ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - After years of being under suspicion as a spy for China, computer scientist Wen Ho Lee was arrested and charged Friday with removing nuclear secrets from highly secure computers at the Los Alamos weapons lab.

There still was no proof he passed information to China or any other country, but officials said they want to know what happened to seven high-volume computer tapes Lee allegedly filled with nuclear computer codes. Three tapes were recovered.

The 59-count indictment charges that Lee violated the federal Espionage Act by the "unlawful gathering and retention of national defense" secrets and violated the Atomic Energy Act by removing secret weapons files from the Los Alamos computers.

He could face up to life in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted of any of the counts, officials said.

Although he has not been charged with providing secrets to a foreign country, Lee's "mishandling of classified information ... has resulted in serious damage to important national interests,"said U.S. Attorney John Kelly.

The indictment says Lee, working in 1993 and 1994 in a Los Alamos division dealing with "the most sensitive nuclear data and information possessed by the United States,"assembled 19 files - thousands of pages of data - containing secret data relating to atomic weapon research, design, construction and testing.

He then transferred the information to an unsecure computer and downloaded 17 of the files to nine portable computer tapes, the indictment says.

Lee made a 10th portable computer tape with current nuclear weapons design codes and other information necessary to compare computer-generated, calculated results with actual test data, the court papers say. Seven of the tapes Lee made remain unaccounted for, the U.S. attorney's office said.

The Taiwan-born scientist, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, appeared before a federal magistrate and was being held without bond. The magistrate scheduled a hearing Monday to consider the prosecutor's motion to detain Lee, who was taken into custody at his home outside Los Alamos, about 90 miles from Albuquerque.

A senior government official in Washington, D.C., said the government hoped Lee, facing the severity of the charges and jail, could be persuaded to disclose what happened to the missing computer tapes. Investigators have asked Lee's attorney about the tapes but received no response, said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Asked how Lee was feeling, his attorney, Nancy Hollander, said, "How would you be if you were just snatched out of your house and taken to jail?"

Mark Holscher, another of Lee's attorneys, did not return telephone calls to his office in Los Angeles.

Lee, 59, was fired in March for security violations after being the primary focus of a three-year FBI investigation into the alleged loss of nuclear weapons secrets to China in the 1980s.

But his dismissal in March fed a growing controversy in Washington, D.C., over alleged Chinese spying at the Energy Department's nuclear weapons labs, specifically Los Alamos, where a half-century ago the first atomic bomb was created.

The uproar caused Congress to revamp the department's nuclear weapons program and prompted the department to strengthen security and counterespionage programs.