Wen Ho Lee Biography

Wen Ho Lee

Wen Ho Lee got his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Cheng Kung University. In 1965 he came to the U.S. for graduate studies at Texas A&M University and received his Ph.D. in 1969. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1974 to 1999. In Dec. 1999 he was arrested and accused of stealing secrets about the design and construction of the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal. Lee was virtually exonerated in Aug. 2000 when he accepted a plea bargain from the federal government. He pled guilty to the felony charge of improperly downloading classified data and agreed to reveal why he did so. In return, the government dropped the other 58 counts of illegally downloading classified data from the computers at the Los Alamos weapons lab. He had served nine months in prison, mostly in solitary confinement.