Sam Smith
Thursday, Feb. 22, 2001
Sam Smith edits the liberal online news service the Progressive Review, located at www.prorev.com. The following is an excerpt from his Wednesday report:
The Chinese connection exploded with the arrival of the Clinton administration. A younger crowd of American politicians had skipped the part about patriotism, about the pledge of allegiance, about loyalty not only to country but to much of anything other than themselves. The Clinton policy toward China was merely an extension of these values: What's in for us and how soon? The notion of national security was almost alien to them; besides, they had the new paradigm of globalization to keep them warm. Here are just a few of the things that happened along the way:
• Named Commerce Secretary, Ron Brown treated his post as just another place to wheel and deal. He was irrepressible, on one occasion okaying the sale of new American engines for China to put in its cruise missiles. The engines had been built as military equipment but Brown reclassified them as civilian.
• Neither was Brown above doing a little business on the side. The Saudis wanted some American planes; Brown told them: You want the planes, you also want a phone contract with ATT. Cost of the planes and hardware: $6 billion. Cost of the phone contract: $4 billion. Part of the deal, it turned out, was an ATT side agreement with a firm called First International. The owner: Ron Brown
• Former London Sunday Times correspondent James Adams wrote a book in which he described the Chinese success with the Clinton crowd as "an espionage coup of epic proportions."
• According to the New York Times, Clinton removed $2 billion in trade with China from national security scrutiny. Among the results: 77 supercomputers – capable of 13 billion calculations per second – that could scramble and unscramble secret data and design nuclear weapons. These were purchased by the Chinese without a peep stateside. At least some of them would be used by the Chinese military.
• With the transfer of the Panama Canal, four of Panama's ports ended up being controlled by a company partially owned by Hutchison-Whampoa Ltd., which in turn was owned by Li Ka-Shing, a billionaire so close to the Chinese power structure that he was offered the governorship of Hong Kong.
Another owner of the Panamanian ports was China Resources Enterprise, called an "agent of espionage" by Senator Fred Thompson. CRE was also a partner of the Lippo Group, owned by the Riady family that played a central if mysterious role in the rise of William Clinton. According to congressional testimony by ex-JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] chief Admiral Thomas Moorer, Hutchison-Whampoa won the right to pilot all ships through the Panama Canal, including U.S. naval vessels.
• President Clinton signed national security waivers to allow four U.S. commercial satellites to be launched in China, despite evidence that China was exporting nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan and Iran, among other nations. One of these satellites belonged to Loral. Nine days later a Chinese Long March rocket carrying a $200 million satellite belonging to Loral failed in mid-flight.
A subsequent lawsuit charged that the circuit board from the highly classified encryption device in the satellite was found to be missing when the Chinese returned debris from the explosion to U.S. authorities, even though a control box containing the circuit board was recovered intact. After the crash, NSA reportedly changed the encoded algorithms used by U.S. satellites because of the apparent release of highly classified information.
• President Clinton approved a waiver allowing the launch of another satellite on board a Chinese rocket, despite a recommendation by the Department of Justice that the waiver would have a significant adverse impact on any prosecution arising from its pending investigation of Loral.
• The New York Times reported in 1998 that the Defense Technology Security Administration said Loral's unauthorized release of sensitive technology to the Chinese gave rise to at least three "major" violations of U.S. national security, three medium violations and 12 "minor" infractions.
• Throughout these dealings, the CEO of Loral, Bernard Schwartz, contributed at least $1.5 million to the Democrats, making him the single largest contributor to these groups during the period in question.
• Softwar newsletter reported that that some of the radios and cell phones being used by Chinese police in their campaign against dissidents were those sold to the Chinese by Motorola after Clinton overrode human rights objections by the State Department.
• In the end, the brunt of the evidence was that the Chinese had obtained more American military secrets over the past two decades than had all the previous spies in American history put together. They had basic information on all nuclear weapons systems, they got our most advanced supercomputers, they gained extraordinarily important information about satellite systems. Some of this knowledge they used for themselves; some they retrofitted and repackaged and sold to other countries like Iraq, where it was used against our own fighter planes.
While the problem occurred under both Republican and Democratic administrations, it got completely out of hand under Clinton. Some of the information was stolen, some was given to China in the classic manner of spies, but a stunning proportion was obtained either as a direct result of political and economic decisions by the Clinton administration or as a result of what can best be described as premeditated indifference.
• Three major players in the China scandal – John Huang, Charlie Trie and Johnny Chung – were all allowed by the Justice Department to cop pleas.
• Carol Cameron of Fox News reported that cover stories provided by Chinese operatives to hide China's illegal campaign contributions may have come from or been approved by President Jiang Zemin. Transcripts of FBI wiretaps obtained by Fox News also pointed to the possibility that President Clinton may have known of both the illegal donations and what was to be said if they were discovered.
Johnny Chung told Congress he was under orders from the Chinese to keep the whole thing quiet. His orders, he said, came from a suspected Chinese intelligence operative named Robert Luu, who worked for a Los Angeles law firm. In a phone conversation tapped by the FBI, Chung was told by Luu to say the campaign money came from the so-called princelings: Chinese leaders' grown sons, who live, study and often live lavishly in the West.
A transcript of the wiretap, obtained by Fox News, contains the following:
LUU: "Shove the blame on the shoulders of the princelings."
CHUNG: "So blame it on the princelings. Do not implicate the Chinese government."
LUU: "Yes. Chairman Jiang agreed to handle it like this; the president over here also agreed."
• Newsweek quoted intelligence officials as saying that the Chinese "penetration is total. They are deep into the [U.S. nuclear weapons] labs' black programs."
• In an AP story ignored by major media, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey accused the Clinton administration of pursuing a policy of appeasement toward China and likened it to the way Britain and France dealt with Nazi Germany on Czechoslovakia before World War II.
• Last year, the Wall Street Journal wrote: "Top business executives are issuing a blunt warning to federal lawmakers: Vote against the trade deal with China, and we will hold it against you when writing campaign checks. Phil Condit, chairman of Boeing Co., and Robert N. Burt, chairman and chief executive of FMC Corp., said a coming vote to facilitate China's entry into the World Trade Organization will be a measure of every lawmaker's friendliness to business.
• Operating with an interim top secret clearance (but without FBI investigation or foreign security check) Commerce official Huang requested several top secret files on China just before a meeting with the Chinese ambassador. Huang and the Riadys then held a meeting with Clinton. Not long after, Huang went to work as a Democratic fund-raiser, but remained on Commerce's payroll as a $10,000-a-month consultant. Huang raised $5 million for the campaign. About a third of that was returned as having come from illegal sources. Among the problem contributions: $250,000 to the DNC from five Chinese businessmen in order to have a brief meeting with Clinton at a fund raiser.
• Macao businessman Ng Lap Seng, closely linked to a couple of major Chinese-owned enterprises, was regularly bringing in large sums of money to the United States, according to customs records. On one occasion, he arrived with $175,000 and then two days later met with Charlie Trie and Mark Middleton at the White House. That evening Ng sat at Clinton's table at a DNC fund raiser.
This is just a sample – not of treason, but of politics as it has been practiced. Now, let's turn to the recently arrested Agent Hanssen. So far there is no evidence that he helped the Russians build a missile, suppress dissidents, or buy U.S. politicians. Instead, in the FBI's own words, "The affidavit alleges that Hanssen compromised numerous human sources of the U.S. Intelligence Community, dozens of classified U.S. Government documents, including 'Top Secret' and 'code word' documents, and technical operations of extraordinary importance and value. It also alleges that Hanssen compromised FBI counterintelligence investigative techniques, sources, methods and operations, and disclosed to the KGB the FBI's secret investigation of Felix Bloch, a foreign service officer, for espionage."
Hanssen's major alleged crime, in other words, is not the betrayal of America but of the (note capitals) U.S. Intelligence Community, its personnel, its manuals, and its tricks of the trade. Open up Robert Hanssen and – as with a Russian doll – you just get another spy who is busily betraying another spy, all of whom are keeping secrets not so much from some foreign country as from the citizens of their own.
It is all bizarre, incestuous, of little known purpose, and, in the best postmodern manner, flexible. Just as American politicians and lawyers have redefined bribery so that the official bribee can escape punishment for the same crime for which the citizen bribee is punished, so the rules of loyalty to one's country now vary immensely not according to the nature of one's action but according to one's position. Hanssen will probably go to prison and may even be executed. Marc Rich's more acceptable foreign entanglements are used to justify his pardon.
Don't look for it written down anywhere. Except for the basic rule, laid down in 1613 by John Harington: "Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason." |
