Topic: Wen Ho Lee

Wen Ho Lee (Chinese: 李文和; pinyin: Lǐ Wénhé; born December 21, 1939) is a Taiwan-born Taiwanese American scientist who worked for the University of California at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. A federal grand jury indicted him of stealing secrets about U.S. nuclear arsenal for the People's Republic of China (PRC) in December 1999. After federal investigators were unable to prove these initial accusations, the government conducted a separate investigation and was ultimately only able to charge Lee with improper handling of restricted data, one of the original 59 indictment counts, to which he pleaded guilty as part of a plea settlement. In June 2006, Lee received $1.6 million from the federal government and five media organizations as part of a settlement of a civil suit he had filed against them for leaking his name to the press before any formal charges had been filed against him. Federal judge James A. Parker eventually apologized to Lee for the government misconduct of which he had been the victim.

Lee was born in 1939 in Nantou, Taiwan. He graduated from Keelung High School in the northern part of the island in 1959, after which he attended National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, Taiwan, where he graduated with a bachelor's of science in mechanical engineering in 1963.

Lee came to the United States in 1965 to continue his studies in mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University. He received his doctorate in 1969 and became a U.S. citizen in 1974. He was employed at industrial and government research firms before he moved to New Mexico in 1978. He worked as a scientist in weapons design at Los Alamos National Laboratory in applied mathematics and fluid dynamics from that year until 1999.