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Morning News

Fmr. U.S. Ambassador to China James Lilley Discusses Wen Ho Lee Case

Aired September 13, 2000 - 11:07 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: That Wen Ho Lee case certainly has raised new concerns about Chinese spying in the U.S. And among Chinese-Americans, it has raised concerns about racial profiling.

Now live from Washington, his perspective on this ongoing story, former U.S. ambassador to China, Ambassador James Lilley.

Sir, good morning to you.

JAMES LILLEY, FMR. U.S. AMBASSADOR TO CHINA: How are you?

HEMMER: I'm doing just fine. Good to talk with you again.

You think, in a story you wrote for the "New York Times" yesterday, that the government bungled this case from the very beginning. How so, sir?

LILLEY: Well, when you do find a suspect -- and apparently there was some information indicating Lee Wen Ho was a suspect, based on contacts not reported in China, based on equivocal lie detector tests, based on our knowledge of the W-88 warhead and the fact that it came from Los Alamos, and based on a number of other factors, there was suspicion that there was a spy. And since he had the access, it focused on him.

Unfortunately, the case got botched. They didn't do the things you have to do before he's alerted. They didn't run the independent surveillance, they didn't use reliable informants, they didn't use phone taps, they didn't get early access to his computer before he was tipped off. That's when you get the data.

HEMMER: Why was...

LILLEY: Once you tip...

HEMMER: Ambassador, excuse me for the interruption here...

LILLEY: Yes, go ahead.

HEMMER: ... but why in this case with such heightened sensitivity would it be carried out according to the way you're describing it? LILLEY: I can't explain that. All I can say, it hurts professionals in the business to see this kind of activity. It was contaminated by jurisdictional fights within Energy. You saw people bad-mouthing each other. you saw criticism of the FBI, you saw revelation of the lie detector tests too early, you saw contradictory evidence about the importance of the information. All of this blew out of proportion.

And the unfortunate thing is it turned into a racist issue and the tables were turned on us. And he -- and Lee Wen Ho became the innocent party being harmed by racist people and images of Japanese internment, Chinese Exclusion Act came out. This is very unfortunate. Many leading Chinese-Americans have come to me very pained about this thing, and I think this is real damage done to our relations.

HEMMER: Damage done to our relations with the Chinese. Long after this case is over and solved, what's the living legacy that we have learned out of Los Alamos and the lasting impact it could have on legitimate relations between Beijing and Washington?

LILLEY: Well, first of all, we spy on them, they spy on us. We can't get outraged on spying. The fact is that they do use ethnic Chinese to collect information on the United States, and they have a major operational effort against the United States. We are the target, logically, because of our technology and our important position. They're going to collect on us and they're going to use very arcane and complex methods, which take very skillful people with excellent investigative techniques to find out because these are not the Aldrich Ames case or the Rosenberg case where we did run the investigation, got the evidence, made the case and made it stick. In this case, we started collecting, we didn't do a very good job, we surfaced the case. Obviously the action was taken to block off access to the real stuff that would be incriminating. You couldn't get it. It's too late.

HEMMER: Ambassador James Lilley, live in Washington, thank you sir. Appreciate your time.

LILLEY: My pleasure.

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