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NATO in denial
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Shays calls the GOP's bluff
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[05/26/99]

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Counterintelligence agents were appalled by the loose security at Los Alamos and other labs, according to reports, with classified papers strewn about desks and uncleared visitors frequenting the installation.

"Some feel Wen Ho Lee was not guilty of anything, that he's a scapegoat for a sloppy environment, and that various minor security allegations were trumped up against him," said a government agent whose expertise is unchallenged. "The polygraph really didn't support anything one way or another." While his take on Lee's culpability could not be corroborated, it was a sign that there is skepticism about the Lee case even within the security community.

Meanwhile, the difficulty of nailing moles with the polygraph is compounded when foreign nationals are involved, experts agree. The emotional pull of the homeland tends to skew answers to certain questions.

"You don't ask an ethnic: Are you loyal to a government other than the United States?" a retired deputy chief of counterintelligence for the FBI told Salon. "In fact, that's one the agency [CIA] used to ask. Most ethnics will flunk that, because if they're first-generation ethnics, they have ties to the homeland, even if they've fled. The question shouldn't be if they're loyal to a country, but if they're working for another country's government."

Further complicating the security challenge is the fact that Chinese-American scientists may not know they are helping Beijing's spies when they hand over scientific papers. Chinese intelligence also sends "sleeper agents" to the United States, such as college students, where they may remain dormant for years before being activated, a CIA source said.

Polygraphs can also boomerang on innocent employees, tie an agency's security personnel in knots, and end up giving employers a legal and public relations headache. As Salon reported exclusively last June, a 28-year-old CIA lawyer named Adam Ciralsky was put on paid leave last year after flunking an agency polygraph even though he had passed three previous tests. His lawyer, former Justice Department Nazi hunter Neal Sher, is preparing a suit against the CIA.

Scientists outside the close-knit brotherhood of polygraph operators say the only way a "lie detector" can be completely reliable is when a suspect is being interrogated about information only he and the investigators could know -- the combination to a safe, say, or a closely held code word.

Meanwhile, no one is yet predicting the fate of Wen Ho Lee, the figure at the center of the scandal, who was suspended from his job at Los Alamos after classified documents were found in his private computer files. He has not been charged with anything.

In all the hue and cry over allegations in the Cox Report, it has largely gone unnoticed that evidence of Beijing's theft of U.S. nuclear secrets came in the form of a Chinese document that fell into the hands of the CIA. According to a New York Times account, the document was in a "suitcase" full of material handed over by a Chinese spy who "walked into the CIA's arms" in Taiwan. Later, however, the man was judged to be under the control of Beijing. Puzzled CIA experts don't know what to make of the incident, but they still regard the document as genuine.

In yet another irony relevant to the case, little notice was taken recently of a security violation similar to Lee's by one of the CIA's own past chiefs. Agents making a routine inspection discovered the home computers of former CIA Director John M. Deutch filled with classified documents that he was unauthorized to possess. A referral was made to the Justice Department, which declined to prosecute.

Closer to home, the Washington Post reported recently that the CIA itself had unloaded scores of its own laptops for sale -- while they were still filled with CIA documents. One of the newspaper's columnists is running a tongue-in-cheek contest for readers to guess what was in the files.
salon.com | May 27, 1999

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