Beverley Lumpkin: Halls of Justice

ByABC News
December 8, 2000, 12:18 PM

W A S H I N G T O N, Dec. 8 --

DIGGING FOR SECRETS

At the end of last month the strange saga of former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee took an even stranger turn when officials acknowledged the FBI was preparing to search the Los Alamos landfill in hopes of finding the tapes containing highly classified nuclear secrets that Lee claims to have thrown out.

The story seemed absurd but now theres an even more amazing turn: the dig has been fruitful; beyond all imagining, tapes have been found!

Youll recall that when Lee reached his plea bargain with the government, he was required to submit to debriefing sessions during which he was to recount everything he could about his making of the tapes and what had happened to them.

Sources say during those sessions, the last two of which are scheduled for next week, Lee told agents that he had discarded the tapes in the regular Los Alamos lab trash. The sources say he also named the month and year when he had thrown them away; thats believed to be in 1995.

Well, the Los Alamos landfill has a special section just for lab trash. And the FBI has a bright young agent whose undergraduate degree was in archaeology. So they were able to determine very specifically where the trash from that month in 1995 had been deposited.

They dug down through the layers and, according to two officials, have so far actually retrieved several tapes. The tapes are currently in the FBI lab where experts are trying to determine if they are indeed the coveted Lee tapes. And the agents are still digging, hoping for more.

PELTIER CLEMENCY BID IGNITES FBI FEARS

Leonard Peltier is the American Indian Movement leader whos been locked up ever since his conviction for the murders of two FBI agents at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota, in 1975.

During that time he has managed to convince a huge constituency that he is innocent and was railroaded by corrupt government agents.

Just a few of those who have supported his bid for clemency: civil and human rights leaders Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Amnesty International, entertainers Robert Redford, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Winona Ryder, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Rep. Connie Morella (R-Md.), Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.