SANTA FE (USA), Jan 15: A Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientist once suspected of spying for China said he was prosecuted because of race in a book released on Tuesday giving his side of the government case that ended with most charges dropped.

“My Country Versus Me,” co-authored by Wen Ho Lee and journalist Helen Zia, asserted that the FBI and prosecutors singled out the Taiwanese-born scientist because he was Chinese and left other scientists alone because they were white or non-Asian.

“Had I not been Chinese, I never would have been accused of espionage and threatened with execution,” Lee wrote of an FBI interrogation session during which he said agents told him he faced the same fate as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953 for spying for the Soviet Union.

Lee, 63 and a naturalized US citizen, was fired from his job at the US Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in March 1999 amid allegations of spying for China.

But Lee never was charged with espionage, and the government ultimately dropped all but one of the 59 charges of mishandling weapons data.—Reuters