Intelligence

CHINA ESPIONAGE AND US INTELLIGENCE

 In a Washington Post article this Thursday reporters Walter Pincus & Vernon Loeb say that a 1995 Chinese "walk-in" (defector) brought in 13,000 pages of classified Chinese technological documents. Most of the documents were not translated for over 4 years, until late 1999, raising howls of another intelligence "blunder." Why? Several reasons. According to the article, the defector had failed a polygraph and the CIA believed he was probably a double agent and the documents could be 'plants.' Another more mundane reason given was that 13,000 pages is a lot of reading, and the Intelligence Community's Chinese analysts were busy with higher priority tasks at the time. So they read the documents and translated a few articles, and did not translate all of them. Also, the initial reading by CIA's Chinese linguists concentrated on finding items of intelligence value rather than counterintelligence implications.
The FBI thought the defector was genuine, but it took four years for them (with the help of the brouhaha raised by the Cox Report in 1999) to convince CIA to translate the entire 13,000 pages. (The CIA now agrees the defector may not have been a double agent, the article says.) When all the documents were translated, they revealed that China had somehow acquired vast amounts of highly classified US military technology -- but most of it about missiles and reentry vehicles. The espionage trail therefore points, most probably, to the Pentagon or to defense contractors.
So how did the suspicion fall on Los Alamos and Wen Ho Lee? According to the article, one of the few documents first translated in 1995 was about US nuclear weapons and the DOE intelligence chief, Notra Trulock, began to suspect espionage at Los Alamos.

BETRAYAL

How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security, by Bill Gertz, columnist for the Washington Times, has been featured in briefings by State Department security officials because it contains an appendix with leaked classified documents, published to bolster the author's arguments. State Department spokesman Andy Laine commented that the department is holding up the Gertz book as "an example of somebody leaking classified information." Gertz is known in Washington for his flamboyant exposés based on classified documents, leaked by government officials for political and departmental reasons to gain advantages in the vicious, cynical and often-demeaning cross-currents of Washington politics and budget wars. (Washington Times 28Aug00, p. A5)