution by the administration's own Justice Department.
As a rule, we prefer to let our reporting speak for itself. In this extraordinary case, the outcome of the prosecution and the accusations leveled at this newspaper may have left many readers with questions about our coverage. That confusion - and the stakes involved, a man's liberty and reputation - convince us that a public accounting is warranted.
In the days since the prosecution ended, the paper has looked back at the coverage. On the whole, we remain proud of work that brought into the open a major national security problem of which officials had been aware for months, even years. Our review found careful reporting that included extensive cross-checking and vetting of multiple sources, despite enormous obstacles of official secrecy and government efforts to identify The Times's sources. We found articles that accurately portrayed a debate behind the scenes on the extent and importance of Chinese espionage - a debate that now, a year and a half later, is still going on. We found clear, precise explanations of complex science.
But looking back, we also found some things we wish we had done differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt. In those months, we could have pushed harder to uncover weaknesses in the F.B.I. case against Dr. Lee. Our coverage would have been strengthened had we moved faster to assess the scientific, technical and investigative assumptions that led the F.B.I. and the Department of Energy to connect Dr. Lee to what is still widely acknowledged to have been a major security breach.
The Times neither imagined the security breach nor initiated the case against Wen Ho Lee. By the time our March 6 article appeared, F.B.I. agents had been looking closely into Dr. Lee's activities for more than three years. A bipartisan congressional committee had already conducted closed hearings and written a secret report unanimously concluding that Chinese nuclear espionage had harmed American national security, and questioning the administration's vigilance. The White House had been briefed repeatedly on these issues, and the secretary of energy had begun prodding the F.B.I. Dr. Lee had already taken a lie detector test; F.B.I. investigators believed that it showed deception when he was asked whether he had leaked secrets.
The Times's stories - echoed and often oversimplified by politicians and other news organizations - touched off a fierce public debate. At a time when the Clinton administration was defending a policy of increased engagement with China, any suggestion that the White House had not moved swiftly against a major Chinese espionage operation was politically explosive.
But the investigative and political forces were converging on Dr. Lee long before The Times began looking into this story.
The assertion in our March 6 article that the Chinese made a surprising leap in the miniaturization of nuclear weapons remains unchallenged. That concern had previously been reported in The Wall Street Journal, but without the details provided by The Times in a painstaking narrative that showed how various agencies and the White House itself had responded to the reported security breach.
The prevailing view within the government is still that China made its gains with access to valuable information about American nuclear weaponry, although the extent to which this espionage helped China is disputed. And while the circle of suspicion has widened greatly, Los Alamos has not been ruled out as the source of the leak.
The article, however, had flaws that are more apparent now that the weaknesses of the F.B.I. case against Dr. Lee have surfaced. It did not pay enough attention to the possibility that there had been a major intelligence loss in which the Los Alamos scientist was a minor player, or completely uninvolved.
The Times should have moved more quickly to open a second line of reporting, particularly among scientists inside and outside the government. The paper did this in the early summer, and published a comprehensive article on Sept. 7, 1999. The article laid out even more extensively the evidence that Chinese espionage had secured the key design elements of an American warhead called the W-88 while showing at the same time that this secret material was available not only at Los Alamos but "to hundreds and perhaps thousands of individuals scattered throughout the nation's arms complex."
That article, which helped put the charges against Dr. Lee in a new perspective, appeared a full three months before the scientist was indicted.
Early on, our reporting turned up cautions that might have led us to that perspective sooner. For example, the March 6 article noted, deep in the text, that the Justice Department prosecutors did not think they had enough evidence against the Los Alamos scientist to justify a wiretap on his telephone. At the time, the Justice Department refused to discuss its decision, but the fact that the evidence available to the F.B.I. could not overcome the relatively permissive standards for a wiretap in a case of such potential gravity should have been more prominent in the article and in our thinking.
Passages of some articles also posed a problem of tone. In place of a tone of journalistic detachment from our sources, we occasionally used language that adopted the sense of alarm that was contained in official reports and was being voiced to us by investigators, members of Congress and administration officials with knowledge of the case.
This happened even in an otherwise far-seeing article on June 15, 1999, that laid out - a half year before the indictment - the reasons the Justice Department might never be able to prove that Dr. Lee had spied for China. The article said Dr. Lee "may be responsible for the most damaging espionage of the post-cold war era." Though it accurately attributed this characterization to "officials and lawmakers, primarily Republicans," such remarks should have been, at a minimum, balanced with the more skeptical views of those who had doubts about the charges against Dr. Lee.
Nevertheless, far from stimulating a witch hunt, The Times had clearly shown before Dr. Lee was even charged that the case against him was circumstantial and therefore weak, and that there were numerous other potential sources for the design of the warhead.
There are articles we should have assigned but did not. We never prepared a full-scale profile of Dr. Lee, which might have humanized him and provided some balance.
Some other stories we wish we had assigned in those early months include a more thorough look at the political context of the Chinese weapons debate, in which Republicans were eager to score points against the White House on China; an examination of how Dr. Lee's handling of classified information compared with the usual practices in the laboratories; a closer look at Notra Trulock, the intelligence official at the Department of Energy who sounded some of the loudest alarms about Chinese espionage; and an exploration of the various suspects and leads that federal investigators passed up in favor of Dr. Lee.
In those instances where we fell short of our standards in our coverage of this story, the blame lies principally with those who directed the coverage, for not raising questions that occurred to us only later. Nothing in this experience undermines our faith in any of our reporters, who remained persistent and fair-minded in their newsgathering in the face of some fierce attacks.
An enormous amount remains unknown or disputed about the case of Dr. Lee and the larger issue of Chinese espionage, including why the scientist transferred classified computer code to an easily accessible computer and then tried to hide the fact (a development first reported in The Times), and how the government case evolved. Even the best investigative reporting is performed under deadline pressure, with the best assessment of information available at the time. We have dispatched a team of reporters, including the reporters who broke our first stories, to go back to the beginning of these controversies and do more reporting, drawing on sources and documents that were not previously available. Our coverage of this case is not over.