Trie�s Deadly Deals
By Douglas Burton
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Clinton fund-raiser Charles Trie has admitted to the
FBI that he conducted a business deal that gave Red
China equipment capable of producing deadly
biological weapons.
Clinton friend and fund-raiser Charles Trie was a conduit for illegal
donations from Chinese military and intelligence operatives to the
Democratic National Committee and the president�s campaign
committees. But Insight has learned that Trie also was involved � and
used Clinton connections � in facilitating a 1993 sale of dual-use
medical technology to China that poses a significant national-security
threat.
In the course of 17 secret Trie interviews with the FBI in 1999 the
Clinton confidant revealed an elaborate and illegal scheme to funnel large
sums into Clinton-Gore campaign coffers and the president�s
legal-defense fund. He also confessed to orchestrating the sale of a
500-liter (130-gallon) medical fermentation device to a pharmaceutical
plant in China suspected of manufacturing chemical and biological agents
for military purposes.
Insight has obtained copies of the secret depositions given by Trie
to the FBI�s Campaign Finance Task Force that, until recently, was
thought to have begun shutting down operations after skirmishes with the
Reno Justice Department concerning the scope and direction of the
long-running investigation. In fact, based on the FBI�s 302 summaries of
Trie�s lengthy depositions, the task force appears significantly to have
expanded its operations and is zeroing in on key targets involved in
suspected illegal campaign donations from overseas, most notably China
and Indonesia.
Trie, who pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign operations and
is cooperating with federal authorities, has revealed extensive details
about the machinery of campaign-finance irregularities involving the
Democratic National Committee, or DNC, and Clinton�s political
operations. He lays bare the elaborate methods he and others used to
collect and channel illegal contributions from Asian-Americans and
overseas nationals.
It is the revelation about the estimated $1 million sale of dual-use
medical technology to China, however, and the involvement of a
respected U.S. government scientist in a company Trie used to facilitate
the sale, that most deeply has shocked federal investigators and
national-security officials contacted by Insight.
Peter Leitner, a senior Defense Department licensing analyst who
specializes in export controls of dual-use technology, has reviewed
Insight�s copies of the confidential FBI interviews with Trie. Leitner says
the transfer of the highly sophisticated pharmaceutical-grade fermenting
machine poses significant risks to U.S. security at home and abroad if
used to make advanced germ-warfare products such as anthrax and
botulism.
The evidence of the fermenting machine�s sale and transfer
sometime in 1993 to the Changchun Biological Products Institute is
alarming, according to Leitner, given that the Chinese facility has been
flagged by some experts as a biological-weapons laboratory run by the
People�s Liberation Army. Leitner tells Insight: �This whole affair has the
classic earmarks of a Chinese military-intelligence operation.�
What the FBI has done with the information newly obtained from
Trie is not clear. However, Insight has learned that Rep. Dan Burton, the
Indiana Republican who is chairman of the House Government Reform
Committee, is aware of the new development and has scheduled
hearings on this and other revelations made to the FBI by Trie.
Scott Wheeler, an investigative correspondent with the TV show
American Investigator, has just finished a related video documentary,
Trading With the Enemy: How the Clinton Administration Armed China.
He presents a Who�s Who of military and intelligence officials, including
former CIA director James Woolsey, discussing the ongoing and
persistent attempts by Beijing to obtain such dual-use technologies from
producers in the United States.
Wheeler and Leitner, who appears in the documentary, were asked
to comment on the FBI summary materials. Leitner tells Insight that
Trie�s export of biotech materials to China illustrates �a major diversion
of U.S. military and technological assets to biowarfare plants in China.�
According to Wheeler: �This is a new basis for the congressional
oversight committees to revisit the federal task-force investigation of
campaign-finance violations in light of compelling evidence that the Reno
Justice Department has failed to conduct a thorough investigation.�
Trie told the FBI he formed an international-trading business in
1991 that �brokered the export of biotech machinery and elevator
equipment to China.� It was this company, Daihatsu International
Trading Inc., that arranged the sale in mid-1992 of the 500-liter
fermenting machine from Sulzer Biotech Systems in Woodbury, N.Y.,
which, only after Clinton took office in January 1993, shipped the
equipment from its Swiss manufacturing plant to the Chinese facility.
How such an export could have been cleared for China remains a
mystery, albeit one about which Chairman Burton will no doubt inquire.
For the moment, Insight�s calls for comment from Commerce
Undersecretary William Reinsch and Commerce Deputy Director of
Export Licenses Eileen Albanese went unreturned by press time.
Trie said he was paid �a commission of $20,000 or $30,000.� But
when federal agents interviewed Sulzer officials about the exotic sale
sometime last year, according to government sources, they appeared
more interested in whether the sale was part of a quid pro quo to funnel
illegal monies into the president�s campaign or to the DNC than whether
it was useful to expanding Red China�s deadly arsenal of biological
weapons.
Trie told the FBI that he didn�t see the fermenter sale as a big deal.
What appears to have impressed him is that on trips to China he met
with high-level intelligence, military and business officials, some of whom
gave him hundreds of thousands of dollars that he used to make illegal
donations.
According to Wheeler, Rene Losher, former executive director of
Sulzer Biotech Systems, has advised government investigators that a
Swiss engineer was sent to Changchun to help install the tank. The buyer
was Zhang Jiaming, director of the Changchun Biological Products
Institute. Leitner says the FBI also should have been concerned with the
likely participation in the deal of Peter Fu, a toxicology expert at the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration�s research facility on the grounds of
the Pine Bluff military arsenal in Arkansas. The arsenal originally was
established to produce and store biological weapons, Leitner says.
According to the FBI summaries, Trie said Fu and his wife,
Violetta, were �silent partners� in the formation of Trie�s Daihatsu
International Trading Inc. and invested thousands of dollars in start-up
capital. According to government sources who have seen Trie�s full FBI
interviews, the Fu�s gave Trie $40,000 in �start-up capital� for this joint
venture.
In fact, Fu tells Insight in an exclusive interview that he was not a
�partner� with Trie and did not invest money in Daihatsu, per se. But he
admits that he and his wife lent the Tries $40,000 as a favor and that the
loan was repaid. At the same time, Fu acknowledges that the registered
mailing address for Daihatsu was Fu�s home in Little Rock, Ark. �At
that time [December 1991], Charlie�s wife and my wife tried to open a
company,� Fu tells Insight. Mrs. Fu quit the business after a few weeks,
Fu says. �Violetta felt she was incapable of handling the business
because of lack of experience and lack of language ability.� He says he
is not aware of any business conducted by Daihatsu or United Biotech,
another trading company registered by Trie during the 1992 presidential
campaign season.
A summary of Trie�s depositions to the FBI reads, in part: �Trie
acknowledged being a close friend of Dr. Peter Fu, a research
biochemist who was chief of the toxicology branch of an FDA facility
near Little Rock,� adding that �the Fus withdrew from the partnership in
1992 or 1993.� Trie also told the FBI that Zhang was present when Trie
formed United Biotech and that Trie had introduced Fu to Zhang in Little
Rock.
Fu tells Insight that he may have been introduced to Zhang in 1992
but that he couldn�t and didn�t help them in their business. �Charlie
brought someone to me who wanted to do something for a vaccine for
hepatitis. They thought I knew something about vaccines, but I do not.
It�s not in my area of research,� Fu says.
The 500-liter fermentation tank transferred to the Changchun facility
would be prohibited for sale by the Department of Defense�s Militarily
Critical Technologies List because it allows the manufacture of large
quantities of biological agents, such as botulism or anthrax bacteria, for
military purposes, Leitner says. Several 500-liter tanks of this type were
discovered in Iraq and seized as contraband by U.N. Special
Commission inspectors in 1991. According to government sources,
China has listed the Changchun facility on the international registry of
facilities producing biological or chemical agents but claims its only use at
this time is for the production of pharmaceuticals such as hepatitis
vaccines.
Leitner calls Trie�s deposition regarding the fermentation tank and
the involvement of Fu �a revelation� that should have been followed up
but apparently wasn�t. �Here we have an FDA guy who is head of the
toxicology branch of his lab, who gives Trie $40,000 and gets
introduced to the manager of a bioweapons program in China. They
gave direct assistance to a biological-weapons program, and the FBI did
not follow up. It�s right there on page four of the FBI summary. You
can�t get more blatant than that.�
Asked about these matters, both the FBI and the Justice
Department declined comment.
___________________________________________________
Trie�s Deal-Making Caught on Videotape
Peter Leitner, a Defense Department expert on dual-use
technologies, warns that Red China�s effort to obtain restricted U.S.
equipment has been �patient, precise and extraordinarily successful.� He
explains that U.S.-based companies frequently have been enlisted to
lobby for export waivers to transfer single items of dual-use technology
which, by themselves, appear to be innocuous but which, when
accumulated and combined with other exports, support highly
sophisticated military production. This not only saves the People�s
Republic of China, or PRC, billions of dollars in research and
development, it escalates the upgrading of PRC forces, says Leitner.
Leitner, who for years has been criticizing the Clinton-Gore
relaxation of export controls, teamed with Scott Wheeler of TV�s
American Investigator to produce a documentary video, Trading With
the Enemy: How the Clinton Administration Armed China, which just
has been released. It includes a segment showing President Clinton�s
friend and fund-raiser Charlie Trie and other members of an Arkansas
state trade delegation meeting with Chinese officials in October 1992,
just before the presidential election.
The voice of a man in the room, said to belong to Arkansas
businessman Carl Bird, tells the Chinese officials: �His [Clinton�s] policy
for China could be influenced, certainly by people at this table, a lot
more than George Bush�s.� Then Trie interrupts: �[Bill Clinton] wants to
invest in China � so he knows.� Trie turns back to the Chinese officials,
who speak to him in excited Mandarin, and then he translates: �He says
they can set up Bill Clinton with China � it will be a pleasure.�
Trie, meanwhile, was doing other strategic business. Daihatsu
International Trading Inc., which he says he founded with his alleged
silent partner Peter Fu of the National Center for Toxicology Research
at Pine Bluff, Ark., received an order for a medical fermenter that could
be used to produce biological weapons, including anthrax. Did the
Chinese officials tell Trie the precise specifications of the machine
needed for their Changchun Biological Products Institute in October
1992? According to copies obtained by Insight of secret FBI interviews
with Trie during 1999, that is unclear.
This much is certain from the deposition summaries: The Chinese
were very interested not only in the dual-use medical device but also in
obtaining Trie�s help to use Chinese and U.S. companies to provide
cover for visas necessary to get into the United States.
Leitner tells Insight that the involvement of Peter Fu made sense
because �Fu is a world-class expert in biological weapons. He would
have been a tremendous consultant for getting just the right
specifications, just the right machine.� In an interview with Insight, Fu
denies having had a formal role in Daihatsu and says he merely loaned
Trie a little money as a personal favor � $40,000 worth.
During the same time period that Trie was working his deals with
China while on Arkansas trade missions, then-governor Bill Clinton was
making speeches excoriating President Bush for �coddling the dictators�
in Beijing and putting U.S. business interests ahead of human rights.
The video includes interviews with Rep. Curt Weldon, a
Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services
subcommittee on Military Research and Development; former CIA
director James Woolsey, former ambassador to China James Lilley;
former Clinton fund-raiser Johnny Chung; and arms-control expert Gary
Milhollin � all of whom give damning portraits of an administration
hell-bent on risking breaches of national security for the sake of trade
with the PRC. As Milhollin says in one interview: �The motto of the
Clinton administration has been: When in doubt, ship it out.�
http://www.americaninvestigator.net/release/chasesocialism.htm
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Chevy Chase Praises Socialism
http://www.americaninvestigator.net/release/chasesocialism.htm
--
Bard
To All Elected Officials:
"Stop stealing my earnings that you use to give to those you know will vote for you."
There's not a dime bit of difference between a DemoRat and a RepubRat,
they're simply two wings of the same bird of prey which pecks at your
earnings and devours your Freedom.
BUCHANAN-Reform
http://gopatgo2000.com/default.htm
Eternal Vigilance - The Price of Freedom!
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A>
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