Report: Feds Botched Spy Probe

An internal Justice Department review of the Wen Ho Lee spy investigation finds the FBI failed to provide enough resources and supervision to the case, and focused so narrowly on the Los Alamos scientist that it may have missed other national security breaches, officials say.

The findings were presented to Attorney General Janet Reno in the past week. The report echoes prior congressional findings about the government's investigation into possible espionage at its nuclear labs.

If the officials' assertions are true, the report would join a list of doubts about the conduct of the Wen Ho Lee probe. For reasons she would not disclose, Reno recently replaced the top prosecutor in the case.

At her weekly news conference Friday, Reno said she had been briefed on the report—which was written by federal prosecutor Randy Bellows—but was still reading the nearly 800-page document and its three appendices.

"It is detailed, it is comprehensive, it is thoughtful," Reno said. "The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been very forthcoming and cooperated."

The Bellows report, according to officials who have seen it and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, concludes the department should have approved the warrant requested several times by the FBI.

But it adds that the FBI did not provide all the information it possessed that might have helped the department make the decision.

It concludes FBI agents spent so much time fighting for the surveillance warrant that they missed the opportunity to more quickly search Lee's work computer.

The lengthy focus on Lee also kept the bureau from considering other possible China espionage suspects and other possible leaks of national security secrets, the report added.

FBI spokesman John Collingwood declined comment.

After months of suggestions that Le would be indicted for China espionage, the scientist was charged in December with lesser offenses of removing nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos lab with no suggestion he gave them to China.

Lee, 60, has been accused of 59 counts of breaching lab security by transferring files from secure to unsecure computers and to computer tapes. He has denied any wrongdoing. He faces trial in November.

Now facing a possible sentence of life in prison if convicted, Lee is pushing to unveil the purported nuclear weapons secrets at trial. His attorneys contend most of the downloaded information was publicly available and that it was not a crime, per se, to copy it.

The Associated Press first reported in December that documents showed the FBI began to doubt more than a year ago that Lee had given China one of America's most prized nuclear secrets as originally feared. But it did not begin to refocus its investigation to other possible suspects until late last year.

The dispute over the FBI’s surveillance tactics is not the only question about the Lee case.

CBS News Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson has reported that some within the Department of Energy feel that Lee was that victim of a witch hunt.

Robert Vrooman, whose job was to oversee spy investigations at the lab, has said, "There are people who have been in this investigation from the beginning who believe that before they even started the investigation, that they had decided it was Lee."

Notra Trulock, the former head of Energy department counterintelligence and the man credited with pushing the theory of Lee as the prime suspect from the very beginning, denied Lee is a scapegoat. "I don't believe there was any preconceived notion about Lee," Trulock told CBS News.

However, Lee remained the FBI's prime suspect even after field agents had cleared him and sent a memo to headquarters saying he was not their man.

Also, as CBS News reported, three Energy department polygraphers gave Lee passing scores on a lie detector test.

The FBI subsequently reviewed the results and said Lee had actually failed the test

Federal investigators have also been criticized for the confrontational manner in which they interrogated Lee. In one 1999 interview, a transcript shows an FBI agent asking: "Do you want to go down in history whether you're professing your innocence like the Rosenbergs to the day that they take you to the electric chair?"