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While most of the sources quoted in the March 6 story were anonymous, the point of view of one was clearly identified -- and, according to Brill's and other critics, adopted by the Times. A former Energy Department investigator with the James Bondian name of Notra Trulock was one of the first to raise questions about Los Alamos and Lee (who was not named in Gerth and Risen's initial story). Trulock was a favored witness on several Republican-run congressional committees, even though, as the Times' revisionist September piece pointed out, "He has a bachelor's degree in political science and no formal technical training." And according to the Brill's story, the Times' original coverage smacked of politics and faulty science.

Jeff Gerth, the senior reporter on the stories, has been attacked for his stories in the past. His seemingly endless coverage of Whitewater kept it on the forefront of the national agenda; Schmidt implies Gerth has it out for President Clinton. Even his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on another tale of Chinese espionage had political implications. In 1988, he reported on two American companies, Loral and Hughes, that shared rocket expertise with the Chinese and unintentionally "advanced Beijing's ballistic missile program." Gerth focused on the contributions of Loral chairman Bernard Schwartz to the Democratic Party and the Clinton administration's hands-off policy vis-à-vis China in general. (The Cox Committee, named for its chairman, Republican Rep. Christopher Cox, issued an exhaustive and much-disputed 872-page report that accused the companies of putting their interests above those of the nation.) Gerth has been accused of anti-Clinton bias by many of the president's supporters. His co-writer on the espionage stories, James Risen, who came to the Times from the Los Angeles Times, is famous for breaking the news that the Clinton administration approved of arms shipments from Iran to Muslims in Bosnia.

Still, it's hard to go along with the Brill's thesis. The paper's decision to go with the Los Alamos story was based on a live (and long-standing) federal investigation, as documents -- many declassified since the initial report -- reveal. In an August 1999 "Special Statement on the Wen-Ho Lee Espionage Investigation" by a Senate committee chaired by Sens. Fred Thompson and Joseph Lieberman, "the story of the mishandled Lee investigation" comes to contentious life.

As the FBI's repeated application for a search or electronic-surveillance warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is repeatedly denied, the bureau returns again and again to the question of "probable cause" for investigating Lee.

But while the question of his guilt or innocence remains undecided, the paper's belief that there was a story there -- a story of national import -- seems more than defensible. Engelberg says that science reporters vetted the Gerth and Risen pieces early on and that future reports -- including Broad's -- merely advanced the story using new information that the publication of the first article had brought to light. "We were struggling on this thing, trying to understand a very classified secret story," he says. "The reporters didn't always have on the first day what they had on the 10th day or the 100th day. A story like this evolves."

When I called him, Schmidt said he stood by his story but would not otherwise comment.

Next page | Was the Brill's piece a fair hit?