Washington, DC, May 12, 1999 SOURCES (tm) The Security Intelligence News Service Today’s Intelligence – Tomorrow’s Headlines ================================== NOTE: See end of this article for subscription coupon. We also offer cost-saving site licenses. If several people in your organization are getting SOURCES, you should have a site license. For more information, contact sales@dso.com. ______________________________________ (c) copyright, 1996-1999, dso inc., all rights reserved ______________________________________ TOLL FREE 1-888-8-dso-com (1-888-8-376-266) http://www.dso.com/ CEO - Glenn Davis Publisher - Jeffrey Hardy Managing Editor - Anthony L. Kimery Washington Bureau Chief - Dr. Clifford A. Kiracofe Contributing Editor, Washington Bureau - William J. Gill Contributing Editor, Paris Bureau - Pierre de Villemarest Assistant Editor - Linda Kelly PLEASE NOTE: SOURCES is pleased to announce the opening of our East Coast office: 601 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Suite 900, Washington, D.C. 20004, 202 434.8206 _______________________________________ Red-Handed: Caught in the Act, Several Chinese Spies Have Yet to be Brought to Justice The FBI has allegedly widened its probe of Wen Ho Lee, a fired Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) scientist, to include other suspects. But this is only the tip of the iceberg of investigations into Chinese espionage activities targeting U.S. weapons technologies. The FBI and the CIA have investigated numerous suspected Chinese spies during the last ten years, and across administrations. These investigations even involved stings against spies who paid thousands of dollars for what they thought was top secret information. No arrests were made, however. Foreign policy appears to have gotten in the way. By Jerry Bohnen and Anthony Kimery A relative of Wen Ho Lee (Lee is the scientist fired in March from a U.S. weapons lab for failing a lie detector test in conjunction with an investigation into whether he gave China information on a U.S. nuclear warhead ten years ago) is allegedly being probed for a second time for possibly having given China secrets about the U.S. stealth bomber. The investigation of Lee’s relative is among perhaps dozens of probes of Chinese spies conducted by the CIA and the FBI, some jointly, during in the last ten years, none of which have resulted in any arrests, according to a variety of federal officials and sources who recently spoke to SOURCES, on condition of anonymity. The sources say CIA and FBI counterintelligence (CI) agents have grown increasingly frustrated over decisions by higher-ups not to prosecute persons against whom they have painstakingly developed espionage cases. According to the sources, most of the stings were supposed to have culminated in arrests, but because they did not, CI agents and officials are now worrying that they will be blamed for the FBI’s lack of action given the growing furor over the seeming ineptness of Chinese spying investigations. The FBI is facing mounting criticism for the way it has handled Chinese spy probes going back several administrations. The Bureau’s Chinese CI operations are also under review by a special task force set up in recent weeks by Attorney General Janet Reno, who is believed to be personally overseeing details of the inquiry. The inquiry includes looking at how the Justice Department has handled spy cases, and whether all such cases have been vetted at the highest levels. The investigations described by sources contradict President Clinton’s statement in March that Chinese espionage during his administration has been marginal, a claim Energy Secretary Bill Richardson finally admitted isn’t true on NBC’s "Meet the Press" on May 9, 1999. "There have been damaging security leaks. The Chinese have obtained damaging information…during past administrations and the current administration," Richardson conceded. A recent CIA assessment of Chinese spying, "Implications of China’s Acquisition of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Information and the Development of Future Chinese Weapons," had already called the President’s claim into question. In light of the CIA’s findings, Senate intelligence committee chairman Richard Shelby told reporters that Clinton’s assertion that only marginal spying has taken place during his administration is "not true." The number and nature of Chinese spy probes over the last ten years which SOURCES was told about are significant, and include the FBI recently re-opening the investigation of Lee’s relative, who is said to work for a major California aerospace company involved in building the stealth bomber. The sources say the relative, who is under electronic surveillance, allegedly made frequent trips to China and has had contacts with individuals there who make the FBI and CIA suspect sensitive information was turned over to them. Ironically, the Justice Department has come under fire lately for the revelation that it turned down an earlier request by the FBI to place Lee under electronic surveillance. Sources say the FBI is also investigating a scientist (a former Midwest university professor) who was recently in possession of classified materials regarding nuclear processes. The FBI is not commenting on the extent of or the subjects of its investigations, but SOURCES has learned that the stings and related investigations it has been told about have come under scrutiny by the Attorney General’s office. The Chinese spies at the heart of these FBI probes, many working in the U.S., sought to acquire a "shopping list" of military weapons secrets including information on the SR-71 spy plane, AWACS aircraft, ballistic missile guidance systems, and nuclear attack submarines, according to the sources. According to the CIA report turned over to U.S. lawmakers recently, China has, in fact, obtained information on a variety of U.S. weapon systems as a result of espionage operations here. It is not known if classified portions of the report acknowledge the CIA and the FBI’s counterintelligence investigations. Regardless, mounting evidence indicates that Chinese espionage has been pervasive, and that the stings SOURCES has been told about are only the tip of the iceberg. Classified information provided to SOURCES indicates that political considerations may have played a role in preventing the probes from culminating in arrests. The White House, FBI, and Justice Department are increasingly looking as though politics indeed tainted how they managed Chinese espionage investigations. This possibility was buttressed by Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on April 12. Lawmakers were told that Clinton Administration officials repeatedly downplayed or dismissed evidence that China had stolen nuclear weapons secrets from a government weapons laboratory. In late 1988, the State Department did not consider China to be overly concerned about technologically modernizing its military through this decade, according to classified documents. The implication was that China was not likely to engage in espionage to get U.S. weapons technologies. While this thinking apparently drove foreign policy toward China, numerous probes of Chinese spying went nowhere, according to sources. A number of the probes involved undercover stings in which large cash payments, sometimes in the tens of thousands of dollars, were given to U.S. undercover operatives by Chinese spies who were trying to buy top secret information on U.S. weapons systems. "These were full-blown investigations -- wiretapping, videotaping, the whole nine yards," said one of the sources familiar with the probes. Since no arrests have been made, one source expressed doubt anything will come out of the expansion of the FBI’s probe of Lee. In recent weeks, the FBI let it be known that its investigation of Chinese espionage has indeed been widened to include unidentified suspects other than Lee. "New information is being evaluated and the focus of the probe has certainly expanded," an official was quoted in The Washington Times on March 18. The absence of arrests allegedly has frustrated both undercover operatives and their FBI and CIA handlers. One undercover operative and his handlers have complained that since the late 1980s, there has been a lack of initiative on the part of the Reagan and Bush, as well as the Clinton Administration to follow through with arrests. For years, FBI field agents have been voicing concern to one undercover operative who has shared his material and knowledge of operations with SOURCES. The operative said FBI agents have complained privately for years of not being able to get cases into court. They have voiced criticism of the U.S. Attorney General’s office and Justice Department officials who allegedly did not want to proceed against the Chinese. Some of the stings SOURCES was told about were videotaped, showing Chinese contacts meeting undercover operatives in motel and hotel rooms all over the U.S. One undercover operative claims he arranged a videotaped meeting for the FBI as far back as 1989. In many of the cases, Chinese operatives were young women who freely exchanged sex, money, and interest in business ventures with China for what they thought was secret information about military bases, aircraft, and military technology. For these Chinese women, sex seemed to be the most often used avenue to get at U.S. military secrets. In one instance, a Chinese spy promptly took information he obtained to a nearby copy shop where he faxed it overseas and then returned the documents to the undercover operative, a move which, the undercover operative told SOURCES, took the FBI off guard. According to sources, the infamous Chinese "masterspy" Ou Qiming, also known as "Q", should have been arrested in Dallas in May, 1994, but was not. Sources say Q was caught in an FBI/CIA sting in which he and another Chinese national bought (with tens of thousands of dollars in counterfeit bills) what they believed was classified information on the AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) aircraft. When Q was handed the information, some of which was stamped "CLASSIFIED," he told the undercover operative that "this makes my country happy." The money Q paid for the documents was turned over to the FBI. "It was all hundred dollar bills," the operative explained, saying he counted the money while taking a rickshaw ride after departing the Hong Kong restaurant where he met Q. Scores of stings like this one have been conducted in the last ten years, and in each case, the cash the Chinese agents paid turned out to be exceptionally high quality counterfeit bills, sources report. It is unclear whether lawmakers have been briefed on the spy probes described to SOURCES, but they have complained that they were never briefed about either the Lee case or about any suspicions on the part of counterintelligence officials that spying was taking place at U.S. nuclear weapons labs. In March, Senator John McCain said on a television news show that "What is … incredibly disturbing is apparently the administration didn’t take the charges seriously. The Congress was not informed." Several past and present senior congressional staff members of committees (whose members should have been briefed on the stings described to SOURCES) said on background they are unaware of any investigations on suspected Chinese spies. "I damn sure haven’t been told about any of these stings, where the kind of money you’re talking about -- counterfeit or not -- has been paid to buy military secrets," one committee member said. "The CIA has been involved? That’s serious business, and I don’t know anything about it," said another staffer. During the April 12 hearings by the Senate Armed Services Committee on Chinese espionage in the U.S., concerns arose that both the FBI and the CIA have not fully briefed appropriate congressional committees and lawmakers on what their spy probes have really uncovered. The CIA has principal responsibility for keeping Congress adequately informed on foreign espionage investigations within the U.S. The Cox Committee (chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox) investigation on military and commercial deals with China was recently conducted in the wake of allegations that U.S. satellite makers illegally gave China vital ballistic missile technology. The committee’s report states that China has aggressively pursued U.S. military secrets for more than 20 years. Reprepresentative Heather Wilson, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has said publicly that the Cox report lays out the extent of Chinese espionage efforts in the U.S., but other sources assert that the report discusses "allegations" of Chinese espionage. Senator Shelby’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence recently launched a formal investigation into allegations that China stole secrets from U.S. nuclear weapons research laboratories, and how the government handled the matter. Shelby told reporters that Chinese spying in the U.S. is "more serious than you can imagine." "The Chinese do target our nuclear weapons laboratories, but they also target other potential sources of the same information, including other parts of the government, its contractors, and the military branches," said Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico recently after receiving briefings by the FBI and the CIA. "There is no question that [China’s] espionage activities are pervasive," Nick Eftimiades, a China specialist and counterintelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was quoted as saying. Eftimiades added that China’s intelligence services make use of not only the 11,500 diplomats, trade representatives, and other Chinese visitors to the U.S. each year, but also the 15,000 Chinese students who arrive on U.S. campuses, and the hundreds of thousands of Chinese Americans around the country. China had 46,958 students in the U.S. in the 1997 to 1998 academic year, more than any other country except Japan, according to the Institute of International Education. Nearly 85 percent were graduate students, many in science and engineering. "The Chinese mostly deal with overseas Chinese, Chinese-Americans, or somebody who’s got a link to China and is presumed to want to do what’s right for the Chinese people," former CIA officer Milt Bearden has been quoted as saying. "It gets into this kind of almost `don’t ask, don’t tell,’ and the next thing you see is a lot of information passing." In contrast, "Soviet espionage gets down to signing on the dotted line and becoming a spy," Bearden explained. A number of students strongly suspected of espionage were targeted during the FBI/CIA investigations of Chinese spying in the U.S. in the last ten years, sources said. National Security Council official Gary Samore oversaw efforts to investigate the theft of nuclear warhead secrets at LANL. When asked if the U.S. government has ever detected or expelled any Chinese spies, Samore declined to comment. Republicans charge that the Clinton Administration has dragged its feet in pursuing the Lee case and other evidence of widespread Chinese espionage in the U.S. to avoid escalating tensions with China. China is one of the biggest trading partners with whom the Clinton Administration has been particularly accommodating when it comes to high technology sales. In 1988, around the time Lee allegedly relayed nuclear bomb secrets to China, the FBI and the CIA are said to have begun investigations of Chinese spying in the U.S., sources report. Henry Kissinger and other pro-China trade advocates, meanwhile, convinced high-level officials of the State Department and Reagan Administration that China posed no threat, Thor Ronay, former Chief of Staff of the General Services Administration under Reagan, was recently quoted as saying. According to the top secret State Department analysis, "Chinese Military Modernization: Looking at the 1990s," (drafted in late 1988), China’s military "still needs to develop the organization, doctrine, and tactics to fight a modern war. These areas will probably see more progress in the next decade than the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] arsenal -- which will continue to suffer from China’s antiquated industrial base and lack of technical expertise and funding." The analysis further lays out the U.S. position that China had come to a "relaxed" view of external threats and that this "account[ed] for the still relatively low ranking of military modernization among China’s domestic concerns." However, China has identified the U.S. in its internal documents, military planning stratagems, and war-fighting doctrine as a potential target, according to U.S. intelligence agencies. "They are quite specific about the U.S. being the greatest obstacle of[sic] Chinese manifest destiny and sovereignty," said James Lilley, a former U.S. ambassador to China, the first CIA chief of station posted to China in the early 1970s, and later the CIA’s National Intelligence Officer on China. Moreover, the CIA has determined that at least a portion of China’s ICBM fleet has been aimed at the U.S. The secret State Department report asserted that because China’s military was "constrained by a lack of funds," PLA modernization initiatives indicated that "China will continue to focus on less expensive, though necessary, schooling, new training facilities, and more realistic training." Nowhere in the analysis was it ever suggested that because China was unable to buy the modernized weapons systems it needed, or to conduct its own expensive research and development, it would consider employing spies to get what it could not afford. "That seems to have been a foreign notion in the minds of [U.S.] policymakers," said a Republican congressional source familiar with Congress’ ongoing investigations of Chinese spying. At the same time the policy paper was written (when Henry Kissinger and pro-China trade advocates were urging the State Department to adopt a pro-China stance), China was actively engaged in widespread spying operations to procure U.S. weapons secrets, concluded the recent CIA assessment and the Cox Committee report. Michael Eddington, a former CIA military analyst, recently said publicly that U.S. government policy "has been to let the Chinese slide" with regard to espionage activities in the U.S. During the Reagan and Bush administrations, officials are also said to have overlooked the security implications of weapons lab scientists visiting countries like China and giving presentations at scientific conferences. These conferences were often attended by intelligence services of countries potentially hostile to the U.S. FBI Director Louis Freeh indicated to lawmakers recently that the compromising information Lee gave to China might have been derived from scientific talks he gave, or during private meetings between Lee and his Chinese counterparts. Freeh told lawmakers that although Lee was a principal suspect, the FBI was unable to find traditional physical evidence of espionage. Information was quite possibly transferred during professional meetings with little official scrutiny. According to Dr. Stephen Bryen, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Trade Security Policy under the Reagan Administration, there was indeed little concern paid to the problem of weapons lab and other DoD scientists exchanging information with their peers around the world. When Bryen first began pushing for the requirement that scientists first vet their proposed talks before his agency for approval, he ran into considerable resistance. "People just didn’t get it," Bryen said. "But at these conferences you had the Chinese, you had the KGB, you had everyone wanting to get their hands on all sorts of weapons, and here were our scientists talking freely about what they were doing -- like it was no big deal." Bryen considered scientists at the weapons labs as security risks because, he said, they believed that they had the right to exchange scientific information with their colleagues, whoever they were. This position is often supported by lab officials, and is a potential problem that was barely on the DoD’s radar screen, Bryen said. In the case of Wen Ho Lee, he traveled to China to deliver scientific papers in l886 and l988 as part of trips "pre-approved and encouraged" by officials at Los Alamos and the DoE, which claims it "cleared the texts of the papers given at these conferences." The FBI also approved the trips. Former CIA military analyst Michael Eddington echoed Bryen in recent weeks, saying the military scientific community does not see things the same way counterintelligence experts do. For that reason, Eddington argues, scientists did not presume that their Chinese peers were actively engaged in spying on them during conferences. The New York Times reported earlier this week that, according to court documents, American scientist Peter Lee (who was assigned to a classified Pentagon project in 1997), supplied China with secrets about advanced, submarine-tracking radar in a lecture he gave in Beijing in May 1997. Federal prosecutors wanted to charge Lee with espionage but the Navy did not want testimony about the radar systems divulged in open court. The Justice Department also reportedly blocked any prosecution of Lee. Lee eventually plead guilty to filing a false statement about his 1997 trip to China and to leaking classified laser data to Chinese scientists during an earlier trip to China in 1985. Congress, which in recent weeks has expressed considerable outrage over lax security at U.S. weapons labs, ironically had raised very similar concerns about security eight years ago. In April 1991, for instance, during hearings by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations into the failed efforts to curtail Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, it was disclosed that in 1989, three employees of the Al QaQaa State Establishment, identified by the international atomic energy agency as Iraq’s main explosives complex involved in developing a nuclear bomb, were permitted to attend a U.S. government sponsored seminar on nuclear detonation. A roster of the event also showed that at least one Chinese government scientist attended the seminar, which was sponsored by the LANL, other U.S. weapons labs, and more than a half-dozen DoD arms agencies, including the Office of Naval Research and the Army Ballistics Research Laboratory. John C. Browne, the director of LANL since 1997, told reporters recently that while he does not "defend what was going on [at LANL] 10 to 20 years ago, scientists at federal weapons labs must be allowed to freely exchange ideas within the scientific community." Browne added that scientists working for federal weapons labs "know how to draw the line" when talking to outsiders, and that they should be given flexibility. "It is a campus. It’s a campus behind a fence. We can’t just put everybody behind a fence and lock them up." On April 12, Notra Trulock, acting deputy director of the Department of Energy (DoE), testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Trulock stated it was the Clinton Administration’s policy that U.S. weapons labs be open to free exchange of information, especially with visiting Chinese scientists. He also told the Committee that his superiors repeatedly downplayed or dismissed evidence that China stole nuclear weapons secrets from government weapons labs. "I must tell you that our warnings were ignored, they were minimized and occasionally even ridiculed, especially by laboratory officials," Trulock testified. In 1988, Congress’ investigative arm, the General Accounting Office (GAO) told lawmakers there were numerous problems with DoE’s control over foreign visitors to its facilities. "These problems included inadequate prescreening of foreign visitors, poor identification and review of visits that could involve potentially sensitive subjects, and insufficient practices for approving, monitoring, and reporting foreign visits," the GAO found. The GAO further stated that DoE’s counterintelligence programs were not fully effective in mitigating foreign intelligence efforts. They lacked comprehensive threat assessments to focus their efforts, as well as performance measures to evaluate their effectiveness. In a report to Congress last year, a subsequent GAO audit revealed that these issues still had not been addressed. "In our view, these problems could lead to the loss of sensitive information to foreign countries regarded as posing a risk to our national security or nuclear nonproliferation goals," Keith O. Fultz, Assistant GAO Comptroller General, Resources, Community, and Economic Development Division, told the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China, and the Subcommittee on Military Procurement, Committee on National Security. "Our reports in 1988 and 1997 made recommendations to strengthen controls over foreign visitors," Fultz continued. "While DoE is initiating actions to improve the management and oversight of foreign visits to the weapons laboratories, Mr. Chairman, DoE has not demonstrated a lasting commitment to improving controls over foreign visitors. Additionally, DoE’s plan to devolve the authority for approving foreign visits to the laboratories may not be appropriate until significant recommendations that we have made are addressed." In October 1997, buttressing the GAO’s findings, FBI Director Louis Freeh and CIA Director George Tenet met with DoE officials and stressed to them that, despite politics and White House policies, DoE needed to immediately move to strengthen security at its weapons labs. Former Clinton Administration DoE secretary, Elizabeth Moler, testified that the DoE had worked hard to clean up its act under the Clinton Administration, but echoed Bryen and others by saying that weapons lab security prior to 1992 was significantly lax. It wasn’t until that year, she said, that the DoE’s counterintelligence office was created. Intelligence and federal law enforcement officials immediately hounded the newly created office for information vital to carrying out nuclear weapons spying investigations, according to past and present officials. The intelligence and law enforcement communities were hindered in their investigations because they did not have a basic technical understanding of what to look for in probing nuclear weapons espionage, sources report. At the insistence of the CIA and the FBI, the DoE’s Office of Intelligence and National Security prepared an unclassified handbook in 1993 describing the types and uses of materials and processes involved in manufacturing nuclear fuels and bombs. One of the agencies that desperately needed it was the CIA. Its analysts ordered "dozens" of copies, almost depleting the DoE’s stockpile, according to a source familiar with the episode. With more revelations regarding Chinese spying activities in the U.S. fully expected, federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies are bracing for possible high-level resignations. Calls for ranking officials to step down will assuredly soon be heard on Capital Hill, where oversight investigations are expected to turn up evidence to support such calls. And as the scandal continues to unfold, depending on its severity and damage to national security, it could become a pivotal presidential campaign issue. (SOURCES has broken many elements of the Chinese spying story over the last six months, to search our archives for previous reporting and purchase those stories, please go to our search page at the URL below, and enter China, Chinese, or Chin (search will be case sensitive until our new site debuts in the next couple of weeks): http://www.dso.com/cgi-bin/webc/dso/store/st_main.html?sid=2Qn2zmMfW -- END OF ARTICLE -- ===================================== Visit SOURCES on the web at http://www.dso.com ===================================== SOURCES (c) copyright, 1996-1999 DSO, Inc. No portions of this article may be copied, reproduced, or distributed in any form to anyone other than the subscriber without express written permission from the publisher, except for the usual journalistic "fair use" license. Journalists, please source SOURCES, a security intelligence news service, http://www.dso.com. 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