Cox Report Was ‘an Exercise in Amateur-Hour Paranoia’

The deep chill that draped over U.S.-China relations after the May release of the House select committee report on Chinese espionage was hardly the report’s fault. The bilateral, as they call the relationship in Washington, is inherently tense, fragile and unpredictable.

The NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade didn’t exactly warm relations or calm nerves. Nor did this month’s in-your-face declaration by Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui that Taiwan was abruptly abandoning its 50-year policy of accepting the idea of “one China,” although it may have jarred Washington and Beijing again into accepting the need not to let tensions get out of hand. But at the same time, China-U.S. negotiations over Beijing’s admission to the World Trade Organization are in disrepair. So are Sino-U.S. talks designed to settle the touchy issue of compensation over the NATO bombing. Pointedly, U.S. warships are still barred by Beijing from docking in Hong Kong.

But if the Cox report, as the House spying probe is known, can hardly be blamed for all this, the report itself looks today to be something far less helpful in understanding America’s true security problems than it did in May. More and more experts are coming to agree with Warren Rudman, chairman of the president’s foreign intelligence advisory board, which reviewed security lapses at U.S. labs. He sees the Cox report as an exercise in amateur-hour paranoia: “Possible damage has been minted as probable disaster,” said the former New Hampshire Republican senator. “Workaday delay and bureaucratic confusion have been cast as diabolical conspiracy.”

One internationally respected West Coast scholar who also takes this view is Jonathan Pollack, Rand’s senior East Asia expert. Going beyond Rudman, he believes the report plays with fire. Today, at Rand’s headquarters in Santa Monica, Pollack will, in a public briefing, denounce the report.

Pollack’s condemnation is no mere academic exercise. He is no anti-Republican pinko, and Rand, which for years existed on Pentagon largess, is no Beijing-by-the-Santa-Monica-Bay. Pollack is angry because he believes the issue of Chinese spying deserved a far more probative and prudent assessment than it got from the bipartisan panel chaired by Christopher Cox, a conservative Orange County congressman.

“The report was an unbelievable rush to judgment,” says Pollack, summing up weeks of painstaking analysis. “I find myself bemused by it all--and deeply disturbed.” Pollack views the Cox work as drawing too many sinister implications out of tenuous reasoning and even thinner evidence: “It is particularly weak on the nuclear espionage issue, the most important one. Who did what to whom is very unclear in its spotty narrative. There are too many unhedged judgments, too many unexplained statements. As a serious document, it simply does not cohere. One has to conclude that the committee knew the answers it wanted before it started out. If it were a PhD thesis at Rand, I’d flunk it.”

Pollack, worried about the report’s fall-out effect on public opinion about people in the U.S. of Chinese ancestry, harks back to the World War II anti-Japanese hysteria in America, especially virulent in California. Could something as vile as this surface in the heat of a new cold war with China? The Cox report, he fears, can be read to raise questions about all Chinese Americans: “Do we really want to believe the worst--that they could all be spies? . . . Is the implication that my Chinese graduate student or a Chinese visitor can be a spy? There is a fine line between prudence and paranoia.”

It’s hard to believe that any sane American can really buy into such red-under-every-bed rubbish. Is the nation prepared to assume that the 80,000 Chinese who visit the U.S. each year must perforce be viewed as spy suspects--that, in the report’s unblushing language, all Chinese Americans are potential “sleeper agents, who can be used at any time but may not be tasked for a decade or more?”

When Cox’s committee released its report, the hope was that it would establish a new high watermark in political probity. After all, the issue was theoretically grave, and Cox himself is no intellectual lightweight. But today the spy report seems to have done little aside from seconding the Rudman view that the nation’s nuclear labs tend to leak like a sieve and must be leak-proofed. Indeed, the Cox report has added nothing, except to raise anew the question of whether Washington is capable of producing anything that can rise above partisan politics, above racial or ethnic stereotypes, above narrow parochial views of the world.

Because of the relentlessly suspicious picture it offers of China, the Chinese are understandably angry about the Cox report. But because of the insecure and deeply paranoid sense it implies about America, the American people have their own good reasons to be upset about the report, too.

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Times contributing editor Tom Plate’s columns run Wednesdays. He teaches at UCLA. E-mail: tplate@ucla.edu.