Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a former CIA agent, has been charged with possession of classified information in the form of notebooks containing the names and other information about undercover agents. The notebooks were found in searches carried out in 2012.
Most of the stories connect Lee to the loss of American agents in China around 2010. The CIA seemed to have a mole, and the search for that mole has been intensive. The New York Times makes the connection more closely than the Washington Post, but both mention it.
It’s not an unreasonable surmise, but a surmise is all it is right now. Lee is accused of keeping notebooks with information that he shouldn’t have taken outside of properly protected areas. That is all. There may be more to come.
Jeffrey Lewis reminds us of Wen Ho Lee, who was accused of more than the evidence could bear – and part of what he was accused of was definitively refuted by another Los Alamos weapons scientist. The Times eventually had to run an explanation of their coverage.
This review showed how, in constructing a narrative to fit their unnerving suspicions, investigators took fragmentary, often ambiguous evidence about Dr. Lee’s behavior and Chinese atomic espionage and wove it into a grander case that eventually collapsed of its own light weight.
Keep this in mind when reading about Jerry Lee, and keep asking yourself if the evidence being presented by reporters is adequate to sustain their stories.