Spying by China Ongoing in U.S., Panel Chief Says

A high-profile congressional committee investigation into Chinese spying in the United States concludes not only that China stole “the crown jewels of our nuclear arsenal” over the last two decades but that the espionage “continues to this very day,” according to the panel’s Republican chairman.

Rep. Christopher Cox of Newport Beach said an unclassified version of the House committee report, due to be released early next month, will document “literally scores” of cases where China illicitly acquired sensitive U.S. military and commercial know-how, from supercomputers and satellites to design details for America’s most modern nuclear warheads.

“These are not isolated incidents,” he said in a telephone interview that provided new details of the committee’s still-secret probe. “This is a very deliberate pattern of action.”

Cox said that the pilfering of secrets from America’s nuclear weapons laboratories, which was publicly confirmed last week for the first time in an assessment by the U.S. Intelligence Community, was broader than previously revealed and relied on a network of Chinese agents and other visitors.

“It involves many people, many of whom we have yet to meet,” Cox said.

Cox insisted, for example, that visits by hundreds of Chinese scientists and other officials to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and other nuclear weapons facilities each year provided a cover for Chinese spy handlers to meet their agents on the inside.

“The foreign deluge coming in provides a very good way for people on the inside to communicate,” Cox said. “And I’m not imagining this.”

In the past, law enforcement and counterintelligence experts have argued that loose-lipped American scientists--and not spies--may have accidentally revealed classified weapons data during academic conferences or in other informal settings overseas.

Rep. Norman D. Dicks of Washington, the committee’s top-ranking Democrat, also disputed Cox’s account. “We didn’t interview any of these spies,” he said.

The clash underscores the huge political issues at stake. Republicans have widely charged that the Clinton administration ignored allegations of Chinese espionage to avoid upsetting relations with Beijing, and the controversy is an early battleground in the 2000 presidential election campaign.

“I would remind my Republican colleagues that this started in the Reagan administration and they did little or nothing to put in an effective counterintelligence program,” Dicks said. “Clinton was the first one to do anything about this problem.”

Congress may do something now, however. Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, introduced legislation Tuesday that would prohibit all visits to U.S. nuclear research labs by scientists from “sensitive countries” unless they receive permission from the Energy secretary for national security reasons.

About 22 nations, including China, Russia, India and Israel, are deemed “sensitive” because of their interest in acquiring U.S. nuclear weapons secrets. Even so, labs at Los Alamos have worked with the former Soviet states to improve monitoring and security of nuclear facilities and materials. The proposed ban, thus, might curtail that ambitious program.

In a statement, Shelby said he proposed the ban as an interim measure to “safeguard this nation’s most sensitive secrets.” He said a counterintelligence effort launched recently by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, including attempts to plug potential leaks of classified data from computers and other sources, will take years to implement.

An Energy Department spokesman said Richardson, who was traveling Tuesday, had publicly opposed attempts to isolate the labs. In an April 17 speech at the Sandia National Laboratory, Richardson vowed to “fight any proposal to close off our science,” saying interactions with scientists from around the world “help protect our national security by advancing our arms control and nonproliferation policies.”

The Cox committee’s classified report was unanimously approved by its five Republican and four Democratic members in late December after a six-month probe, and Cox and Dicks briefed President Clinton last Thursday for the first time.

Declassification of the report has been delayed for more than a month as committee staffers and officials from the CIA, FBI, Energy Department, Justice Department, White House and other agencies have reviewed every sentence for potential security problems. But the committee spokesman, Brent Bahler, said the final report would be almost as voluminous as the original, with about 700 pages, 12 chapters and 38 recommendations.

Still, much of China’s espionage effort remains a mystery. The damage assessment released last week by the U.S. Intelligence Community, the official group title for America’s 13 intelligence agencies and bodies, specifically states that experts could not confirm if any secret nuclear weapons documents or blueprints were stolen.

The analysis also noted that no evidence suggested that China had used U.S. secrets to build new warheads or develop new weapons. China has a small strategic nuclear force that includes about 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles, a tiny fraction of the U.S. arsenal.

Another riddle is the motivation of the Chinese double-agent who first confirmed that China had obtained details of America’s most modern nuclear warhead. The agent walked into a U.S. government office in Asia in 1995 carrying what a U.S. intelligence official called “a big stack, I mean pounds and pounds” of documents, all in Chinese, on Beijing’s military, missiles and nuclear weapons programs.

Analysts soon determined that nearly all the material was old, already known or irrelevant. And after several meetings with “The Walk In,” as he was dubbed, the CIA determined in 1996 that he had been under control of China’s chief spy agency, the MSS.

That only made the case more perplexing. Buried in the mound of paper was a single report, dated 1988, containing design secrets from several U.S. nuclear weapons.

“We still don’t know his motivation,” the official said. “Was it a screw-up that he gave us that one document? Did they know what he had? Was it disinformation to distract us from something else, to translate tons of useless documents, or even to send us a signal? We don’t know.”