http://www.consortiumnews.com/021601b.html
February 16, 2001
Chinese Espionage Was a Reagan-Bush Scandal
By Robert Parry
As recently as Tuesday, in a televised infomercial for right-wing Judicial
Watch, the charge resurfaced that the Clinton administration’s role in
Chinese nuclear espionage had not been investigated fully.
This time, the claim came from onetime-leftist journalist Christopher
Hitchens as he chewed over old “Clinton scandals” with Judicial Watch leader
Larry Klayman. According to the Judicial Watch infomercial, the culprits who
curtailed this investigation were Clinton sympathizers in the press.
Beyond helping Judicial Watch raise money, this recurring China allegation
has become something of a touchstone for many conservatives -- as well as
other Americans -- who believe that the Clinton administration somehow traded
nuclear secrets to China for campaign donations in 1996 -- and got away with
it.
Indeed, many American voters may have gone to the polls last November with
concerns that Al Gore's 1996 visit to a Buddhist temple in California had
some connection to the alleged loss of nuclear secrets from Los Alamos. Bush
supporters certainly did all they could to leave that impression.
But as we have pointed out before, these allegations were based on bogus
history and false logic. Indeed, the evidence always has pointed in a very
different direction: that the alleged Chinese theft of secrets for building
the miniaturized W-88 nuclear warhead occurred during the mid-1980s, under
the watch of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
The key facts were these:
A purported Chinese defector walked into U.S. government offices in Taiwan
in 1995 and handed over Chinese documents indicating that Chinese
intelligence apparently had stolen the secrets of the W-88 warhead “sometime
between 1984 and 1992.” The Chinese then tested their miniaturized warhead in
1992 while the elder Bush was still president. Indeed, the suspicious trips
that made Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee an espionage suspect occurred
between 1986-88, while Reagan was president.
Yet, these salient facts have never been highlighted in the national news
media, which seemed to have become addicted to “Clinton scandals” by the
time the possible W-88 espionage was revealed to the public in 1999.
New Corroboration
Somewhat correcting that media failure this month was a long retrospective on
the Wen Ho Lee case by The New York Times, a newspaper whose early imprecise
reporting had helped drive the "Chinagate" media stampede.
Over two days – Feb. 4 and 5 – the Times laid out the detailed chronology of
events and confirmed that the suspected loss of the nuclear secrets dated
back to the Reagan-Bush administration and to its cozy strategic relationship
with communist China.
The Times noted that limited exchanges between the two countries’ nuclear
scientists began after President Jimmy Carter officially recognized China in
1978. But those meetings grew far more expansive and less controlled during
the 1980s.
“With the Reagan administration eager to isolate the Soviet Union, hundreds
of scientists traveled between the United States and China, and the
cooperation expanded to the development of torpedoes, artillery shells and
jet fighters,” the Times reported. “The exchanges were spying opportunities
as well.”
Oliver North's Gambit
The full story of the Republican-Chinese collaboration was even worse than
the Times described. As we reported last September, Ronald Reagan's White
House had decided to share sensitive national security secrets with the
Chinese communists by 1984.
That year, Ronald Reagan’s White House turned to the Chinese because the U.S.
Congress had banned U.S. military assistance to the Nicaraguan contra rebels.
Despite that ban, the White House was determined to secure surface-to-air
missiles that the contras could use to shoot down Soviet-made attack
helicopters that had become an effective weapon in the Nicaraguan
government’s arsenal.
Some of the private U.S. operatives working with White House aide Oliver
North had settled on China as a source for SA-7 missiles. In testimony at
his 1989 Iran-contra trial, North called the securing of these weapons a
“very sensitive delivery.”
For the Chinese missile deal in 1984, North said he received help from the
CIA in arranging false end-user certificates from the right-wing government
of Guatemala. North testified that he “had made arrangements with the
Guatemalan government, using the people [CIA] director [William] Casey had
given me.”
But China was opposed to the Guatemalan government, which was then engaged in
a scorched-earth war against its own leftist guerrillas. China balked at
selling missiles to the Guatemalan military.
To resolve this problem, the White House dispatched North to a clandestine
meeting with a Chinese military official. The idea was to bring the Chinese
communists in on what was then one of the most sensitive secrets of the U.S.
government: the missiles were not going to Guatemala, but rather into a
clandestine pipeline arranged by the White House to funnel military supplies
to the contras in defiance of U.S. law.
This was a secret so sensitive that not even the U.S. Congress could be
informed, but it was to be shared with communist China.
In fall 1984, North enlisted Gaston J. Sigur, the NSC’s expert on East Asia,
to make the arrangements for a meeting with a communist Chinese
representative, according to Sigur’s testimony at North’s 1989 trial. “I
arranged a luncheon and brought together Colonel North and this individual
from the Chinese embassy” responsible for military affairs, Sigur testified.
“At lunch, they sat and they discussed the situation in Central America,”
Sigur said. “Colonel North raised the issue of the need for weaponry by the
contras, and the possibility of a Chinese sale of weapons, either to the
contras or, as I recall, I think it was more to countries in the region but
clear for the use of the contras.”
North described the same meeting in his autobiography, Under Fire. To avoid
coming under suspicion of being a Chinese spy, North said he first told the
FBI that the meeting had been sanctioned by national security adviser Robert
C. McFarlane. Then, North went ahead with the meeting to gain the help of
communist China.
“Back in Washington, I met with a Chinese military officer assigned to their
embassy to encourage their cooperation,” North wrote. “We enjoyed a fine
lunch at the exclusive Cosmos Club in downtown Washington.”
North said, in part, the Chinese communists saw the collaboration as a way to
develop “better relations with the United States.” Possession of this
knowledge – one of the Reagan administration’s most politically dangerous
secrets – also put Beijing in position to leverage U.S. policy in the future.
It was in this climate of cooperation that other secrets, including how to
make miniaturized hydrogen bombs, allegedly reached communist China.
Enter Wen Ho Lee
Wen Ho Lee first came to the FBI’s attention in 1982 when he called another
scientist who was under investigation for espionage, according to the Times
chronology. But Lee's contacts with China -- along with trips there by other
U.S. nuclear scientists -- increased in the mid-1980s as relations warmed
between Washington and Beijing.In March 1985, Lee was seen talking with
Chinese scientists during a scientific conference in Hilton Head, S.C. The
next year, with approval of Los Alamos, Lee and another scientist attended a
conference in Beijing. In 1988, Wen Ho Lee attended another conference in
Beijing.“On Sept. 25, 1992, a nuclear blast shook China’s western desert,”
the Times wrote. “From spies and electronic surveillance, American
intelligence officials determined that the test was a breakthrough in China’s
long quest to match American technology for smaller, more sophisticated
hydrogen bombs.”In September 1992, George H.W. Bush was still president. By
that point, the barn door had been left open for years and the horses
apparently were long gone.In the early years of the Clinton administration,
U.S. intelligence experts began to appreciate the potential magnitude of the
Chinese espionage. They came to believe that the Chinese nuclear breakthrough
was most likely achieved through purloined U.S. secrets.“It’s like they were
driving a Model T and went around the corner and suddenly had a Corvette,”
said Robert M. Hanson, a Los Alamos intelligence analyst, in early 1995, the
Times reported.
A Scandal 'Fix
'The W-88 story, however, did not break until 1999, in the weeks after
President Clinton’s impeachment and Senate trial. It came at a time when the
Republicans and the national news media seemed hungry for another "Clinton
scandal" fix. To get one, they brushed aside the timing of the lost
secrets.The espionage story often was paired with allegations of suspicious
Chinese money going into Democratic coffers in 1996 and with images of Vice
President Al Gore visiting a Buddhist temple in California that same year.
The picture of Asian-looking monks and Al Gore became the enduring image of
"Chinagate."Virtually never noted was the logical impossibility of Democrats
selling secrets to China in 1996 when China apparently had obtained those
secrets almost a decade earlier during a Republican administration.Feeding
the media's appetite for scandal, Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., released a
high-profile “Chinagate” report on May 25, 1999. The well-received report
played down any Reagan-Bush role, even through the presentation of misleading
graphics.The report's time-line chronology of the scandal covered two full
pages [p. 74-75] and packed all the boxes alleging espionage into the years
of the Carter and Clinton administrations. Nothing sinister appeared in the
12-year swath of the Reagan-Bush years, other than a 1988 test of a neutron
bomb built, the Cox report said, from secrets believed stolen in the “late
1970s,” the Carter years.Only a careful reading of the text inside all the
boxes revealed that the principal security breaches under review occurred
between 1984-92, the Reagan-Bush years.Similar misleading charges came from
Republican allies. Larry Klayman’s Judicial Watch, for instance, sent out a
solicitation letter in 1999 seeking $5.2 million for a special “Chinagate
Task Force” that would “hold Bill Clinton, Al Gore and the Democratic Party
Leadership fully accountable for election fraud, bribery and possibly treason
in connection with the ‘Chinagate’ scandal."“Chinagate involves actions by
President Clinton and Vice President Gore which have put all Americans at
risk from China’s nuclear arsenal in exchange for million of dollars in
illegal campaign contributions from the Communist Chinese,” Klayman's letter
said.
Political Mileage
During the 2000 presidential election campaign, an obscure conservative group
got more mileage out of blaming Clinton and Gore for the espionage. The group
aired an ad modeled after Lyndon Johnson's infamous 1964 commercial that
showed a girl picking a daisy before the screen dissolved into a nuclear
explosion.The ad remake in 2000 accused the Clinton-Gore administration of
selling vital nuclear secrets to communist China, in exchange for campaign
donations in 1996. The compromised nuclear secrets, the ad stated, gave
communist China “the ability to threaten our homes with long-range nuclear
warheads.”While the attacks on Clinton and Gore were high profile,
less-noticed evidence continued to build indicating that the hemorrhage of
nuclear secrets actually had occurred on the Reagan-Bush watch.Last year,
federal investigators began translating other documents from the Chinese
defector who approached U.S. officials in Taiwan in 1995. The closer
examination indicated that the exposure of nuclear secrets in the 1980s was
worse than previously thought.According to an article in The Washington Post
on Oct. 19, 2000, “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.”Still, the overwhelming
public impression remained that the Clinton-Gore administration was
responsible.
The Payoff
The ultimate payoff for this twisting of history may have come in November,
when possibly millions of Americans went to the polls determined to throw out
the Clinton-Gore crowd for selling nuclear secrets to communist China. Given
all that the public had heard, the sentiment was understandable.By voting
against Al Gore, these voters might have thought they were taking the keys of
the Executive Branch away from the people responsible for Chinese espionage
that made Americans more vulnerable to devastating nuclear attack.In reality,
however, these voters simply were helping return the keys to the political
leaders who actually had overseen the loss of the nuclear secrets in the
first place.Robert Parry is an investigative reporter who broke many of the
Iran-contra stories in the 1980s for The Associated Press and Newsweek.
