As politicians and journalists denounced him as a spy, Wen Ho Lee repeatedly said that federal investigators had targeted him because of his Chinese ethnicity.

After he accepted the plea bargain that freed him last year, Lee agreed to drop his claim of racial profiling. And government officials continued to deny that his race had anything to do with his arrest and the unusually harsh nine months he spent in jail, mostly in solitary confinement. "I can be very clear to you," U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno told the Associated Press, "that there was no racial bias in anything that we did with respect to Dr. Lee."

Lee did break the law by downloading secret information. Whether he was a spy, we may never know. Regardless, some Asian Americans say that the Lee case taught them a lesson, one that African American motorists have known for a while: The principle "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't always hold true for people of color.

"You can definitely feel the [racial] overtones, where Asian Americans in general are considered suspect, in particular with whichever country is considered the enemy at the time," says Phil Ting, the national coordinator for the Coalition Against Racial and Ethnic Scapegoating (CARES). "I think there is always that overtone, not just in the sensitive area of defense work, but in general."

For Ting and other Asian Americans, Lee's case fits into a pattern. After all, assumptions based on race or ethnicity are what led to the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II for "national security." Overlooked was the fact that most of those taken away to camps had been born in the United States and had no close ties to Japan, making them unlikely threats. A similar need to scapegoat led to the backlash against Chinese miners during the Gold Rush in the late nineteenth century, or to the fears of a Japanese economic "invasion" during the eighties and early nineties. It also contributes to the anti-immigrant sentiment of today.

Just like people stopped for "driving while black," Lee was presumed to be a suspect with little or no proof. For a lot of people it was easy to make the assumption that because he was Chinese, he would be a spy for China. Lee, however, was born in Taiwan and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

FBI Director Louis Freeh said in a Congressional hearing that Lee had been under suspicion as far back as 1982, but his name didn't surface until 1999. Early that year, The New York Times and other media outlets began reporting on security breaches at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where Lee had worked. The urgency on the part of the government to produce a spy picked up. Republicans who wanted to portray the Clinton administration as soft on China added to the frenzy.

With the media and political pressure building, supporters of Lee say, a fall guy was needed. Lee was an easy target. He had been under suspicion, and most important, he was of Chinese ethnicity. Soon after Lee's name surfaced, he was fired from his job at Los Alamos. It was a presumption of guilt that may also have compromised security: Robert Vrooman, the former head of counterintelligence at the Los Alamos lab, has stated that federal investigators engaged in racial profiling by focusing their investigation on Chinese American employees while ignoring other employees who could have been spies.

But it was easy to demonize someone who looked "foreign" and was not part of the mainstream. And many journalists took the bait.

The editors at The New York Times conceded as much in an extraordinary note "from the editors," published late last year, which alluded to "flaws" in their reporting on Lee. It was meant to answer critics who felt the newspaper had carelessly published unsubstantiated claims that implied Lee was a spy. "In place of a tone of journalistic detachment from our sources, we occasionally used language that adopted the sense of alarm that was contained in official reports and was being voiced to us by investigators, members of Congress and administration officials," the note read. It also stated that there should have been "a full-scale profile of Dr. Lee, which might have humanized him and provided some balance."

Nowhere in the 1,600-word treatise is race mentioned. 

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