Page 2: Nuclear Secrets In the years that followed, U.S. nuclear scientists held a number of meetings with their Chinese counterparts to discuss areas of mutual interest. While
the Americans were under restrictions about what information could be
shared, it has never been clarified exactly why these meetings were held
in the first place – why the risk was taken that some U.S. scientist
might willfully or accidentally divulge nuclear secrets. These
scientific contacts in the 1980s sowed the seeds of the Wen Ho Lee case. In
1995, after the Chinese agent delivered the so-called “walk-in”
document indicating that U.S. nuclear secrets had been compromised by
1988, investigators for the U.S. Energy Department began focusing on
U.S. scientists who had traveled to China during the 1980s. The
investigators developed a list of a dozen names, including a lead
suspect, Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-born naturalized U.S. citizen. As
The Washington Post reported, “Lee was at the top of the list
because he had traveled to China in 1986 and 1988, and because he and
his wife, Sylvia, had taken an active role in greeting visiting Chinese
scientists” who toured nuclear labs in the United States. [WP, Sept.
17, 2000] By 1998, amid the impeachment drive to oust President Clinton, Republicans on Capitol Hill got wind of these investigations. The
Republicans eagerly sought to link the espionage suspicions to
allegations of improper Chinese donations to the 1996 Clinton-Gore
reelection campaign. Democratic fund-raiser Johnny Chung had been
accused of funneling a $30,000 donation from a Chinese military
intelligence front to the campaign. By early 1999, word was spreading about a Los Alamos espionage suspect with an Asian name. In March 1999, “Chinagate” exploded as a scandal with front-page stories by Jeff Gerth and James Risen of The New York Times about possible Chinese espionage at the Los Alamos nuclear lab. Soon,
Wen Ho Lee was identified as the chief suspect and was fired for
transferring sensitive classified material to his personal office
computer. On
May 25, 1999, a select House committee headed by Rep. Christopher Cox,
R-Calif., released an 872-page report in three glossy, bound volumes.
The report described how the Chinese government supposedly stole nuclear
secrets while the Clinton administration dragged its feet on
investigating. The Cox report did what it could to implicate the Democrats and absolve the Republicans. A chronological chart about the alleged espionage covered two pages [p. 74-75] and packed all the boxes describing evidence of 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 from secrets that the report
said were believed stolen in the “late 1970s,” the Carter years. Only
a careful reading of the text inside the boxes revealed that the
principal security breaches under review, particularly the stolen
secrets of the W-88 miniaturized nuclear bomb, occurred “sometime
between 1984 and 1992,” the Reagan-Bush years. The first test of the
lighter warhead occurred in 1992, the last year of the Bush
administration. The
illogic of blaming secrets apparently lost during a Republican
administration in the 1980s on Democratic fund-raising in 1996 didn’t
stop the stampede of media pundits who latched onto the Republican
allegations. In spring 1999, “Chinagate” filled a void in Clinton
scandals left by Clinton’s impeachment acquittal in the Senate. Dan
Quayle, the former vice president who then was testing the waters for a
presidential run, accused the Clinton-Gore administration of
“appeasement” of China in “espionage involving our most critical
secrets.” [NYT, Sept. 16, 2000] Other
conservatives saw a new opening for fund-raising. Larry Klayman’s
Judicial Watch sent out a solicitation letter 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. … Chinagate involves actions by
President Clinton and Vice President Gore which have put all Americans
at risk from China’s nuclear arsenal.” Eventually,
more tempered assessments emerged. A panel of intelligence officials
reviewed the evidence and came away with far less certainty about the
significance of Chinese espionage than the Cox committee believed. The
Chinese 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,” the panel reported. The
intelligence experts could not decide which sources had been most
important or what the Chinese had gained from the various strategies. In June 1999, a study by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board – chaired by former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H. – concluded that the spying probably was less than “widely publicized.” Rudman’s panel also found that the W-88 secrets were in the hands of other federal agencies by 1983, so the leak could have come from elsewhere than Los Alamos. The
board also judged that suspicions had unfairly settled on Wen Ho Lee
because of his Chinese heritage. Finally,
on Sept. 7, 1999, The New York Times, which had stoked the
“Chinagate” scandal six months earlier, retreated from its
overheated coverage. The new article by William J. Broad noted that the
evidence was much more tenuous than the Cox report had represented. “A
review of the dispute, based on months of interviews and disclosures of
weapons and intelligence secrets, suggests that the congressional report
went beyond the evidence in asserting that stolen secrets were the main
reason for China’s breakthrough,” Broad wrote. Though
the intense spy fever had broken, its consequences had not played out.
The Justice Department obtained a 59-count indictment against Wen Ho Lee
for mishandling classified material and arranged to have him held in
solitary confinement with his cell light on at all times. The
60-year-old scientist was allowed out of his cell for one hour a day and
allowed to shuffle with leg shackles around a prison courtyard. After nine months of incarceration, a key FBI witness against Lee acknowledged overstating some of the evidence and infuriated U.S. District Judge James A. Parker. At a court hearing on Sept. 13, Parker accepted Lee’s plea bargain to a single count of mishandling classified material and freed the scientist. The
judge said he had been “led astray” by the U.S. government and
apologized to Lee for the “demeaning, unnecessarily punitive
conditions” under which Lee was held. Parker
allowed Lee to go free with no additional prison time. Still, federal
prosecutors said they will compel Lee to make a full explanation of why
he downloaded the classified data. After the plea bargain, some of
Lee’s associates offered a fairly innocuous explanation. They said Lee
felt he needed the data so he could continue to do unclassified work if
he lost his job at Los Alamos, The Washington Post reported. [WP,
Sept. 17, 2000] Remaining Questions Still,
the larger suspicions of “Chinagate” remain a backdrop of the 2000
election, with President Bush’s son seeking to reclaim the White House
for the Republicans. Though not alluding directly to the espionage
allegations, Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s campaign has run ads showing
Vice President Gore meeting with saffron-robed Buddhist monks in 1996,
an allusion to the Chinese fund-raising issue that sparked the
“Chinagate” firestorm. Given
the likely role of former President Bush in his son’s administration,
another question that begs answering is why the Reagan-Bush
administrations allowed exchanges between Chinese and U.S. nuclear
scientists in the 1980s and whether those arrangements were linked to
China’s secret support for the contras. Was
President Reagan’s willingness to scratch the back of governments that
lent a hand to the contras a factor in the cozy, albeit secret,
U.S.-China relationship? Was there a U.S.-China quid pro quo – as
there apparently was for other countries – and, if so, what did the
quid pro quo entail? While those questions might never be answered, there can be no doubt that the Reagan-Bush administration did share at least one very sensitive secret with the communist Chinese: that the White House was defying U.S. law in 1984 by arranging military shipments to the contras. That
secret stayed hidden from the American people and from the U.S. Congress
until the Iran-contra scandal was finally exposed two years later. ______ In
the 1980s, Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-contra stories for The
Associated Press and Newsweek.
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