Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy writes about the case of Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Daniel King in his electronic newsletter Secrecy News:
DANIEL KING: THE NAVY’S WEN HO LEE?
The case of US Navy Petty Officer Daniel M. King has emerged as yet another espionage horrorshow and a cautionary tale of prosecutorial authority run amok.
King was a Navy cryptanalyst who, following an inconclusive polygraph examination in 1999, was accused of committing espionage. He was subjected to an arduous and coercive interrogation involving sessions of up to 19 hours over a three week period, culminating in a confession that he would later recant. Despite intensive efforts, Navy investigators were unable to develop any significant corroborating evidence that the alleged espionage had ever taken place.
Sometimes described as the Navy’s version of Wen Ho Lee, Petty Officer King spent an extraordinary 520 days in pretrial confinement before the charges against him were finally dropped.
The decisive moment in the case came on March 9 when Commander James P. Winthrop, the military judge who served as “investigating officer,” recommended that the case be dismissed.
“It has become apparent to me … that the government has not been able to effectively prosecute this case,” Winthrop wrote. “The espionage charge… is based exclusively on a confession that the accused subsequently contradicted on several occasions.” Moreover, “there are several fundamental extenuating and mitigating facts relevant to the charge.”
Cmdr. Winthrop’s remarkable memorandum, which loosely recalls Judge James A. Parker’s expression of disgust at the government’s handling of the Wen Ho Lee case, is posted here:
http://www.fas.org/irp/ops/ci/king/winthrop.html
The dismissal of the case is a credit to King’s tenacious and energetic civilian attorney Jonathan Turley. Turley’s peculiar strategy involved, among other things, an attempt to turn the tables on the government by relentlessly accusing the military judge and opposing counsel of security violations both large and small (such as using a cellular telephone inside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, failing to use cover sheets on classified documents, etc.). Several of Mr. Turley’s complaints, submitted to DCI George Tenet and others, are posted here:
http://www.fas.org/irp/ops/ci/king/index.html
These items provide some fascinating insights into the conduct of the case, which is otherwise mostly classified. One of Turley’s complaints notes, for example, a settlement offer made by the government to drop all charges against Petty Officer King if he would agree not to pursue a lawsuit against the Navy or officials in the case. The offer was rejected.
The outcome of the King case is particularly remarkable because the government almost never loses an espionage case once a decision is made to bring it to trial. The 1986 case of former army civilian Richard Craig Smith is perhaps the only instance in the last several decades in which an espionage trial ended in an acquittal of the defendant.
If Jonathan Turley is the kind of attorney you want nearby when you are falsely accused of a hideous crime, then Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Shelby seems like someone who should be avoided if at all possible.
Senator Shelby lashed out at the Navy, not for its cruel interrogation or its trouncing of an American sailor’s constitutional rights, but because it failed to win a conviction.
“I believe it was a very strong case — and it was bungled,” Senator Shelby told the Washington Post yesterday.
A Pentagon press briefing yesterday noted that both the Department of Defense Inspector General and the Navy have begun “reviews” of the case.
A reporter asked whether any disciplinary action has been taken against the investigators who were involved in the case. “Have they been suspended from duty or anything like that?” Pentagon spokesman Adm. Craig R. Quigley replied, “Not that I’m aware of.”
See excerpts from yesterday’s press briefing here: