Hoffman, Ian

PERSONAL:

Male.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Albuquerque, NM. E-mail—ihoffman@angnewspapers.com.

CAREER:

Alameda Newspaper Group, Oakland Tribune/Tri-Valley Herald, staff writer.

WRITINGS:

(With Dan Stober) A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor to newspapers, including the Albuquerque Journal.

SIDELIGHTS:

Journalist Ian Hoffman is the author, with fellow journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Dan Stober, of A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage. The book began as a newspaper story about Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese immigrant and weapons-code scientist who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory until he was arrested during the mid-1990s and accused of spying for China. Ultimately, Lee pled guilty to a single count and was released after serving nine months in detention. Hoffman and Stober analyze the incident, admitting that Lee was guilty of a major security offense, even though he was found innocent of the espionage charges, but they also determined that the FBI was not blameless in their handling of the situation. In a review for Publishers Weekly, a contributor called the book an "exemplary investigative report," and Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky, writing for the American Scientist, considered it "an excellent sequential account of this complex series of events." Writing for the Nation, Dusanka Miscevic and Peter Kwong concluded: "Written like a crime novel, their book is at its best as an exposé of the behind-the-scenes workings of Washington politics, in which the truth is all too easily sacrificed for political expediency."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Scientist, July-August, 2002, Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky, "A Spy or Not a Spy, that Was the Question," p. 371.

Booklist, November 1, 2001, Brad Hooper, review of A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage, p. 442.

Business Week, February 2, 2002, "The Making of a Scapegoat," p. 17.

Economist, February 9, 2002, "Trade Secrets, Nuclear Espionage."

Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2002, review of A Convenient Spy, p. 36.

Library Journal, December, 2001, Daniel K. Blewett, review of A Convenient Spy, p. 151.

Nation, April 15, 2002, Dusanka Miscevic and Peter Kwong, "The China Syndrome," p. 25.

National Journal, June 1, 2002, Dick Kirschten, "The Counterintelligence Dilemma."

New York Times, February 17, 2002, Joseph E. Persico, "Life under Suspicion."

Publishers Weekly, November 12, 2001, review of A Convenient Spy, p. 46.

ONLINE

Alameda Newspaper Group Online,http://www.insidebayarea.com/ (November 8, 2006), staff biography of Ian Hoffman.*