WHAT,
HO?
Lock up your secrets, folks. Wen
Ho Lee is a free man.
After
nine months in solitary confinement, the man once accused of stealing the
“crown jewels” of America’s nuclear arsenal for the Chinese was
allowed to cop a plea to just one of the fifty-nine (fifty-nine!) felony
counts with which he was charged and was sentenced to time served, with an
apology from the presiding judge.
Note
that the charge to which Lee pleaded guilty was one of mishandling data, not
espionage. Actually, that’s all he was EVER charged with, since nothing in
the original fifty-nine count indictment actually charged him with spying.
Yep, you heard right. The master spy who supposedly gave away the most
secret of secrets to the Chinese was never actually charged with being a
spy. He was charged with copying data from a secure to an unsecure area of
the Los Alamos Lab computer system (i.e. from the double-top-secret hard
disk to the part of the network where the tech support guys store their
porn) and from there onto some computer tapes.
If Lee was a spy, he was a singularly inept one. At one point, he
apparently made the mysterious tapes on a computer that he borrowed from a
colleague. I mean, can you imagine James Bond having to actually borrow his
exploding pen or his wristwatch tracking device ? Q must be rolling over in
his grave. Furthermore, even when Lee had lost his security clearance as a
result of the investigation, he still kept trying to get into the restricted
area of Los Alamos. Suspicious? Perhaps. Stupid? Most definitely. If this is
the caliber of agent being recruited by the Red Chinese, we can send the “Mission
Impossible” team on vacation to Aruba and let them take the Man from UNCLE
with them.
Of course, let’s not forget another irony of this whole thing: the
fact that one of our own spies, in fact our nation’s top spook, has
apparently done pretty much the same thing, downloading classified data onto
his own laptop so he could work on it at home.
Former CIA head John Deutch, however,
will probably not see the inside of a jail cell
anytime soon, what with him being a white guy
instead of one of those inscrutable Orientals.
Now that the prosecution of Lee is over, Washington is filled with
the sound of a million tiny
feet, the sound of high officials scurrying like cockroaches toward
political cover. Uber-roach Bill Clinton, in the sort of backstabbing move
not seen since Eddie Haskell on “Leave It To Beaver”, has
suddenly decided to confide to reporters that he has “always had
reservations” about the Lee case. Attorney General Janet Reno, left
twisting in the wind by Clinton’s abrupt attack of doubt, stoutly denies
that there was anything wrong with locking a man up without bail in solitary
for a case that was flimsy to begin with and supported by admittedly false
allegations by one of the FBI’s top agents (who later recanted those
allegations in open court). Senate Republicans, who just a few months ago
were screaming for Reno’s resignation for failure to bring them Lee’s
head, are now screaming for her resignation for railroading poor ol’
Ho. Sen. Arlen Specter somewhat incoherently characterized the Lee
case as “the grandest case of grand larceny in the history of the world on
the espionage and the theft of vital American secrets". But hey, that
was almost a year ago. And now? Specter says “the Justice Department
"threw the book at Dr. Lee to make up for their own failings."
Predictably, Senator Specter (who sounds like a villain in a James Bond
movie his ownself) is calling for hearings on the matter.
Lott, Specter, and their other Senate
cronies haven’t suddenly gotten
religion, though; calling for Janet Reno’s scalp IS their religion.
So what do we learn from this mess? Number one, master spies ain’t
what they used to be. Number two, everything Janet Reno does is wrong.
Number three, watch where you put your data. And number four, if you
disregard number three, don’t be Chinese.
Dusty Rhoades is a
Southern Pines lawyer, who believes that the American intelligence community
has been going to hell in a handbasket ever since Agent 99 left the “Get
Smart” TV show.
OUR
GRACIOUS HOST (BOOKS-N-BYTES)
COPYRIGHT 2000 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.