China Spy Probe Shifts to Missiles
washingtonpost.com
China Spy Probe Shifts to Missiles
By Walter Pincus and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday , October 19, 2000 ; Page A01
A new review of Chinese military documents provided by a defector in 1995 has led
U.S. intelligence agencies to conclude that
Chinese espionage has gathered more American missile technology than nuclear
weapons secrets, senior U.S. officials said.
The conclusion was reached only this year because the CIA and other intelligence
agency linguists did not fully translate the
huge pile of secret Chinese documents, totaling 13,000 pages, until four years after
the agency obtained them, according to a
senior law enforcement official, who described the delay as a major blunder.
The belated translation and analysis has prompted a major reorientation of the FBI's
investigation into Chinese espionage. From
1996 until late last year, the FBI probe centered on the suspected loss of U.S.
nuclear warhead data, and quickly narrowed
into an investigation of Wen Ho Lee, a researcher at Los Alamos National
Laboratory in New Mexico. Now, however, the
FBI--which never found evidence that Lee spied for China--has shifted its focus to
the Defense Department and its private
contractors.
That is because the documents provided by the defector show that during the 1980s,
Beijing had gathered a large amount of
classified information about U.S. ballistic missiles and reentry vehicles. The missile
secrets are far more likely to have come
from defense officials or missile builders than from Los Alamos or other U.S. nuclear
weapons labs, officials said.
The shift in the investigation's focus follows several years of highly public and
controversial efforts by the FBI, CIA and Energy
Department to determine whether China stole the designs of advanced nuclear
warheads from the United States, and if so,
whether Beijing was aided by U.S. spies.
Plagued by internal disputes between agencies, partisan pressures from Congress,
and an apparently mistaken decision to focus
on Lee, counterintelligence investigators were slow to review the full 13,000 pages
that originally sparked the inquiry.
The CIA concluded several years ago that the defector who supplied the documents
was a Chinese double agent, casting
doubt on the information he delivered and delaying its translation from Mandarin to
English. But the FBI, which has interviewed
the defector in the United States, believes that he is legitimate. The CIA now says
the evidence about the defector is
"inconclusive," but agrees that the information he handed over has proven accurate, a
senior government official said this week.
The FBI, officials said, pressed for translating more of the document and, to support
its case, began to question directly the
Chinese informant, a former Chinese missile specialist whom the bureau brought to
the United States. Although the FBI refused
to say where he is now living, a senior intelligence official said earlier this week, "We
know his whereabouts."
Because the informant was a volunteer who approached the United States with an
unsolicited offer to provide Chinese secrets,
he is known in intelligence jargon as a "walk-in." He smuggled the documents out of
China through DHL, the private delivery
company, according to a former intelligence official who has reviewed much of the
translated material. The documents appear
to be a five-year "strategic plan" for development of China's new generation of
missiles, the former official said.
Another intelligence expert familiar with the material described it as "an
embarrassment of riches."
When the walk-in first delivered the documents, a senior U.S. official said, the CIA
read and translated the titles of each major
portion, then ordered a full translation of a 76-page section dealing with "nuclear"
information--data on U.S. warheads,
including the most advanced weapon in the U.S. arsenal, the W-88.
One nuclear weapons official familiar with the process said the CIA had Chinese
linguists read the documents for "intelligence
purposes," to see whether they contained valuable information about Chinese
missiles and warheads, and decided they did not.
The agency did not perform a "counterintelligence review" to determine whether they
contained classified information about
U.S. missiles and warheads, the official said.
Because of the CIA's belief that the walk-in was a double agent, a full translation of
the documents seemed less pressing. "He
failed an agency polygraph," one intelligence official explained. The CIA's suspicions
about the informant also slowed the FBI's
already limited investigation at Los Alamos of Wen Ho Lee.
Another reason for the FBI's limited inquiry at Los Alamos in 1996 and 1997, a
former FBI agent said, was that the bureau's
Chinese counterintelligence agents were "already swamped" by highly publicized
allegations of Chinese campaign contributions
to the 1996 Democratic presidential campaign.
One official who did pay attention to the CIA's 76-page translation on nuclear
warheads in 1995-96 was Notra Trulock III,
then the Energy Department's intelligence chief. Trulock was given a copy of the
material about the W-88 before it was
officially circulated within the intelligence community, triggering a complaint by
then-CIA Director John M. Deutch, who had
concerns about the document being properly secured, a CIA official confirmed.
Trulock used the translation to draft an "administrative inquiry" calling for an
investigation of Chinese espionage, which in turn
led the FBI to open a formal investigation that focused on Lee in 1996.
In 1997, a team led by former CIA deputy director Richard Kerr reviewed the small
portion of translated material. Kerr felt
that it showed "how very aggressively the Chinese were pursuing [U.S.] secrets,"
according to a participant in the study, who
added that the team decided that if the walk-in was a bona fide double agent, it was
"baffling that such valuable information was
planted with him."
In late 1998, after a House select committee chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox
(R-Calif.) received testimony about alleged
Chinese espionage at the weapons lab, the FBI "pushed hard to get the entire
document translated," said one government
official.
A CIA damage assessment in early 1999 by Robert Walpole, a senior intelligence
officer, was based on further, partial
translations of the documents. But the CIA did not order a full translation until after
Walpole's assessment was made public in
March 1999.
"They brought Chinese linguists from all over the government to take part," said one
former senior intelligence official.
As the full translation began to unfold, the Department of Defense was called in to
help determine the sensitivity of information
pertaining to missiles and reentry vehicles. The Pentagon concluded the information
was highly classified and had been stolen by
Beijing, a former senior official said.
In September 1999, Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh
told congressional committees they were
widening the investigation of nuclear espionage beyond Lee to include other potential
suspects at numerous defense facilities.
The announced reason for the expansion was the government's realization that the
information about the W-88 warhead
contained in the walk-in documents could have come not just from Los Alamos, but
also from hundreds of other facilities within
the nation's nuclear weapons complex.
But as authorities expanded the investigation into alleged nuclear espionage, they
started looking for possible sources of
compromised missile data as well.
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