It was hard to find anyone left standing after the government's strange case against nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee came crashing to the ground last week. No one was bleeding so heavily as the FBI and its director, Louis Freeh, whose top agent gave up some of his testimony against the 2-year-old Los Alamos engineer. But there was rubble everywhere you looked. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose department had ignored security at Los Alamos for years, was walking around in a daze. Rescue workers were still searching for Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder, who were trying to explain why they had suddenly agreed to drop 58 of 59 charges against a man once accused of stealing the 'crown jewels 'of America's nuclear factory. When master survivalist Bill Clinton came out of hiding, it was to confide to reporters that he had 'always had reservations' about some aspects of the case —words that recalled the way he ducked responsibility for the Waco fiasco in 1998. And though the neighbors in White Rock, N. M. put out flags last Wednesday and welcomed Lee home with a big backyard party on Barcelona Avenue, the man at the center of the wreckage still has a lot of explaining to do. Lee won back his freedom only after pleading guilty to a single felony count of mishandling national-defense information, which means he downloaded the equivalent of 400, 000 pages of classified data about the U. S. nuclear-weapons program onto an unsecured computer system and then transferred them to high-volume cassettes. Lee had refused to spell out why he spent an estimated 40 hours over 70 days downloading all that data, what he did with much of it or why he tried repeatedly to enter a restricted area after losing his security clearance—once, around 3: 30 a. m. on Christmas Eve. As part of his plea agreement, Lee promised to explain everything to investigators. He will never again be able to vote, however, Or serve on a jury. But the real damage from the Lee case isn't the leaks from national labs or the mystery of secrets that got away. Instead, the case makes it harder to believe that in America at least, the governmem will always ensure that the punishment fits the crime. The Wen Ho Lee story began in 1995, when a walk-in source gave the CIA a document from the People's Republic of China that claimed Chinese weapons designers had obtained specific and highly classified details of an American nuclear warhead known as the W-88. Not everyone in the intelligence community was convinced the document was genuine. The Department Of Energy and the FBI, which handles spy catching, quickly learned that several agencies and some defense contractors had information about the W-88, and concluded that the leak had probably occurred at the weapons lab at Los Alamos, where most of the data were stored. DOE officials compiled a list of about 12 people who had both access to the material and contact with Chinese officials and scientists. On the list was Wen Ho Lee. Finding out spies is hard. To stand a chance of putting them behind bars, you almost have to catch them in the act of forking over secrets. But in the Los Alamos case, the damage was already done, and so agents had to find a way to 'walk the cat back, 'as they like to say, and prove the crime in retrospect. That makes spy catching even harder, but the FBI didn't do itself any favors. Bureau sources admit that when the probe was opened in May 1996, it was left to second- string agents. 'It was dumb and dumber, 'says a bureau veteran. 'They put the wrong people to investigate it, and they didn't give it sufficient oversight from headquarters. ' From the sentence 'Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose department had ignored security at Los Alamos for years, was walking around in a daze. ', we know that_____.