Asian Leaders Decry Blocking Of Lee Honors
Patriotic group, some GOP legislators opposed support of scientist
Steve Geissinger, Oakland Tribune, Jun. 8
SACRAMENTO—Nearly 100 Asian leaders from across California joined Monday in blaming “racist, right-wing zealots” for cancellation of Assembly honors for former accused spy Wen Ho Lee.
But both a patriotic group and some Republican legislators said they remained opposed to the state honoring Lee.
Those were the latest developments in a clash that came after Oakland Tribune reports on plans by the Asian legislative caucus, and its Bay Area members, to honor Lee, whose case ended in uncertainty.
Asian leaders said during a news conference that the caucus dropped its plan to award Lee a resolution for courage after a patriotic group voiced opposition and GOP lawmakers signaled they would speak out during the ceremony, embarrassing Lee.
“The fact that the GOP caucus felt it had to placate these right-wing zealots shows that there remains many in this Capitol who have very little regard for the truth,” said Ted Wang of San Francisco-based Chinese for Affirmative Action.
Representatives of some minority GOP legislators said Monday, however, that the lawmakers would have criticized an attempt to present a resolution in the Assembly on their own.
Likewise, the patriotic group, Move America Forward, headed by former GOP lawmaker Howard Kaloogian, on Monday stood by its earlier comments that Asian legislative caucus members might be violating their oaths of office to defend against domestic enemies.
“The words of Howard Kaloogian, in describing Dr. Lee as a domestic enemy, on which he was quoted just a few days ago, illustrates that the racist attitudes that led to the original prosecution are still very much alive,” Wang said.
The Asian leaders, gathered for a policy summit, said they would proceed with honoring Lee during a dinner.
“We will fight back the accusations that because we are honoring him, we are not loyal Americans,” said Assemblywoman Judy Chu, the Monterey Park Democrat who chairs the Asian caucus. The six-member group includes Democratic Assembly members Wilma Chan of Oakland and Leland Yee of San Francisco.
Lee, a former computer engineer in the nuclear-weapons program at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was jailed nine months, half of it in solitary confinement, under special orders of top federal officials. Previously, the government applied those conditions only to terrorist and Mafia defendants.
He never was charged with stealing nuclear secrets for China, although that was the gist of news coverage of his case for almost two years. Nor was he exonerated.
The most serious charges against him—39 counts of copying those secrets with intent to aid an unnamed country or harm the national security—were dropped in September 2000. Lee pleaded guilty to a single felony of using an unclassified, unsecure computer to download “information related to the national defense.”
Lee and his supporters claimed the government pursued him simply because he was a Chinese American.
Lee’s ethnicity did fuel the federal investigations of him, but so did his copying of an extraordinary amount of nuclear-weapons software to portable tapes and his dissembling with federal investigators.
Lee never persuasively explained his need for the tapes, and his case ended in uncertainty, partly because the New York Times’ leak-driven coverage of the purported theft of U.S. nuclear secrets by China forced the Lee investigation to a premature close.
But Lee did offer a persuasive account of throwing his tapes, containing what federal prosecutors called the “crown jewels” of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, into a dumpster.
The dumpster’s contents were buried in one of two locations. An FBI team unearthed the shallowest garbage heap and found nothing. Verifying the deeper home of the tapes would, by FBI estimates, have cost at least $45 million. It was never dug up.