Reporter investigates investigation into Yee

The Seattle Times today begins "Suspicion in the Ranks," a look inside the mysterious spy case against Army Capt. James Yee. This is the story behind that story. In the days following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Times reporter Ray Rivera interviewed Yee for a story about the U.S. military's efforts to improve understanding and tolerance of Muslims serving in the armed forces. Yee, a West Point graduate, was the Muslim chaplain at Fort Lewis.

That story ran Sept. 29, 2001. The next time Yee's name appeared in The Times was Sept. 21, 2003, in an Associated Press report. The headline said, "Muslim chaplain detained in terror war."

The AP report said Yee had spent most of the previous year at Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba, teaching fellow troops about Islam and counseling detainees suspected of having ties to terrorist networks. The Washington Times reported he was suspected of "sedition, espionage, aiding the enemy, spying and failing to obey a general order."

Rivera says those allegations "seemed out of character" with the man he had interviewed two years before. "This was a guy who seemed to truly love the military. You never got any indication that he saw a conflict between his ideology and his military role."

Following the September 2003 story, Rivera and reporter Cheryl Phillips quickly pulled together a profile of Yee, presenting what was known about the allegations against him and the shocked reactions of people close to him. "Those who know Yee insist that he is not the kind of person who could be recruited to the terrorist cause," their story said.

Yee spent 76 days in solitary confinement, but the espionage case began to unravel within weeks. Last March, six months after his arrest, the military dropped all criminal charges against him.

Last week Yee left the military. His discharge was honorable, but as today's story says, he is "forever scarred by the treatment he received from his colleagues in arms."

In June, Rivera set out to answer one question: What caused Yee to become a suspect in the first place? "The Army's explanation was that he became a suspect when he acted suspiciously in the terminal of Jacksonville Naval Air Station on a trip home from Guantánamo. That was patently untrue," Rivera says. "He had become a suspect long before.

"To find out why, we needed to go straight to the people who first became suspicious and who pushed the investigation."

Finding those people took months. Yee, who had been ordered not to talk until he left the Army, declined to be interviewed. His attorneys, likewise, would not share any government documents gathered in the case and wouldn't discuss them with any specificity. The Army, FBI and several other agencies involved in the case also declined interviews.

An important breakthrough came in early September when the first of The Times' dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests came back from the Army. The Times was able to trace the investigation back to the counterintelligence agent, Army National Guard Capt. Theo Polet, the first to ask for a probe.

Meanwhile, an espionage case against Air Force Senior Airman Ahmad Al Halabi was nearing trial. The investigations into Yee and Al Halabi were separate, but they involved many of the same people, most importantly Army Reserve Capt. Jason Orlich, lead intelligence officer at Guantánamo's Camp Delta.

Though many people had become suspicious of Yee, Al Halabi and others in their tight-knit group at Guantánamo, it was Orlich more than anybody else who transmitted those concerns to investigators.

Rivera questioned Polet and Orlich at length. They firmly believed they had reacted appropriately to behavior they interpreted as suspicious. And higher commanders had agreed with them, approving the investigation. They wanted that story to be told.

Throughout the interviews, Polet and Orlich took precautions not to divulge classified information. Rivera corroborated their accounts with other military and civilian sources close to the investigation, and obtained additional documents through sources that helped fill in the story. The reporter also spoke to officials who worked directly with Yee and who had authorized many of his activities that Polet and Orlich considered suspicious.

The report doesn't answer every question because some central players, including Yee, haven't discussed the case. Still, it is impressive reporting.

Mark Higgins, Rivera's editor, says, "Papers had reported that the probe had all but fallen apart, but no one — until now — could answer the question, why? For seven months Ray doggedly worked at answering that question. What he learned was the very genesis of the case against Yee, and the steps the Army and government took along the way that kept it alive, even when some in the military questioned its very premise."

The series continues daily in The Times through next Sunday.

Inside the Times appears in the Sunday Seattle Times. If you have a comment on news coverage, write to Michael R. Fancher, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111, call 206-464-3310 or send e-mail to mfancher@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists