Time to Say Farewell to Spy Scandal

It’s time to pronounce the Chinese nuclear weapons spy story a hoax. Great media fun while it lasted, with lurid charges of the theft of our nation’s top weapons secrets, the “crown jewels of our nuclear arsenal,” as Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) hyped it. Even the august New York Times seemed eager to give credence to every leaked claim from the Cox committee.

For those attempting to revive the Cold War, this was much more exciting stuff than the alternative alarm, that Red China threatens our way of life with cheap sneakers and T-shirts. But unfortunately for the wannabe Cold War warriors, the Chinese nuclear spy scare, which is supposed to have begun 15 years ago when Ronald Reagan was president, proved bogus. No spy has been caught, no secrets proved lost, no new dangerous weapons deployed. And it doesn’t even make for exciting fiction.

The whole thing reads like the plot of a bad 1940s movie. First, U.S. agents obtain sketches of secret weapon designs supplied by a defector from Beijing. Soon, our sleuths are hot on the trail of a Taiwanese-born scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as the most likely culprit. An investigation quickly follows, led by an outraged Cox, who represents the more right-wing fringes of Southern California, eager to find a new evil empire as justification of a military buildup, once the staple of that region’s economy. (Shades of Richard Nixon.)

Nice try. But as it turned out, the CIA had quickly determined that the defector who planted the sketches was a double agent for Beijing. The most logical conclusion is that the phony documents were a ploy by Chinese intelligence to impress us with their military savvy without spending much money to improve their primitive forces.

The smeared Los Alamos scientist, Wen Ho Lee, a man of long and loyal service to his adopted land, was never charged with a crime. Even the New York Times, which did as much as any media outlet to stoke this story, concluded after an exhaustive investigation by William J. Broad, that paper’s most experienced reporter on such matters, that Cox’s congressional report “went beyond the evidence” to support its claims that the Chinese made a weapons breakthrough based on stolen U.S. secrets. The Times’ Page 1 story said that there was a consensus among experts “that the federal investigation focused too soon” on Los Alamos and Lee. It added, “The lost secrets, it now appears, were available to hundreds and perhaps thousands of individuals scattered throughout the nation’s arms complex.”

Those secrets were also well-known to the Russians (and the French and British), who for decades have been building the miniaturized nuclear warheads that the Chinese presumably were attempting to develop. The Russians, whose poorly paid scientists are easy targets for espionage, have deployed thousands of such weapons; the Chinese, none.

Cox is quite insistent that he never pointed the finger at Lee, writing in response to a previous column of mine that he had not heard of Lee when his committee completed its report in January. That defense is disingenuous. The spy’s identity was concealed in testimony before the Cox committee only because his case was still being investigated by the FBI. But scientist Lee and the Los Alamos lab were at the center of the charges Cox was pursuing--charges raised before the committee by its star witness, Notra Trulock, the former Energy Department official responsible for singling out Lee.

Trulock is not a weapons design scientist, nor were any of the 47 staffers on Cox’s committee. But the staff was convinced by Trulock that the trail from the phony Beijing documents led to Los Alamos and its suspect scientist. This was a case “built on thin air,” according to Robert S. Vrooman, former chief of intelligence at Los Alamos, who stated recently that there was not “a shred of evidence” that Lee passed nuclear secrets to China.

Even Trulock now backs off from the wilder assertions of the Cox committee, telling Broad, “When I testified, I used the appropriate caveats to express uncertainties in our evidence and our conclusions,” which the committee ignored.

Vrooman points out that a detailed description of the weapon in question, the miniaturized W-88 warhead, had been distributed to 548 addresses throughout the government, the National Guard and private defense firms. Some secret!

It’s time to give the Chinese spy scandal a rest and focus instead on meeting the Chinese challenge on the shelves of our shopping malls.