A forum on the Wen Ho Lee case entitled "Spy of the Century?" will take place tomorrow (September 14) in Rm 4-231 from 7-8:30pm. Graduate student Roger Hu, who worked with Dr. Lee's defense committee in Fremont, CA, will be the moderator. A 60 Minutes story on the case will be shown.
Dr. Lee, a Taiwanese-American scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory who has spent nine months in jail, agreed over the weekend to plead guilty to one felony count of improperly retaining classified nuclear weapons data. As part of the plea bargain, the government reportedly agreed to drop 58 other charges against Dr. Lee, whose supporters said he was being singled out because he was of Chinese descent. Initially, Dr. Lee was investigated on charges that he spied for China, but when he was arrested the charges involved downloading data about weapons secrets with the intention of harming the United States.
A federal judge in Albuquerque will rule on whether to accept the plea arrangement, once attorneys for both sides hammer out unspecified details. In the interim, Dr. Lee, who agreed to cooperate with the government as part of the plea bargain, remains in jail.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 13, 2000.
