Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China by David Wise

Danville, California. The FBI had maintained the wiretap on Min's phone, and it heard the caller identify himself and say that he was a nuclear weapons designer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
    According to a report of a polygraph exam that was later administered to the caller, he had learned that Min "was having problems with some men in China," was aware that he was from Taiwan, and had called just "out of curiosity." He offered to find out who had "squealed" on Gwo-bao Min.
    The caller's name was Wen Ho Lee. The Los Alamos scientist had surfaced in the TIGER TRAP case seventeen years before he would become a celebrated spy suspect himself, in an unrelated FBI investigation.
    Wen Ho Lee claimed that he had learned about Min's problems from a story in a Chinese-language newspaper. He called Min out of more than curiosity, however. Both Lee and Min were born in Taiwan, and Lee had been in contact with nuclear researchers in Taiwan for several years and had done consulting work for them. Attorney General Janet Reno testified at a closed Senate hearing in 1999 that Wen Ho Lee told the FBI "that he contacted [Min] because Lee thought [Min] was in trouble for doing the same sort of thing that Lee had been doing for Taiwan." *
    According to a detailed TOP SECRET review of the Wen Ho Lee case in 2000 by a Justice Department team, the FBI was worried that "Lee might be acting on behalf of a Taiwan intelligence service."Bill Cleveland was summoned to Albuquerque to brief the FBI field office on TIGER TRAP .
    At the same time, after Lee's 1982 phone call to Min, the FBI opened a full counterintelligence investigation of Wen Ho Lee. The Albuquerque office asked the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit to prepare a personality profile to establish whether Lee might be "involved in clandestine intelligence activities."
    Not realizing that he had been overheard on the wiretap, Lee lied to the FBI and although asked several times, said that he "had never attempted to contact" Min.Lee, the review team concluded, "provided truthful answers only when confronted with irrefutable evidence (i.e. the FBI's awareness of his phone call ...) or when faced with a polygraph."
    Then there was an astonishing development. Although Lee was under active investigation as a possible spy, in December 1983 the FBI asked him to go to San Francisco and help the bureau on the TIGER TRAP case. Lee was instructed to go to Min's home and try to lure him into revealing what secrets he had passed to the Chinese. Before he left, at the FBI's behest, Lee placed four telephone calls to Min, with the bureau's agents listening in.
    When Wen Ho Lee showed up at Min's home, he was rebuffed by the former Livermore engineer. The door was not exactly slammed in Lee's face; he spent about half an hour with Min. But he did not succeed in the mission he had been given by the FBI.
    The Justice Department review team was troubled, however, to discover that the FBI had enlisted Lee's help "in the direct contact of the subject of an espionage investigation."
    Early in 1984, Lee passed a polygraph examination in which he was asked about his telephone call to Min. On the polygraph test, he denied working for any foreign intelligence agency. Although Lee had lied by denying his phone call to Min until he was confronted with the wiretap evidence, on March 12 the FBI closed its investigation of Wen Ho Lee.
    ***
    With Gwo-bao Min forced out of Livermore, and Chien Ning's magazine operation moved back to Beijing, Chien left San Francisco and with her husband moved to Pasadena. She became an American citizen, taught seismology at the University of Southern California, and also engaged in a number of business ventures.
    Federico C. Sayre, an activist attorney in Santa Ana—he once represented César Chávez, the charismatic leader of the United Farm Workers union—knew Chien and hoped through their friendship to become a middleman between the Chinese government and US investors