-Caveat Lector-
Pentagon to Add 450 Experts to Protect Defense Secrets
By Walter Pincus and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday , October 27, 2000 ; Page A02
The Pentagon is hiring 450 counterintelligence specialists to
protect defense secrets after learning that China has obtained
classified U.S. missile technology, including critical
information about the heat shield that keeps America's most
advanced missiles from burning up as they reenter the atmosphere,
senior defense officials said.
While applauding the attempt to boost security, members of
Congress said it was long overdue, coming more than five years
after the Defense Department was told of the suspected Chinese
espionage.
A trove of Chinese military documents, given to the CIA in 1995
by a former Chinese missile specialist, showed that Beijing had
gathered some classified data about U.S. nuclear weapons and a
great deal of secret information about America's ballistic
missiles, according to officials familiar with the material.
The Energy Department reacted quickly to the apparent loss of
nuclear secrets, launching a probe that focused on Los Alamos
National Laboratory and scientist Wen Ho Lee. But the Defense
Department has been slower to respond to what officials now say
was the far more substantial evidence that China had obtained
significant missile technology.
Over the past two years, Congress has pressed the Energy
Department to take drastic measures to tighten security at the
national laboratories, such as requiring polygraph or "lie
detector" exams for thousands of employees. But little
congressional pressure has been applied to the Pentagon, which
now is moving to tighten its control over missile technology at
military installations and private defense contractors.
Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said this week in response to
inquiries from The Washington Post that it will take until 2002
to bring on board all 450 counterintelligence specialists,
roughly the same number eliminated since the end of the Cold War
for budgetary reasons.
"All the new specialists will work to protect technical secrets
at the Defense Department laboratories and defense contractors,"
Bacon said, adding that "other procedural techniques and
monitoring tools" will be used to improve security.
The counterintelligence officers are being hired through the
Pentagon's civil service procedures and are expected to come
primarily from the military, local police forces and the ranks of
former government employees, according to a Pentagon official.
Some will work in Washington and others at defense facilities
around the country.
Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview that his
committee staff has been urging the Pentagon to add
counterintelligence positions since 1997.
Shelby called the Pentagon's failure to investigate the loss of
missile technology "a big concern." China's apparent theft of
missile secrets from the Defense Department or its contractors is
at least as troubling as the Energy Department's alleged loss of
secrets related to nuclear warheads, he said.
Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence, said the slow response reflects
broader security problems at the Pentagon, including a backlog of
about 1 million people awaiting routine re-investigations of
their security clearances.
"It is such a huge problem," Goss said. "They are whittling away
at the pile there."
Most of the approximately 60 espionage cases in the Defense
Department over the past 20 years have involved people who had
been cleared to handle classified documents. Top-secret
clearances are required to be re-investigated every five years,
secret clearances every 10 years and confidential clearances
every 15 years.
Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), chairman of a House select
committee that investigated Chinese espionage at the national
laboratories, said he believes the CIA and the entire U.S.
intelligence community share responsibility for the Defense
Department's failure to conduct a prompt investigation of the
loss of missile technology.
"The problem could have been alleviated if any member of the
intelligence community had shown special initiative," Cox said.
In 1995, according to senior intelligence officials, a Chinese
missile specialist approached the CIA with an unsolicited offer
to provide secret Chinese military documents. Over a period of
months, this "walk-in" agent handed over about 13,000 pages, The
Post reported last week.
One of the first sections to be translated contained physical
data about the W-88, a nuclear warhead on U.S. submarine-launched
missiles. This triggered a 1996 probe by the Energy Department
and the FBI, which the Justice Department later concluded had
focused too narrowly on Lee.
The government never charged him with espionage, and he was freed
last month after nine months in jail when he pleaded guilty to a
single felony count of downloading classified data to computer
tapes.
While the Energy Department and the FBI may have moved
precipitously, at least in singling out Lee, the Defense
Department hardly reacted at all. Government officials have
suggested two reasons: The intelligence community was slow to
translate all 13,000 pages from Mandarin to English, completing
that work only last year, and the CIA suspected on the basis of a
failed polygraph exam that the walk-in defector was a Chinese
double agent.
But after the FBI brought the defector to the United States for
further questioning, it concluded that he was legitimate, and
senior intelligence officials said the information he provided
has proved accurate.
Cox said this week that the CIA assured his committee in late
1998 that the untranslated portions were "mundane." Senior
intelligence officials conceded that there were delays in
translating the documents, but they said the Pentagon, the FBI
and the Energy Department were informed in 1995 that China
apparently had obtained classified information about the Trident
II reentry vehicle on U.S. nuclear missile submarines.
"The Pentagon knew that in 1995, the FBI knew that in '95, DOE
knew it," the official said.
The intelligence officials also said that since the fall of 1996,
the CIA's Counterintelligence Center sent about five separate
"crimes reports" to the FBI as the gradual translation of the
documents yielded evidence that missile and warhead secrets had
been compromised by the U.S. military or its contractors.
One former senior Pentagon official who was briefed on the
walk-in documents in 1997 said the Trident II information
obtained by China was "extremely accurate." It included a
description of the sophisticated mating, or attachment mechanism,
of the nuclear warhead inside the Mark-5 reentry vehicle, as well
as of the materials that make up the heat shield.
Whether China was able to improve its own missiles because of the
U.S. data remains unclear. "China's technical advances have been
made on the basis of classified and unclassified information
derived from espionage, contact with U.S. and other countries'
scientists, conferences and publications, unauthorized media
disclosures, declassified U.S. weapons information, and Chinese
indigenous development," a CIA damage assessment said last year.
"The relative contribution of each cannot be determined," it
concluded.
But whatever its practical value, such information "should not be
in Chinese hands" and most likely got there through espionage, a
U.S. intelligence official said.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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