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A driven daughter: Her father's spy case made a rights activist of Alberta Lee

By Lesli A. Maxwell | Sacramento Bee
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Five years ago, Alberta Lee was a hotshot technical writer at IBM, making good money, winning praise and promotions from her bosses and planning a wedding.

Lee had charted, and was living, what she calls an "apolitical, mainstream life" -- until she had an unnerving conversation with her father, Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

That came in December 1998 when he revealed to his youngest child that FBI agents were questioning him about nuclear weapons secrets and China. The Taiwanese-born scientist, a longtime employee of the New Mexico weapons lab, was nervous, but reluctant to hire a lawyer.

"I just remember thinking, 'I wish I knew about the law and what our rights are,' " Alberta Lee said. "That's when things began to change for me."

Now, the 30-year-old Lee is a second-year student at the King Hall School of Law at the University of California, Davis, drawing on her father's case nearly every day as she prepares for a new life as a civil rights attorney.

"His name comes up a lot when we talk about civil rights and racial profiling," says Archana Sahgal, Lee's friend and fellow law student at Davis. "Alberta has an amazing way of telling her father's story from a personal perspective, and people really want to hear what she has to say. She also really listens to other students and professors talk about the case from a legal perspective."

In the year that followed the FBI's first inquiries about nuclear weapon espionage at Los Alamos, Lee saw her father get fired, arrested, detained in solitary confinement for nine months and portrayed as America's worst spy since Ethel and Julius Rosenberg had been executed in 1953 for selling atomic secrets to the Soviets.

Lee, whose only public speaking experience had been a poetry reading in a college creative writing class, became her father's spokesperson and chief fund-raiser for his legal defense. She also became a forceful critic of racial profiling. She traveled around the country to speak out against government officials she believes targeted her father because of his nationality.

The federal case against Wen Ho Lee crumbled in the summer of 2000, and 58 of 59 charges against him were dropped. He pleaded guilty to one felony count of copying classified documents onto computer tapes without permission and was released after the federal judge who had ordered his detention issued an extraordinary apology.

"That apology," said Lee, "reinstated my faith in the legal system."

By then, she was a full-fledged civil rights activist and celebrity, particularly in the Asian American community, and her conviction to become a lawyer had intensified.

The demands of law school have turned her once public and hectic life into a fairly solitary one. She still makes speeches to civil rights groups and at colleges, but much less often.

Most everything Lee has worked on in law school is a reminder of her father's civil rights ordeal.

Right now, she's researching federal statutes to help a Rastafarian inmate in Soledad state prison get out of solitary confinement for refusing to cut his long dreadlocks. Last summer, Lee worked for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York City, advising immigrants on complying with the federal government's special registration requirements.

"There's no question that she is driven by what happened to her family," says Bill Hing, a professor of law and Asian American studies at UC Davis. "Her drive to develop a certain set of skills and learn how the legal system can help people makes her a good fit" for public interest law.

While happy to talk about herself, Lee is protective of her parents, who now live in Northern California (she declines to be more specific) to be closer to her. Her father, 64, fishes, gardens and occasionally publishes papers in science journals. Her mother, Lee said, is relieved to have privacy again.

She recognizes the irony in choosing a University of California law school, after the university-managed lab in Los Alamos became such a source of upheaval for her family.

Despite her ambivalence about UC and Los Alamos, Lee believes strongly that the university -- not a private company -- is the best entity to continue running the lab where the Manhattan Project launched the nuclear era.

When asked whether she will seek a high-profile role as a civil rights lawyer, Lee says her goal is to "make an impact and keep the government honest."

But her friend Sahgal insists that Lee is already a force in the civil rights community.

"Alberta sees herself as a small part of the movement, even though most of us see her as a huge part of it."

http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/7869116p-8809168c.html