-Caveat Lector-
The Man Inside China's Bomb Labs
U.S. Blocks Memoir of Scientist Who Gathered Trove of Information
By Steve Coll
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 16, 2001; Page A01
Between the spring of 1990 and the summer of 1999, nuclear weapons
scientist and intelligence analyst Danny B. Stillman made nine trips to
China. He visited nearly all of its secret nuclear weapons facilities
and held extensive, authorized discussions with Chinese scientists and
generals.
In all, Stillman said he collected the names of more than 2,000 Chinese
scientists working at nuclear weapons facilities, recorded detailed
histories of the Chinese program from top scientists, inspected nuclear
weapons labs and bomb testing sites, interviewed Chinese weapons
designers, photographed nuclear facilities - and then, each time he
returned home, passed the information along to U.S. intelligence
debriefers.
Now Stillman, 67, who worked for 28 years at Los Alamos (N.M.) National
Laboratory before retiring in late 1993, is locked in a dispute with the
U.S. government over whether he can publish a 500-page memoir detailing
his and other little-known contacts between U.S. and Chinese nuclear
scientists during the 1990s. The case involves complex First Amendment
issues and reveals the extent to which both countries have used
scientific exchanges to keep tabs on each other's nuclear programs.
Stillman submitted his manuscript, "Inside China's Nuclear Weapons
Program," to the Defense Department and the Department of Energy 17
months ago for prepublication clearance required by a secrecy agreement
he signed at Los Alamos. Both agencies have so far denied Stillman
permission to publish, citing a Pentagon memo that says the memoir could
"reasonably be expected to damage the security concerns of the United
States" and "could also damage American foreign relations with China."
Stillman has hired an attorney and intends to file a lawsuit to reverse
that finding.
Stillman's disclosures could provide new context for allegations that
China used contacts with U.S. scientists during the 1990s to steal
U.S. nuclear secrets, showing that China also provided unprecedented
access to its own nuclear program to visiting U.S.
intelligence officials and scientists.
Stillman said in an interview that he believes the Chinese nuclear
program made its important advances without resorting to espionage.
While the Chinese looked for ways to steal secrets during their contacts
with him and other U.S. scientists, he said, they also were "looking to
brag about what they had done" on their own, while "trying to bring
their program out into the open."
China invited Stillman to its closed nuclear facilities while seeking to
rebuild ties disrupted by American outrage over the massacre of Chinese
students around Tiananmen Square in 1989.
At the beginning of the 1980s, China had authorized intelligence-sharing
with the United States to help contain the Soviet Union.
These programs included smuggling arms to Afghan rebels and operating
joint listening posts along the Soviet Union's southern borders.
In the nuclear arena, China had been slower to engage, but as Stillman
began his travels, Beijing signaled a desire to enter arms control
agreements such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Chinese
scientists wanted to exchange information about how to maintain their
nuclear stockpile after testing ended. They also repeatedly pressed
Stillman to transmit requests to U.S. officials for safety locks that
would make it harder for Chinese bombs to be detonated without
authorization.
"They wanted me to bring information to the U.S. government," Stillman
said. "If you want to weigh what we got versus what we might have said
- well, we got a whole lot."
Colleagues familiar with Stillman's work concur.
"We saw things no outsider had ever seen before," said Robert Daniel,
who traveled to China with Stillman in 1991, when Daniel was an
assistant energy secretary in charge of intelligence programs. "We went
to the test site in the Gobi Desert and saw them getting ready to place
a [nuclear explosive] device down a 600-meter hole. . . . I think we
learned a lot, and I would emphasize, we didn't give anything away."
"Danny's approach was disarmingly simple: You just go to China, find the
guys who designed the bombs and ask them questions,"
said Robert Vrooman, former director of counterintelligence at Los
Alamos. Added Jay Keyworth, a former science adviser to President
Ronald Reagan: "I would say the whole activity that he was involved in
was extraordinarily successful for the United States."
But skeptics of the scientific exchanges argue that on balance, the
United States has given up much more than it received, in part because
the U.S. nuclear program is ahead of China's.
"There's just absolutely no way to do these exchanges without showing
your hand in a way that there's security problems," said Gary Schmitt, a
former White House and Capitol Hill intelligence analyst who is
executive director of Project for the New American Century. "You had a
cocktail of a large policy goal [to engage China] combined with the
natural instincts of scientists to share everything. . . . I think
what happens is you just kid yourself about what you're doing."
Stillman and his lawyer argue that the best way to resolve such debates
is to allow publication of his memoir. But it isn't clear whether or
when the U.S. government will do that.
Last year, after conducting an initial manuscript review, the Department
of Energy proposed a few changes to remove what it said was sensitive
information about nuclear weapons. Stillman agreed to the changes but
soon learned that the Defense Intelligence Agency, backed by the CIA,
had decided that none of his manuscript could be released.
A Pentagon spokesman said yesterday that the DIA's recommendations were
not final and that a further Defense Department review was underway. A
DOE spokesman also said its review "is ongoing."
Mark S. Zaid, Stillman's attorney, said the government's rulings have
been overly broad because Stillman merely recorded in the book what he
saw and heard during visits made at the invitation of Chinese officials,
and in some cases was traveling as a private citizen after his
retirement.
"Essentially, what the government has done is classify his postcards
home," Zaid said.
There are few clear guidelines for Stillman's case, lawyers specializing
in First Amendment issues said. The most relevant precedent, they said,
was a 1972 dispute in which courts held that a former CIA agent, Victor
Marchetti, had a right to publish unclassified information but that the
government also had wide authority to deny clearance for any material
that was properly classified.
"There's enormous ground for battle about what is properly classified,"
said Mark Lynch, a partner at Covington & Burling and former attorney at
the American Civil Liberties Union.
Stillman joined Los Alamos in 1965 as a specialist in devices used to
simulate and measure nuclear explosions. In 1978, he was promoted to
run the lab's Division of International Technology, which contracted
with the DIA, CIA and other U.S. agencies to analyze foreign nuclear
programs.
As part of this work, Stillman met with visiting Chinese scientists
whenever possible. Playing off the intelligence community's fondness
for acronyms such as "SIGINT," or signals intelligence, and "HUMINT," or
human intelligence, Stillman called his method "ASKINT," as in "Just ask
them."
When five Chinese scientists visited New Mexico in 1988, Stillman
invited them on a picnic. Later he learned they were all from the
Chinese nuclear program. Stillman kept in touch and pressed for an
invitation to China.
In April 1990 he made his first trip, and with two U.S. colleagues he
visited China's equivalent of Los Alamos, the Southwest Institute of the
Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics at Mianyang. On this and
subsequent trips, the Chinese talked extensively about their program's
history and operations, including how they had developed a neutron bomb.
"I had videos and cameras, and I was always taking notes," Stillman
said.
Even after retiring from the lab in October 1993, Stillman continued to
travel to Chinese facilities, sometimes escorting senior Los Alamos
officials. More recently, he has traveled to China with John Lewis, a
Stanford University political scientist who specializes in the history
of China's nuclear program.
Before each trip, Stillman obtained permission to travel from the
Department of Energy. Each time he returned, a U.S. intelligence
debriefer came to his Los Alamos office for an interview, and Stillman
said he voluntarily provided detailed diaries about everything he had
seen and heard in China.
Stillman said Chinese scientists offered details that seemed to
contradict a select congressional committee headed by Rep.
Christopher Cox (R-Calif.). The committee alleged in 1999 that China
had stolen U.S. secrets that helped it to miniaturize nuclear weapons
for use on intercontinental missiles.
Stillman said Chinese physicists told him that they had begun research
on miniaturization during the 1970s, but could not complete it because
they lacked the computing power to carry out massive calculations. When
the Chinese physicists got access to supercomputers, they pulled out
their old research, ran the numbers and designed the new devices.
On a visit to China in the summer of 1999, Stillman said, Hu Side, one
of China's leading weapons physicists, delivered an angry speech over
dinner about distortions he ascribed to the Cox committee and the
prosecution of Taiwanese American scientist Wen Ho Lee for security
violations.
As for miniaturization, "We did not need you," Hu Side said, according
to Stillman. "These allegations must have been made for political
reasons."
Cox said yesterday that Chinese scientists provided a mixture of
accurate insights and disinformation to their U.S. colleagues. "I
think we were all in agreement that [the exchanges were] not a
black-and-white question."
>From his first visit, the Chinese asked Stillman to press U.S.
officials for help with nuclear bomb locks known as permissive action
links, or PALs. The Chinese said that splits in their military during
the Tiananmen crisis brought home the potential danger of unauthorized
control of nuclear weapons, and they wanted the United States to provide
older PAL technology that would make Chinese bombs safer but not
jeopardize U.S. bomb security.
"Every trip, they asked for that," Stillman said. "I always thought the
world would be a safer place if they got that."
In Washington, after Stillman transmitted the Chinese request, "There
was a big debate in the United States about how far we should go to
assist them with that technology," said Kurt Campbell, a former Pentagon
official during the Clinton administration, now senior vice president at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I think they [the
Chinese] truly were interested in what they called positive control."
Ultimately, however, U.S. authorities declined to help, and by the
mid-1990s China had turned to Russia for PAL technology as well as for
other nuclear weapons assistance.
Stillman said that after years of maintaining a low profile, he decided
to write his memoir because he had a great deal of information to add to
the record about how the Chinese built their nuclear program.
"I retired and I couldn't find a job, frankly, and I had all this unique
experience," Stillman said. "More Americans have walked on the surface
of the moon than have walked on the surface of the Chinese nuclear test
site."
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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