The smell of rot, from Washington :
Wall Street Journal
June 10, 1999
The Administration Quashes Truth Tellers on China
By Michael Ledeen, a Reagan administration official and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of "Machiavelli on Modern Leadership," just published by St. Martin's Press.
We hear from President Clinton and his defenders that he is not to be blamed for the Chinese espionage detailed in the Cox committee report, nor for the illegal transfer of missile technology to China by American corporations like Hughes and Loral, since both the espionage and the technology-transfer policy began years ago, in the Reagan era. For the most part, neither the media nor Republicans have challenged this line, Mr. Cox himself being a notable exception. But it is false. President Clinton has done two things that were inconceivable in the Reagan years: He has armed China with our best military technology, and has silenced anyone inside the executive branch who has dared challenge this policy.
During the Reagan years, the U.S. crafted an international system to prevent dangerous technology from going to dangerous countries. This required enormous input from professional civil servants, particularly in the military, to evaluate the impact of high-tech sales to actual and potential enemies. It would have been unthinkable for those experts to have been silenced or coerced into lying about matters that directly affected national security. Yet this has happened repeatedly during the Clinton years, as some recently uncovered documents show.
Shortly before Chinese President Jiang Zemin's arrival in Washington in the fall of 1997, the White House was pushing the State, Defense and Energy departments to support a presidential certification of China as a nuclear nonproliferator and to sign off on the creation of an "information exchange and technical cooperative reciprocal arrangement" on ostensibly civilian nuclear technology. This arrangement would give the Chinese easy access to American civil reactor sites, provide them with detailed information on how the U.S. handles fissionable materials, and give them access to operational data on U.S. nuclear sites.
Despite pressure from the White House, Jonathan Fox, an attorney on the arms-control staff of the Defense Special Weapons Agency, wrote a memo stating with certainty that China was a nuclear proliferator and that the proposed arrangement was "a technology transfer agreement swaddled in the comforting yet misleading terminology of a confidence-building measure." Mr. Fox's memo argued against the agreement on these grounds:
It "presents real and substantial risk to the common defense and security of both the United States and allied countries." It "can result in a significant increase of the risk of nuclear weapons technology proliferation."
"The environment surrounding these exchange measures cannot guarantee timely warning of willful diversion of otherwise confidential information to non-nuclear states for nuclear weapons development." There was no guarantee that the nuclear information would be limited to nonmilitary applications in China itself.
Mr. Fox noted that the Chinese chafed at their inferiority to the West and "now [seek] to redress that balance through industrial, academic and military espionage. China routinely, both overtly and covertly, subverts national and multilateral trade controls on militarily critical items." (Those who have been lured into the deceptive debate over when we knew about Chinese espionage should note that civil servants like Mr. Fox, well below the pay grade of National Security Adviser Samuel Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, were well aware of the general phenomenon).
On Oct. 24, 1997, Mr. Fox was called out of an interagency meeting to receive an urgent telephone call. According to three people to whom he gave a contemporaneous account of the phone conversation, he was given an ultimatum from superiors in the Office of Non-Proliferation Policy in the Department of Defense: either revise the memo and recommend in favor of the agreement, or look elsewhere for employment. (Mr. Fox himself declined to comment on the matter.)
Within an hour, all the critical language had been deleted, and the memo now simply concluded that the agreement "is not inimical to the common defense or the security of the United States." Worried that his earlier draft might fall into unfriendly hands, Mr. Fox's superiors insisted that somebody else sign the new memo.
The arrangement was in place in time for the summit with the Chinese ruler, who was no doubt quite satisfied that his American friends had given him a good-conduct certificate, even though he, Mr. Clinton and the entire American national-security team knew full well that China was spreading militarily useful nuclear technology to such nations as Iran and Pakistan. Indeed, it was precisely this knowledge, and the fear that somebody in the media or Congress might enunciate it at an embarrassing moment, that drove the administration to silence potential truth-tellers.
Mr. Fox is not the only weapons expert in the government to have been instructed to lie or remain silent about the true consequences of sending military technology to China. Notra Trulock and his colleagues were told by their superiors at the Department of Energy that they should stop annoying people with accounts of Chinese espionage at Los Alamos. Similarly, professionals in the Pentagon such as Michael Maloof and Peter Leitner were told to keep quiet about the approval of high-tech licenses that would strengthen Chinese military power. Both of them spoke out; others remain silent.
But even when the professionals stick by their principles, their superiors have chosen to substitute facts with politically expedient disinformation. On at least two occasions, military experts who argued against high-tech exports to China later discovered that their recommendations had been altered in the Pentagon's computerized data base.
Had President Reagan's appointees attempted such heavy-handed censorship, the Democrats in Congress, constantly on the lookout for cooperative whistle-blowers, would have cried bloody murder. Yet despite being well aware of the level of internal censorship, Republican leaders from Rep. Dick Armey to Sen. Fred Thompson have all but remained silent. Mr. Thompson's Governmental Affairs Committee asked the Pentagon's Inspector General to investigate this matter last August. With the lightning speed that has characterized Republican investigations, the Inspector General's report is due to arrive on June 18, nearly a year later.
Congress's behavior is thus the reverse of what it was during the Reagan years, which is one reason the president has breezed through revelations that would have threatened the tenure of his predecessors. Republicans have yet to present a coherent challenge to the administration's China policy, and for several years have largely ignored the cries of alarm from the professionals who have spent their lives protecting our security.
We don't yet know why Mr. Clinton chose to help arm China and why Congress has been slow to stop it. But one thing ought to be clear: The blame for this scandal lies not in the distant past with the Reagan administration, which tried to prevent our military technology from falling into the hands of real and potential enemies, but with Mr. Clinton, who has consciously and systematically done the opposite. On this point, there must be neither doubt nor silence.
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