The mother of all scandals
Washington Times
3/11/99 EDITORIAL
As might have been expected, in response to the burgeoning Chinese espionage scandal, the Clinton administration wasted little time unveiling its "Blame Ronald Reagan First" strategy. Vice President Al Gore will be the man to deal with any electoral repercussions, and so the White House dispatched him to CNN on Tuesday to spread whatever disinformation he could. In no mood to accept responsibility, Mr. Gore put on a very disingenuous show. Coming from the man who coined the phrase "no controlling legal authority" to absolve himself of any guilt for shaking down Buddhist monks and nuns for campaign contributions in 1996, Mr. Gore's performance met the low standards he long ago perfected.
Mr. Gore was asked by CNN about charges that the Clinton-Gore administration had been "negligent in dealing with an allegation of espionage of nuclear secrets at the Los Alamos nuclear-research facility," where China stole weapons designs enabling it to develop miniaturized warheads and to leapfrog an entire generation in its nuclear-weapons program. "That happened during the previous administration. That happened back in the 1980s," Mr. Gore said. "And as soon as the investigation identified targets of that investigation, then the law-enforcement community handled that very aggressively," Mr. Gore deceitfully asserted. "It resulted in a presidential directive that completely changed the procedures at the weapons labs."
The problem is, Mr. Gore's self-serving interpretation in no way conforms with reality.
The U.S. government -- specifically, the Department of Energy (DOE), which runs the weapons labs -- initially learned of China's 1980s espionage activity at Los Alamos during the first half of 1995. Later that year, Notra Trulock, a senior DOE intelligence official, briefed the FBI about the department's findings. In early 1996, Mr. Trulock briefed the CIA, whose chief counterintelligence officer concluded that China's espionage was "far more damaging to national security" than the spying CIA agent Aldrich Ames did for the Soviet Union.
Contrary to CNN's report, which said the White House was "only briefed about the possible technology secrets theft in mid-1997," the White House was, in fact, first briefed in April 1996. At that meeting, Mr. Trulock and several other senior DOE officials informed then-Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger that China appeared to have reproduced and successfully tested the W-88 warhead -- America's most advanced nuclear weapon, eight of which are deployed on each Trident D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missile. Mr. Berger, who was promoted to national security adviser in 1997, was also told that the suspected spy continued to work at Los Alamos.
This initial White House briefing, it's worth repeating, occurred in April 1996. At that very moment, Democratic bagman John Huang was raising millions of dollars from illegal and highly questionable Asian sources. Three months later, Johnny Chung, whom an NSC official had previously labeled "a hustler," began funneling $100,000 from Chinese military intelligence into the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The source of Mr. Chung's 1996 donations was Liu Chao-ying, a Chinese aerospace executive who was also a lieutenant colonel in China's People's Liberation Army and the daughter of China's highest-ranking military commander and in charge of obtaining Western military technology to upgrade China's army and nuclear missile force.
Contrary to Mr. Gore's assertions, once the probe "identified targets," the FBI's criminal inquiry had made so little progress by the end of 1996 that DOE officials were convinced that the FBI had assigned few resources to the investigation. Indeed, the FBI even failed to keep the CIA's counterintelligence office informed of the probe's status.
Frederico Pena, who became Secretary of Energy in March 1997, didn't help matters, either. Mr. Pena shelved a previously approved counterintelligence plan. And for 17 months, the Energy Department disregarded an April 1997 classified report by the FBI that recommended several measures to improve security at the labs, including restricting the suspect's access to classified information.
In May 1997, moreover, the Pentagon issued a classified report that concluded that "United States national security has been harmed" by the improvement in China's missile capabilities, which was made possible by an unauthorized transfer of missile guidance and control technology by a U.S. aerospace corporation whose chairman donated more than $600,000 to the Democratic Party during the 1995-1996 campaign cycle.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trulock and other intelligence officials were uncovering new evidence of Chinese espionage operations that were ongoing at the weapons labs. For unknown reasons, however, Mr. Trulock was unable to inform Mr. Pena because he could not get an appointment for four months. By the time Mr. Trulock finally briefed Mr. Pena in July 1997, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee had begun its hearings into campaign-finance abuses during the 1996 election. On July 8, Committee Chairman Fred Thompson charged that the Chinese government had attempted to "subvert our election process" by making illegal campaign contributions.
It was under these circumstances that Mr. Trulock returned to the White House in July 1997 once again to brief Mr. Berger. After the first briefing in April 1996, White House officials had determined that the charges of Chinese espionage would have no bearing on the administration's China policy. After the July 1997 briefing, senior White House officials continued to remain skeptical of the alarms raised by DOE intelligence officials. Although Mr. Berger briefed the president in July 1997, Mr. Clinton decided that the Commerce Department would remain in charge of transferring high technology to China.
In September 1997, the FBI, unable to meet the tough standards for obtaining an indictment, nonetheless told DOE that the suspect should be relieved of his security clearance and removed from his position. Yet he retained both for more than a year.
In October 1997, President Clinton hosted Chinese President Jiang Zemin at a Sino-American summit. Nothing -- not even ongoing Chinese espionage at the nation's weapons laboratories --could derail the president's collapsing China policy.
By the summer of 1998, the administration had only given Congress "dribs and drabs" of information about the problems at the weapons labs, according to Democratic Rep. Norman Dicks, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. Indeed, in July 1998, when the committee sought an update, acting Energy Secretary Elizabeth Moler actually ordered Mr. Trulock not to brief the intelligence committee because, according to Mr. Trulock, she feared the information would be used to attack the administration's China policy. It wasn't until late 1998 that Mr. Trulock was finally able to brief a select committee headed by Republican Rep. Chris Cox. Rejecting the White House's long-held view that Chinese espionage was not sufficiently serious to affect U.S.-Chinese relations, the Cox committee unanimously agreed with Mr. Trulock's far more alarming assessment, that U.S. national security had been harmed.
In his CNN interview, Mr. Gore made much of the fact that in February 1998 President Clinton issued "a presidential directive that completely changed the procedures at the weapons labs." In fact, however, that directive was not implemented until October 1998, when, nine months after it was issued and 30 months after the White House was first alerted to China's espionage at Los Alamos, former U.S. United Nations Amb. Bill Richardson replaced Mr. Pena as Secretary of Energy. And it wasn't until two days after the New York Times revealed the extent of the Chinese espionage scandal and the Clinton administration's longtime indifference to it that the spying suspect was finally fired from the Los Alamos weapons lab.
Next week the Senate Intelligence Committee will question FBI Director Louis Freeh and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. Echoing the nonsense spoken by Mr. Gore, Mr. Berger Tuesday evening audaciously declared, "I reject the notion there was any dragging of feet." At the center of the White House's nearly three-year refusal to come to terms with the consequences of Chinese espionage, Mr. Berger also has earned an invitation to testify next week before the Senate Intelligence Committee. |
