How ChinaGate Led to 9/11
May 25, 2004
by Jean Pearce, FrontPageMag.com
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As the 9/11 Commission tries to uncover what kept intelligence agencies from preventing September 11, it has overlooked two vital factors: Jamie Gorelick and Bill Clinton. Gorelick, who has browbeaten the current administration, helped erect the walls between the FBI, CIA and local investigators that made 9/11 inevitable. However, she was merely expanding the policy Bill Clinton established with Presidential Decision Directive 24.
What has been little underreported is why the policy came about: to thwart investigations into the Chinese funding of Clinton's re-election campaign, and the favors he bestowed on them in return.
In April, CNSNews.com staff writer Scott Wheeler reported that a senior U.S. government official and three other sources claimed that the 1995 memo written by Jamie Gorelick, who served as the Clinton Justice Department's deputy attorney general from 1994 to 1997, created "a roadblock" to the investigation of illegal Chinese donations to the Democratic National Committee. But the picture is much bigger than that. The Gorelick memo, which blocked intelligence agents from sharing information that could have halted the September 11 hijacking plot, was only the mortar in a much larger maze of bureaucratic walls whose creation Gorelick personally oversaw.
It's a story the 9/11 Commission may not want to hear, and one that Gorelick - now incredibly a member of that commission - has so far refused to tell. But it is perhaps the most crucial one to understanding the intentional breakdown of intelligence that led to the September 11 disaster.
Nearly from the moment Gorelick took office in the Clinton Justice Department, she began acting as the point woman for a large-scale bureaucratic reorganization of intelligence agencies that ultimately placed the gathering of intelligence, and decisions about what - if anything - would be done with it. This entire operation was under near-direct control of the White House. In the process, more than a dozen CIA and FBI investigations underway at the time got caught beneath the heel of the presidential boot, investigations that would ultimately reveal massive Chinese espionage as millions in illegal Chinese donations filled Democratic Party campaign coffers.
When Gorelick took office in 1994, the CIA was reeling from the news that a Russian spy had been found in CIA ranks, and Congress was hungry for a quick fix. A month after Gorelick was sworn in, Bill Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 24. PDD 24 put intelligence gathering under the direct control of the president's National Security Council, and ultimately the White House, through a four-level, top-down chain of command set up to govern (that is, stifle) intelligence sharing and cooperation between intelligence agencies. From the moment the directive was implemented, intelligence sharing became a bureaucratic nightmare that required negotiating a befuddling bureaucracy that stopped directly at the President's office.
First, the directive effectively neutered the CIA by creating a National Counterintelligence Center (NCI) to oversee the Agency. NCI was staffed by an FBI agent appointed by the Clinton administration. It also brought multiple international investigations underway at the time under direct administrative control. The job of the NCI was to "implement counterintelligence activities," which meant that virtually everything the CIA did, from a foreign intelligence agent's report to polygraph test results, now passed through the intelligence center that PDD 24 created.
NCI reported to an administration-appointed National Counterintelligence Operations Board (NCOB) charged with "discussing counterintelligence matters." The NCOB in turn reported to a National Intelligence Policy Board, which coordinated activities between intelligence agencies attempting to work together. The policy board reported "directly" to the president through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.
The result was a massive bureaucratic roadblock for the CIA - which at the time had a vast lead on the FBI in foreign intelligence - and for the FBI itself, which was also forced to report to the NCOB. This hampered cooperation between the two entities. All this occurred at a time when both agencies were working separate ends of investigations that would eventually implicate China in technology transfers and the Democratic Party in a Chinese campaign cash grab.
And the woman charged with selling this plan to Congress, convince the media and ultimately implement much of it? Jamie Gorelick.
Many in Congress, including some Democrats, found the
changes PDD 24 put in place baffling: they seemed to do
nothing to insulate the CIA from infiltration while
devastating the agency's ability to collect information. At
the time, Democrat House Intelligence Chairman Dan Glickman
referred to the plan as "regulatory gobbledygook." Others
questioned how FBI control of CIA intelligence would foster
greater communication between the lower levels of the CIA
and FBI, now that all information would have to be run
through a multi-tier bureaucratic maze that only went
upward.
Despite their doubts, Gorelick helped the administration
sell the plan on Capitol Hill. The Directive stood.
But that wasn't good enough for the Clinton administration,
which wanted control over every criminal and intelligence
investigation, domestic and foreign, for reasons that would
become apparent in a few years. For the first time in
Justice Department history, a political appointee, Richard
Scruggs - an old crony or Attorney General Janet Reno's
from Florida - was put in charge of the Office of
Intelligence and Policy Review (OIPR). OIPR is the Justice
Department agency in charge of requesting wiretap and
surveillance authority for criminal and intelligence
investigations on behalf of investigative agencies from the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. The
court's activities are kept secret from the public.
A year after PDD 24, with the new bureaucratic structure loaded with administration appointees, Gorelick drafted the 1995 memo Attorney General John Ashcroft mentioned while testifying before the 9/11 Commission. The Gorelick memo, and other supporting memos released in recent weeks, not only created walls within the intelligence agencies that prevented information sharing among their own agents, but effectively walled these agencies off from each other and from outside contact with the U.S. prosecutors instrumental in helping them gather the evidence needed to make the case for criminal charges.
The only place left to go with intelligence information - particularly for efforts to share intelligence information or obtain search warrants - was straight up Clinton and Gorelick's multi-tiered chain of command.
Instead, information lethal to the Democratic Party
languished inside the Justice Department, trapped behind
Gorelick's walls.
The implications were enormous. In her letter of protest to
Attorney General Reno over Gorelick's memo, United States
Attorney Mary Jo White spelled them out: <font color=blue>"These
instructions leave entirely to OIPR and the (Justice
Department) Criminal Division when, if ever, to contact
affected U.S. attorneys on investigations including
terrorism and espionage," White wrote. (Like OIPR, the
Criminal Division is also part of the Justice Department.)
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Without an enforcer, the walls might Gorelick's memo put in place might not have held. But Scruggs acted as that enforcer, and he excelled at it. Scruggs maintained Gorelick's walls between the FBI and Justice's Criminal Division by threatening to automatically reject any FBI request for a wiretap or search warrant if the Bureau contacted the Justice Department's Criminal Division without permission.
This deprived the FBI, and ultimately the CIA, of gathering
advice and assistance from the Criminal Division that was
critical in espionage and terrorist cases.
It is no coincidence that this occurred at the same time
both the FBI and the CIA were churning up evidence damaging
to the Democratic Party, its fundraisers, the Chinese and
ultimately the Clinton administration itself. Between 1994
and the 1996 election, as Chinese dollars poured into
Democratic coffers, Clinton struggled to reopen high-tech
trade to China. Had agents confirmed Chinese theft of
weapons technology or its transfer of weapons technology to
nations like Pakistan, Iran and Syria, Clinton would have
been forced by law and international treaty to react.
Gorelick's appointment to the job at Justice in 1994 occurred during a period in which the FBI had begun to systematically investigate technology theft by foreign powers. For the first time, these investigations singled out the U.S. chemical, telecommunications, aircraft and aerospace industries for intelligence collection.
By the time Gorelick wrote the March 1995 memo that sealed off American intelligence agencies from each other and the outside world, all of the most critical Chinagate investigations by American intelligence agencies were already underway. Some of their findings were damning:
In an investigation originally instigated by the CIA, the
FBI was beginning its search for the source of the leak of
W-88 nuclear warhead technology to China among the more
than 1,000 people who had access to the secrets. Despite
Justice Department stonewalling and the Department's
refusal to seek wiretap authority in 1997, the
investigation eventually led to Wen Ho Lee and the Los
Alamos National Laboratory. The FBI first collected
Extensive evidence in 1995 linking illegal Democratic Party
donations to China, according to the Congressional Record.
But Congress and the Director of the CIA didn't find out
about the Justice Department's failure to act upon that
evidence until 1997, safely after the 1996 election.
According to classified CIA documents leaked to the
Washington Times, between 1994 and 1997, the CIA learned
that China sold Iran missile technology, a nuclear fission
reactor, advanced air-defense radar and chemical agents.
The Chinese also provided 5,000 ring magnets to Pakistan,
used in producing weapons-grade uranium. The Chinese also
provided uranium fuel for India's reactors.
In many cases the CIA resorting to leaking classified information to the media, in an effort to bypass the administration's blackout.
Gorelick knew these facts well. While Clinton may have refused to meet with top CIA officials, Gorelick didn't. According to a 1996 report by the legal news service American Lawyer Media, Gorelick and then-Deputy Director of the CIA George Tenet met every other week to discuss intelligence and intelligence sharing.
But those in the Clinton administration weren't the only ones to gain from the secrecy. In 1994, the McDonnell Douglas Corporation transferred military-use machine tools to the China National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation that ended up in the hands of the Chinese army. The sale occurred despite Defense Department objections. McDonnell Douglas was a client of the Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin, L.L.P. (now called Baker Botts), the Washington, D.C., law firm where Gorelick worked for 17 years and was a partner. Ray Larroca, another partner in the firm, represented McDonnell in the Justice Department's investigation of the technology transfer.
In 1995, General Electric, a former client of Gorelick's, also had much to lose if the damaging information the CIA and the FBI had reached Congress. At the time, GE was publicly lobbying for a lucrative permit to assist the Chinese in replacing coal-fired power stations with nuclear plants. A 1990 law required that the president certify to Congress that China was not aiding in nuclear proliferation before U.S. companies could execute the business agreement.
Moreover, in 1995, Michael Armstrong, then the CEO of Hughes Electronics - a division of General Electric and another client of Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin - was publicly lobbying Clinton to switch satellite export controls from the State Department to the Commerce Department. After the controls were lifted, Hughes and another company gave sensitive data to the Chinese, equipment a Pentagon study later concluded would allow China to develop intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles aimed at American targets. Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin partner Randall Turk represented Hughes in the Congressional, State Department, and Justice Department investigations that resulted.
The Cox Report, which detailed Chinese espionage for Congress during the period, revealed that FBI surveillance caught Chinese officials frantically trying to keep Democratic donor Johnny Chung from divulging any information that would be damaging to Hughes Electronics. Chung funneled $300,000 in illegal contributions from the Chinese military to the DNC between 1994 and 1996.
It was this web of investigations that led Gorelick and
Bill Clinton to erect the wall between intelligence
agencies that resulted in the toppling of the Twin Towers.
The connections go on and on, but they all lead back to
Gorelick, the one person who could best explain how the
Clinton administration neutered the American intelligence
agencies that could have stopped the September 11 plot. Yet
another high crime will have been committed if the
September 11 Commission doesn't demand testimony from her.
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