Connect China's Dots

May 10, 1999 - William Safire - The New York Times

I called three friends in the Departments of Energy, Defense and Justice and asked them to turn on their office computers and read to me the first banner that came on their screens.

"Anyone using this system expressly consents to monitoring" is the message. Government employees using Government equipment on Government time thus waive privacy claims. Wen Ho Lee, the scientist who downloaded millions of lines of the nation's most secret codes to a computer easy to penetrate, also signed a waiver consenting to a search of his computer without his knowledge.

And yet the Reno Justice Department denied the F.B.I.'s request for permission to search Lee's Government computer. Eric Holder, Janet Reno's deputy, decided that a court search warrant was necessary -- but then refused to apply to the special foreign-surveillance court to get it. Of more than 700 such F.B.I. requests a year, a surveillance official admits that a flat turndown is extremely rare. Why this one?

Ms. Reno, who never met an investigation of Chinese penetration she didn't try to undermine, is suckering us with a claim that the denial of surveillance was to protect a criminal investigation. That is foo-foo dust. This was counterespionage, and the Criminal Division was kept in the dark.

Making C.D. the scapegoat for the failure to protect America's deepest nuclear secrets is typical of the Clinton-Reno refusal to accept responsibility for endangering national security. Reno has appointed her personal Whitewash Brigade of favorite roundheels. This enables her to rebuff Congress and the press for months with the usual "I cannot comment because an inquiry is ongoing."

Her non-investigation of this Mr. Lee, following last year's oh-so-gentle prosecution of another Mr. Lee for espionage, is part of a pattern of averting exposure of Clinton's national-security laxity. Connect the dots:

  1. Political contributions poured in from Beijing spymasters through Johnny Chung, 50-time visitor through Hillary Clinton's office. Richard Shelby's Senate Intelligence has now passed evidence of "suspicious banking relationships" to Reno Justice, where it will languish unless Senate Banking picks up the trail.

  2. Secret U.S. technology flowed out to China, made possible by Clinton's easing of export controls to his "strategic partner." This included missile improvements to target U.S. cities and supercomputers that could take advantage of secrets being stolen while Justice was determinedly protecting Mr. Lee from search.

  3. Nuclear secrets poured out of Los Alamos and other labs to computers easily accessed. Though The Washington Post, a day late and a scandal short, treats this as the partisan conclusion of "GOP Senators," Democrat J. Robert Kerrey said yesterday he had "no doubt" that the technology transfer and Chinese espionage at nuclear labs damaged our national security.

Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson cannot explain why Clinton claimed not to know of heavy espionage on his watch when he demonstrably did. With exquisite irony, Richardson makes a great show of strapping scientists into lie detectors.

They never learn. Wen Ho Lee beat a polygraph when he was first suspected, just as the Soviet spy Aldrich Ames did. Reliance on the sweat machine is the surest way to intimidate innocent scientists while letting downloaders and dead-droppers appear to be not guilty.

With Clintonites hunkered down and Justice covering up, Congress must do the digging. A report by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control showed what Chinese arms enterprises received U.S. technology over the past decade -- but could supply no names of U.S. exporters during the Clinton years. That's because that embarrassment is "proprietary information" at the Commerce Department.

John McCain's Senate Commerce Committee has the power to subpoena those names from Commerce, and to have Wisconsin's Gary Milhollin run those sales against his Chinese-arms data base. That would tell us what political contributors were allowed to sell sensitive technology in 1996 and 1997 to which Chinese nuclear, missile and military sites.

Staring at us are dots connecting political money and radical policy switches to laxity in stopping the sale and theft of secrets. But none are so blind as those who will not see.


  • Return to Wen Ho Lee Page