Spectator's Journal: Shoot the Messengers
Timmerman, Kenneth R.
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL by Kenneth R. Timmerman Shoot the Messengers T he Clinton administration has demoted at least four top analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency who raised alarms about...
...In the wake of the U.S...
...computer systems they had set up surreptitiously by hacking...
...What you're seeing now at CIA," said Cox, "is policy-makers who all share the same bad ideas...
...Since then, these sales have accelerated...
...So far, the administration has stymied TAS's efforts to obtain a copy of these documents through the Freedom of Information Act...
...technology...
...Despite this official ing in the United States has turned out to be in Southern California, including their de-linking, however, many Chinese corneven more sensitive...
...government, the Chinese are now using their new capabilities to break into U.S...
...Two subsequent reports were also suppressed...
...he could start by directing the and unclassified," says Cox...
...After Pandolfi testified in closed session before Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala...
...70 December 1999/January 2000 • The American Spectator...
...That report painted Trulock, and anyone who accepted his conclusions, as a racist...
...But Pandolfi never made it out the door—at least, not with the report...
...As any visitor to the CIA's Website can see, the Agency has spent a tremendous effort over the past year declassifying thousands of documents relating to U.S...
...In Cohen's doublespeak words: DIA to purchase a copy of the "Memberare a void...
...It comes in two flavors: classified, China's biggest defense-industrial organi- in the U.S...
...government computer systems in a massive way...
...Dennis Fred Simon, and two other unnamed China military experts, were demoted after they drafted a National Intelligence Estimate on Chinese military science and technology in 1997...
...Even though every U.S...
...The Chinese government soon issued its own 40-page rebuttal of the Cox report, whose arguments soon began appearing in mainstream media outlets, including the Washington Post— without any citation of the source...
...The disavowed analysts also authored reports containing explicit warnings that U.S.-made supercomputers were helping the Chinese to improve their strategic weapons systems, develop information warfare strategies against the United States, and improve their biological and chemical weapons...
...Before long, Pandolfi was asked by the Senate Intelligence Committee to testify on the incident...
...By the time he left Hughes, accompanied by a female CIA liaison officer for Southern California, Pandolfi was carrying a copy of the Hughes launch failure report...
...Specifically, these analysts warned that U.S...
...Either our intelligence com- ship Directory of the China Enterprise munity has suppressed this information, or The [Defense Intelligence] Agency deter- Association," which is published in El they are producing nothing...
...technology without any control because it will prevent it from being transshipped across the border into China," Cox said...
...and Norm Dicks (D-Wash...
...Since then, according to the bipartisan report released in May by Reps...
...the secretary of defense...
...controls whatsoever...
...and we have little defense against it...
...The administration has determined it would do "irreparable harm" to release the intelligence community's assessment of the military use China is currently making of U.S...
...The Cox report has been totally invalidated...
...We've got such an enormous backlog, you're just going to have to wait in the queue," a CIA FOIA officer politely told us...
...more than boo supercomputers have been shipped to China...
...As the months went by and the spin shifted in its favor, the White House began to declare victory...
...Not a single one of its conclusions stands up to close scrutiny...
...Clearly, the Clinton-Gore White House believes it is in the national interest to rehash old horror stories from the 1970's, especially now that General Pinochet is facing extradition to Spain on charges of human rights abuses...
...Lee failed a lie-detector test during that earlier investigation when asked whether he had helped a Chinese Communist agent subsequently prosecuted for espionage...
...That was done on Executive Order, at White House request...
...But already three or covert ties to the Chinese military required But as this administration has said on more weeks earlier Defense Secretary William additional investigation...
...Well, guess what: Since July 1, 1997, there's no border...
...satellite surveillance and communications intercept programs...
...With the naysayers removed from positions of influence, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency have moved increasingly to produce homogenous products, painting China's People's Liberation Armyas "the greatest junkyard army in the world," as government analyst Paul Godwin puts it...
...That figure is current only until January of 1999," Cox said in an interview...
...The Lees "stood out from the other suspects for various reasons," according to a report by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, "principal among them the aggressive efforts Sylvia Lee had made to involve herself with visiting Chinese scientific delegations and Wen Ho Lee's prior involvement as a suspect in a previous espionage investigation in 1982-1984...
...Until the Clinton administration lifted export controls on the sale of supercomputers to China in January 1996, the PRC had only managed to acquire a handful of these powerful machines...
...nese Government announced that the Chi- more than a hundred companies owned by nese army would no longer engage in But identifying PLA companies operat- the Chinese government now operating commercial activities...
...Culver's letter triggered a Justice Department investigation of the CIA for obstruction of justice, which is still being debated by a grand jury...
...Nuclear power plants, oil refineries, chemical plants, water pumping stations, and sewage treatment plants—just to name a few—could all be shut down or made to malfunction by Chinese government hackers in time of war...
...Before long, with assistance from the FBI he came to the conclusion there was a high probability that the Chinese had an agent on the inside who had passed on critical information on several advanced nuclear weapons designs, including the W-88 Trident warhead...
...Many are also made available to the public in a declassified form...
...supercomputers...
...defense and high-tech companies trading with Communist China...
...According to TAS sources, the Hughes official asked Pandolfi to wait while he checked on the classification level of the accident report—a report that Hughes had already given to its Chinese partners...
...Hughes company officials explained that after one of their Optus telecommunications satellites was destroyed in January 1995 during launch, they sent a technical team to China to examine why China's Long March rocket had failed...
...government permission to share technical information with the Chinese...
...technology obtained through satellite launches and other commercial projects for military purposes, TAS has learned both the 1996 and low NIEs were suppressed on orders from CIA Director George Tenet...
...Pandolfi asked them if they had U.S...
...After returning from vacation, Oehler found his office empty, his staff reassigned, and the phone disconnected," one congressional aide said...
...military technology through civilian contracts, current and former intelligence officials told TAS recently...
...Eager to head off any further leaks of information to a team of congressional investigators scheduled to visit Hughes, Culver wrote a memo to the CIA's California field office, urging it to warn Hughes that Congress was starting to poke into the affair...
...bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Valentine said recently, the Chinese assaulted an array of U.S...
...According to Jay Valentine, the head of Infoglide Corp., an Austin, Texas company that investigates computer security breaches for the U.S...
...A report issued more than two years ago by the President's Commission for Critical Infrastructure Protection found "widespread capability to exploit infrastructure vulnerabilities...
...produces a detailed organization chart If Cohen is sincerely interested in The first report was delivered in June showing the chain of command controlling uncovering the Chinese army's operations 1998...
...He got the message and resigned the next day...
...government Websites, revealing an astonishing 3,000 to 4,000 "back doors" to U.S...
...Or he might consult mercial entities, some formerly associated with the People's Liberation Army, months after the legal deadline for filing , continue the FBI, which told the Cox-Dicks comthe PLA report—President Clinton wrote to operate in the United States...
...with the reporting requirementco] ance mplirequirements to provide annual reports on intelligence community's primary inforChinese espionage against the U.S., and on mation collector on PLA companies, and PLA companies operating on our shores...
...he was removed from the China division and put to work on developing alternative energy sources...
...This is a clear mined that in the summer of 1998 the Chi- Monte, California, and conveniently lists violation of the National Security Act...
...The capability to do harm—particularly through information networks—is real...
...Cox warned that the administration now plans to allow the PRC to gain access to even more powerful supercomputers starting in January 2000, with KENNETH R. TIMMERMAN is a contributing editor for Reader's Digest and a frequent contributor to The American Spectator...
...The main suspects to appear after a grueling investigation were a Chinese-American scientist, Wen Ho Lee, and his wife...
...intelligence activities in Chile during the early 1970's...
...This is the first time I know of that the director of the CIA has intervened to block the release of such a product, after it has been cleared by all the intelligence community components that contributed to it," one knowledgeable source told TAS...
...China policy and kiss your career goodbye...
...Accordingly, we than one occasion, so what...
...Pandolfi's CIA escort wrote a memo to the head of the China military analysis office, John Culver...
...It was precisely this type of technical exchange with the Chinese by satellite rival Loral that sparked intense congressional investigations in 1997 and 1998, and led to the appointment of the Cox-Dicks committee...
...To deter- mittee that more than 3,000 PLA-owned Cox that he had turned the matter over to mine whether any such entity retained overt companies currently operate in the U.S...
...The American Spectator December r 9 9 9 /January 2000 69 The latest wrinkle of this extraordinary Cohen had informed Cox in a letter that the have undertaken an effort to identify, witheffort to reinvent the truth is the adminis- Defense Intelligence Agency knew nothing in the executive branch, an agency which tration's response to new congressional about the subject—even though DIA is the might more appropriately facilitate [with requirement...
...In other words, he was given an empty office, without a telephone or a computer," one source familiar with the case said...
...And through all of this, we are maintaining the fiction that Hong Kong continues to exist as a separate entity that can receive more sensitive U.S...
...it is growing at an alarming rate...
...Gordon Oehler, head of the CIA's Nonproliferation Center, was forced to resign in the summer of 1998, after telling Congress in public testimony that the Clinton administration "regularly dismissed" information from the intelligence community on Russian and Chinese missile sales to Pakistan and Iran...
...Hughes ultimately turned the report over to the CIA and to several congressional committees, but not before Pandolfi was victimized for reporting on Hughes's questionable relationship with the Chinese...
...68 December 19 99 /January 2000 The American Spectator had shown unusual interest in obtaining the Hughes damage report, which could spell trouble for the Agency...
...But the Chile project is different, I was told by a CIA spokesman...
...The belief is that no matter how much the Chinese spend or how much they try to modernize, they will never be a match for U.S...
...intelligence agency had signed off on their findings, including that the Chinese were using U.S...
...But then the spin began...
...Chris Cox (R-Calif...
...Trulock began investigating a possible breach of security at this nation's nuclear laboratories in 1995...
...aerospace companies, through satellite launch contracts, were transferring military equipment and technical information that could benefit China's nuclear weapons and missile programs...
...National Intelligence Estimates are shared on a regular basis with Congress.44 After returning from vacation, Oehler found his office empty, his staff reassigned, and the phone disconnected.' 77 They are widely distributed throughout the intelligence and national security community...
...Both of them zations...
...In September—ten parent companies...
...T he most famous whistle blower to fall victim to political necessities is the former head of the Department of Energy's counterintelligence department, Notra Trulock...
...Isn't it incredible how a story like this can get started and then it turns out to be totally false," a top NSC official told me recently...
...And that was before the Chinese had large numbers of U.S...
...military capabilities...
...Pandolfi was part of a CIA team preparing a new National Intelligence Estimate on the PRC's military science and technology...
...They detailed recent developments of China's military industries, and its successes in "Deception and Denial" of U.S...
...To complete his research, Pandolfi had been instructed to visit a number of U.S...
...She warned Culver that Pandolfi Criticize U.S...
...So anything that goes to Hong Kong today goes directly to the PRC...
...no U.S...
...R onald Pandolfi was the CIA's highest ranking scientist when he visited the headquarters of Hughes Space and Communications in El Segundo, California in 1996...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL by Kenneth R. Timmerman Shoot the Messengers T he Clinton administration has demoted at least four top analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency who raised alarms about Chinese efforts to acquire sensitive U.S...
Vol. 32 • December 1999 • No. 12
