brees,
Wag as he may, Clinton will not be able to escape culpability...for the "dangerous duping" of this administration
April 29, 1999
ESSAY / By WILLIAM SAFIRE
The Deadliest Download
nytimes.com
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ASHINGTON -- During President Clinton's watch,
America's most vital nuclear secrets -- guarded
intensely for five decades -- have been allowed to spill out
all over the world.
Five weeks ago I surmised that what now worried our
scientists most was the possible theft of the "Lagrangian
codes" from our national laboratories.
These are the supercomputer programs that -- when fed
secret data "benchmarks" from all our nuclear tests --
enable foreign scientists to simulate our explosions and
erase our lead.
We are now informed by The New York Times's
Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative team that the codes --
"legacy codes," as they are known at Los Alamos -- were
allegedly downloaded by Wen Ho Lee in 1994. Our nuclear
genie is out of the bottle.
"The People's Republic of China is the number one
proliferator," said Representative Chris Cox, chairman of
the select committee on Chinagate. "Now the secrets are out
there in the stream of commerce, and probably on to Iran
and North Korea and Libya."
The hemorrhage is horrendous. How did it happen? The
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is grilling F.B.I.
Director Louis Freeh today in secret, but here are some
facts:
Suspecting Lee at Los Alamos to be a spy for China, F.B.I.
agents in 1997 alerted the White House and went to the
Department of Justice's Office of Intelligence Policy
Review to request application to a special court for a
wiretap under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
But Acting Director Gerald Schroeder and his aide Alan
Kornblum decided the evidence was insufficient and refused
to apply.
The F.B.I. then went over Schroeder's head to the office of
Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, and was turned down
again. The F.B.I. never returned with new evidence to
Schroeder.
Did Director Freeh appeal to Janet Reno about
"over-lawyering" in a national security case, or was he too
browbeaten to try? The bureau learned that when it comes
to China, Reno Justice assigns only its most incompetent
operatives and penalizes prosecutors who target Asian
financing of the 1996 election.
Consider: Justice makes some 700 court applications a year
for taps under that surveillance law.
Maybe once or twice a year, says a Justice intelligence
official, it finally refuses the F.B.I.'s request that it apply.
This case, involving an embarrassment to China when Clinton
was proclaiming "strategic partnership," was the one.
Moreover, Congress should examine the ultra-gentle
prosecution of a Los Alamos nuclear simulation scientist,
Peter Lee, who was let off with a year in a halfway house.
The sentencing judge was never told all Justice knew of his
spying.
With his Chinese chickens coming home to roost, Clinton has
been desperately trying to keep a lid on Chinagate. His first
reaction -- that it happened back in the 80's and had
nothing to do with him -- has been overtaken by eventful
truth.
For 10 weeks he ducked a meeting with Cox and Norman
Dicks of the House committee seeking security clearance of
their 1,000-page report on China's penetration of our
scientific and political worlds. Last week they met in a
"sober" session; Cox expects his slightly sanitized report to
be made public by May 15.
Two weeks after that, we'll see what the President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board comes up with. Its
chairman, former Senator Warren Rudman, was incensed by
a prediction in this space of a whitewash: "It will be a
hard-hitting report about security at the labs," he insists.
Rudman has hired nine new investigators and may come up
with recommendations about locking the barn door now that
the secrets of almost every nuclear test we have undertaken
are on their way to Baghdad or Pyongyang via Beijing.
As the dangerous duping of this Administration unfolds,
keep in mind Beijing's grand design: Use Asian fund-raisers
to influence White House policy to sell China advanced
computer and missile technology. Simultaneously, use spies
to steal both the secret codes to program those
supercomputers and to steal the data benchmarks enabling
them to simulate our nuclear tests.
Thanks to the downloading of our secrets, American cities
will be less safe in two years than they were at the height
of the cold war. We owe it to ourselves to find out who let
it happen and why. |
