Trulock: CIA Director Aided Cover-up of Clinton-China Scandal (Let's Go Down Memory Lane)

WASHINGTON – CIA Director George Tenet "pulled the trigger” that silenced a senior CIA official who tried to warn of the Chinese weapons buildup during the Clinton administration, Notra Trulock, the former intelligence director in the Energy Department, revealed this week.

Speaking at a meeting in Washington of Accuracy in Media, Trulock also criticized current White House aides who have rebuffed efforts to alert President Bush of the role played by Clinton holdover Tenet in assisting the Clinton administration in the cover-up.

Trulock, himself a victim of punishment for whistle-blowing on the Chinese spy scandal, told the gathering that Gordon Oehler, then director of the CIA’s Nuclear Proliferation Center, tried to warn Congress that the Chinese buildup was far more alarming than the diplomats had indicated.

"What happened,” Trulock told NewsMax after the meeting, "is that diplomats were going to China. The Chinese were telling them, ‘Oh, we’re not doing this, and we’re not doing that.’ And the diplomats were coming home and saying, ‘Well, the Chinese were telling us that they’re getting out of this [nuclear weapons proliferation] business.’ And Oehler was saying: ‘No, they’re not. Our information to the contrary is [based on intelligence sources].’”

"What the [Clinton] administration finally did was just order Oehler, ‘Shut up!’ Particularly, stop telling the [Capitol] Hill.”

Oehler’s information concerned proliferation of weapons technologies in general, and missile and nuclear technologies in particular.

Oehler thought it was his responsibility to tell the congressional oversight committees what was going on, "which it was,” added Trulock.

Trulock himself tried to "tell this stuff in ’97 and ’98, and we just got shut down.”

In Trulock’s case, the FBI raided his home in an obvious attempt to intimidate him.

Clinton hurt national security in three ways.

1. Under his tenure we had the “peace dividend” and many nice incentives that cater to special interest groups, while the DoD was slipping behind in procurement, R&D, testing and evaluation of new hardware etc. Operations that cost the DoD large sums were not funded with additional defense authorizations intended to cover those costs that are not included in the normal operating budget.

Concrete example of this behavior was in the Balkans. The DoD was told to execute a war, but unlike today where lost equipment, expended ordinance etc is paid for with a supplemental, the cost of executing Clinton's war had to come “out of hide” and that hurt several programs that had to be cut back.

While we were still the worlds premier equipped Army, lots of hardware that was identified as neccessary and available for procurement was not purchased out of simple budgetary shortfalls, i.e. Javelin, Interceptor Body Armor, Armored HMMWVs……. Ironically, a later administration which began to fix this problem almost as soon as they took office was blamed for the previous administrations failure.

2. Structure and doctrine was all antiquated. Already in the early 90s it was clear as day what the future threats will look like: Terrorism, Theater Ballistic Missiles, cyber attacks and large scale Psychological Operations. The fight is going to be smaller, asymmetric, long spanning, and involving other governmental agencies etc. However, all the Army seemed to change was the adoption of a beret.

In doctrine, hardware, and organization the DoD did not restructure, rethink, or re-equip themselves, to meat the demands of the new threats. Money, political waves and a general lack of vision contributed to years of stagnation for our DoD while the threat was evoleving.

Example: Missile defense is an obvious national effort today, but the political obstacles as well as negative press for pushing through this initiative was enormous and Bush encountered huge obstacles internal and international until North Korean missile tests and 911 when those voices were largely extinguished.

The senior civilian and military leadership was generally without direction or vision, so they relied on old ways of thinking, simply making it a bit faster, further, higher and powerful. Example: Crusader, Comanche – systems that are basically conceptually obsolete and don’t even fit into today’s needs. Another example: We were organized in Armies, Corps, Brigades, Battalions and companies, in the same way we were in the Cold War, when the threat was the communist horde of 30,000+ armored vehicles to the East in Europe. We’re no longer fighting like that and that was clear in Somalia, the Balkans, etc. Today the reorganization into smaller but sovereign elements, the training even in Basic has all changed to finally look like what it should have been for years. Again there is an ironic twist to this, since Rumsfeld whoes despised by the media and every self proclaimed liberal is much to credit for the needed changes on going today.

3. The dropping of certain export restrictions on defense critical technology! Completely overlooked by a media in love with Clinton, the dropping of these trade restrictions is probably long term the single most damaging action to happen during those years. People simply don’t realize that the brain of an AMRAAM is an Intel processor, like in your home PC. A lot of crypto technology and hardware has direct military applications and Cisco is even buildiing this stuff in China today. We opened the flood gates and gave people who really don’t like us the keys to the kingdom. Much of the technology driving some of the most lethal and most capable threat systems of Chinese or Russian origin (Available for export) today are as capable because they have the electronics and the optics. It's the miniaturization, weight, reliability, speed and capacity (i.e. intelligence of weapon systems) that gives us this lead we enjoy. Soviet and Chinese hardware was always mechanically good. The “enabling” technology that gave us our potency was all about certain critical technologies. May that be a radar, radio, or an integrated battlefield command and control system, we more or less allowed the exportation of technology that today is already found in advanced threat systems.

But it gets even worse. Others followed suite and today Pandora’s Box is open. Even if we began to try to clamp down, the French won’t, the Germans wouldn’t want to.

When we entered WWII we were bombed by the Japanese who in part made their bombs with US steel which we were still exporting to them even though we knew they were a major threat and that war was not just possible but likely. Soon, American pilots will fly against missiles based on advanced computing technology and crypto based on stuff we exported. Give it a few years and we’ll have the pleasure of dealing with spin off’s in technology we gave away in a way designed to kill our boys. Even if it’s not the Chinese themselves, do they care to whom they peddle off their hardware: Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Yemen?

Clinton reigned during a time of low activity and some of the threats were deliberately downplayed or ignored for political reasons. His legacy should not only by one of impeachment & adultery but of an absolute security nightmare. It was an era where issues like “gays in the Army” were on the forefront, while Al Qaeda attacked us four times. It was the era of “black berets” (made in China), while terms like the “peace dividend” were coined. It was an eight year nightmare for this nation’s defense and security establishments which set the stage of not only for 911, but far more reaching.

“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime”— We have taught the “bad guys” how to fish.

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