Yee, a Chinese-American West Point grad, worked as an Army chaplain at Camp Delta, the Guantanamo Bay prison where “enemy combatants” are held. A convert to Islam who studied in Syria and married a Syrian woman, he was arrested in September and accused of espionage. Officials said they found suspicious documents in Yee’s backpack, including information about detainees and two small notebooks containing handwritten “notes and diagrams.” Pentagon officials believed he might be part of a Gitmo spy ring that they thought was feeding classified information about prisoners to terrorist groups. Prosecutors seemed so certain of Yee’s guilt that they hauled him to the military’s maximum-security brig in South Carolina and warned his lawyers to start preparing a death-penalty defense.
Yet just three months later, no one is talking about sending Yee to the gallows anymore. Last month, without explanation, the Army quietly dropped the espionage accusations against Yee and allowed him to return to active duty. But the prosecution isn’t quite finished with him yet. In the course of scouring Yee’s life, investigators discovered that the chaplain was harboring secrets, but of a different sort: he now faces charges of adultery (for carrying on an affair with a female officer) and pornography (for accessing adult Web sites on his work laptop computer).
The Pentagon is also pursuing Yee for allegedly mishandling classified information. Even that part of the case, however, isn’t going very well. Last week a preliminary hearing to determine if he had broken security rules was cut short when the government admitted it wasn’t prepared. Investigators, it said, hadn’t yet finished the “classification review” of the documents seized from Yee. (None of the suspect papers had security markings, and Yee says the handwritten notebooks were just his own notes on prisoners he was counseling.) Instead, the prosecutors called Yee’s mistress to the stand, where she recounted the details of their affair, down to his choice of contraception. After two days of testimony that barely touched on security matters, the presiding officer, Col. Dan Trimble, ended the hearing and put the case on ice for 42 days, so prosecutors could figure out just what security rules they believe Yee violated.
Government officials have refused to comment on any aspect of the case, including why they believed Yee to be a spy in the first place. But Yee’s attorneys and other sources close to the case say the chaplain may have been mistakenly swept up in the Pentagon’s intense fears earlier this year that Gitmo had been infiltrated by the enemy.
Last summer, a few weeks before Yee’s arrest, investigators arrested Ahmad al-Halabi, a Syrian-born Air Force airman who worked as a translator at Gitmo. He was charged with espionage after officials said they’d found 186 “sensitive, classified” documents about detainees in his possession. (Al-Halabi has pleaded not guilty.) Yee and al-Halabi knew each other well; both worked in the camp library. That may have been enough to draw suspicion to Yee. “Someone looked at it and said, he’s a Muslim, he’s married to a Syrian woman… and he knows al-Halabi, who had just been arrested,” says Maj. Scot Sikes, one of Yee’s defense attorneys.
Eventually, investigators apparently concluded Yee wasn’t part of a criminal conspiracy. His lawyers are surprised that the military, perhaps in an effort to save face, is still pursuing the lesser adultery and pornography charges–offenses rarely punished on their own.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have learned themselves how easy it is to run afoul of the military’s rules on handling sensitive information. In an embarrassing slip-up, one of the prosecutors himself broke security regulations when he inadvertently sent Yee’s defense team a packet of classified documents. The prosecutors had no choice but to go to Yee’s lawyers and sheepishly ask them to give the secret papers back.
