-Caveat Lector-
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.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company
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