FBI Official Misled Congress About Wen Ho Lee, Report Says

WASHINGTON — A senior FBI official misled Congress two years ago about an espionage investigation at Los Alamos National Laboratory in which physicist Wen Ho Lee was identified as a suspect, according to the General Accounting Office.

FBI Assistant Director Neil J. Gallagher told a Senate committee in June 1999 that he had “full confidence” in the initial investigation by the Department of Energy. But in a report sent Thursday to Congress, the GAO said Gallagher “had ample opportunity to know and should have known” about an FBI memo expressing “serious concerns” about the investigation.

That document was sent from the FBI’s Albuquerque field office to headquarters on Jan. 22, 1999 -- more than a month before Lee was fired from Los Alamos.

GAO’s Office of Special Investigations said it was unable to determine whether Gallagher, who heads the FBI’s National Security Division, intentionally misled the committee.

“Mr. Gallagher told us that he did not lie or purposely mislead the Congress, but that he inadvertently gave incomplete testimony,” the report says.

The GAO investigation was requested by Sens. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.).

“While the GAO says it’s unable to prove Mr. Gallagher intentionally misled, Congress should be suspicious of anything he represents to us in the future,” Grassley said Thursday.

“This is another instance of the FBI undermining the confidence that Congress and the public have in federal law enforcement,” he said.

Gallagher, in a rebuttal letter, took exception to the GAO’s conclusion that his testimony was misleading.

He admitted that his statements “may have not been complete,” but said that was because he did not know about the Jan. 22 memo when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs.

“During my testimony on the Wen Ho Lee matter and at no time during my 28-year career in the FBI have I ever misled or intentionally misinformed a member of Congress,” Gallagher wrote.

Lee, 61, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was charged in December 1999 with 59 counts of mishandling classified information and violating the Atomic Energy Act. After the allegations of spying collapsed, he pleaded guilty in New Mexico last September to a single felony count of downloading nuclear weapons data to portable tapes.

GAO investigators determined that a copy of the Jan. 22 memo was included in a briefing book prepared for Gallagher prior to his Congressional testimony. The GAO report says Gallagher acknowledged failing “to read the briefing book in its entirety.”

GAO investigators also reviewed a Feb. 22 memo from Gallagher to the Justice Department in which he forwarded various documents in the Lee case, including the Jan. 22 Albuquerque memo. Gallagher said in his rebuttal that the Feb. 22 memo was written and initialed on his behalf by a subordinate.

According to the GAO report, Gallagher told GAO investigators that he first learned of the Jan. 22 memo after his Senate testimony during a conversation in late June or early July 1999 with the agent in charge of the FBI’s Albuquerque office.

In his rebuttal, Gallagher said it was worth noting that the special agent also told GAO investigators that “it was clear to him that I was unaware of the January 22, 1999, document that he was talking about.”