MY COUNTRY VERSUS ME: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused of Being a Spy, by Wen Ho Lee with Helen Zia. Hyperion, 332 pp.

A CONVENIENT SPY: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage, by Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman. Simon & Schuster, 384 pp.

Cliches about historical periods may be an absolutely necessary part of public life; they provide a kind of mental shorthand without which the past becomes too garrulous to quote. But it isn't always easy to know which cliche works best. The case of Wen Ho Lee -- the Los Alamos scientist accused, and acquitted, of spying for the People's Republic of China -- does tend to fit the new wisdom about the Clinton years as having been a time of maximum incompetence in all matters pertaining to foreign intelligence. Or was it, conversely, just another episode in the right-wing jihad against Clinton? The threat still posed by godless Communism remained a key belief of the seething-kook wing of the Republican party throughout the late 1990s, when thousands of talk-radio hours were devoted to covert Chinese influence on the Clintonistas. In prosecuting Lee as a spy, the administration could deflect criticism for accepting alleged illegal campaign contributions from the PRC.

Then again, perhaps it was another sign of the era's rampant media sensationalism. For, after all, it was coverage by The New York Times that turned the overzealous investigation of Lee into something like the bureaucratic equivalent of mob justice. Two very different new books on the case share one especially dramatic scene: an FBI agent brandishing the Times article comparing the espionage case to that of the Rosenbergs, saying, "You know what happened to them? They electrocuted them, Wen Ho."

The scientist was released from custody in September 2000 with an apology by the federal judge hearing the case. (While found guilty of mishandling secure materials, Lee was absolved of all espionage charges.) The problem now is how to remember the affair, what meaning to take away from it.

And in that regard, Lee's memoir has an advantage, for he can present the events as a clear story of victimization and vindication. My Country Versus Me narrates a nightmare of racial profiling and bewildering imprisonment, in which Lee's suffering is a direct consequence of his perfect innocence - not just in the sense that he is not guilty of the accusations, but also utterly naive about the duplicity of criminal investigators and the illogic of politics.

The story told by A Convenient Spy is not so clear-cut. The authors, both of them journalists, write in a studied tone of "some-say-this, others-however-say-that" which is the hallmark of newspaper reporting -- its great strength and commanding tedium. It is not an exciting or moving book. It plods. You feel as if you are reading an unusually detailed feature article, one that goes on for about 350 pages. And yet A Convenient Spy, for all its clunk, is so much more valuable a book than My Country Versus Me that it is difficult even to compare them.

Given its Kafkaesque overtone, Lee's memoir makes an immediate appeal to one's sense of helplessness before big, powerful, confusing institutions. Stober and Hoffman make considerable efforts to show how those institutions function, as each bad decision feeds the next. They also chronicle the extremely poor judgment of Wen Ho Lee himself (with rather less indulgence than the scientist's ghostwriter).

"In my straightforward scientific way of thinking," claims Lee at the outset of his account, "once a problem is solved, it is finished and there is no need to check if one plus one might suddenly yield a different answer." This simple honesty, he says, put him at a disadvantage during interrogation, whenever "new and unrelated events were thrown into the mix, mutating it into a more virulent inquiry and magnifying what were once simple questions by significant multiples." He allows that he did, in fact, download a few computer files onto tapes -- but only in the interest of making sure there were backup copies of his work. It was all very innocent. Yet it left him vulnerable to the suspicions of xenophobic spycatchers with too much time on their hands once the Cold War wound down.

From Stober and Hoffman, one learns that Lee's tendency when questioned was to deny, forget or finesse suspicious behavior until presented with proof. The secure material he downloaded -- a total of 1,600 files in all -- included descriptions of "the shapes and sizes of the interior components of nuclear weapons," as well as the formulas needed to create a virtual simulation of an atomic explosion, "offering a prediction of how well the bomb would perform." It constituted "the largest unauthorized collection ever of nuclear-weapons simulation tools," which Lee stored "on an open computer network with hundreds of Internet connections to the outside world."

In his memoir, Lee insists that he padlocked the collection with three levels of password. Stober and Hoffman indicate there were only two passwords, one of them being "WHLee." Furthermore, he then downloaded the files to tape -- and later threw the tapes into a Los Alamos Dumpster. They were, in any case, never recovered.

The picture emerging from Stober and Hoffman's reporting, and carefully airbrushed out of Wen Ho Lee's own self-portrait, is that of someone who, if not actually engaged in espionage himself, would certainly have made a professional spook's workload much lighter. Once the awkward and disobliging questions came, his vaunted "straightforward scientific way of thinking" went into the Dumpster, too. There is a substantial entry in the index to A Convenient Spy for "Lee, Wen Ho, misleading statements of."

(Mental note: If FBI or counterintelligence officers ever show up at front door, either 1) confess every transgression ever committed, beginning no later than adolescent shoplifting, or 2) get lawyer immediately. Do not permit memory to grow cloudy, until lawyer begins hinting this is appropriate.)

The value of Stober and Hoffman's account is by no means limited to that of providing a corrective to My Country Versus Me's easygoing self-exculpation. The authors provide background on how the PRC and the USA have spied on each other, with scientists often serving as de facto agents while traveling to conferences. And they show how deeply ingrained in the U.S. intelligence community is the assumption that ethnicity was a particularly important factor in Chinese recruitment of agents, despite evidence to the contrary.

While the authors suggest that Lee's behavior made it inevitable that he would come under scrutiny, they also show, step by step, how the bureaucratic machine backed itself into a corner. One line of investigation was opened, everything was bet on it -- and soon the stakes were so high that "intelligence" became the least appropriate possible word for anything.

Given recent circumstances, the case of Wen Ho Lee may turn out not to have been a final embarrassment of the 1990s but, rather, an early draft of bold new blunders. As we move into a time that will require fresh cliches to comprehend, we might want to adopt a motto repeated by one of Lee's defenders in court (quoting, I think, the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein): "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." As the Lee affair should suggest, it is a rule that can be applied to either prosecutor or defendant, and sometimes both.