WorldNetDaily: Swept under the red carpet
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Monday, October 9, 2000   Swept under the red carpet
By Paul Sperry
WASHINGTON -- The politics behind the Wen Ho Lee case is like a pretzel that no one seems to be able to untwist, not even China hawks well-versed in the propaganda put out by our panda-hugging president. Listen to this national-security adviser on the Hill struggle to make sense of the case: "We have Hillary telling her Chinese audience at a Chinese shopping center in New York that Wen Ho Lee is a victim of racial discrimination and stereotyping," the adviser said privately. "But simultaneously, (Attorney General) Janet Reno and (FBI Director) Louis Freeh are saying that Wen Ho Lee is a dangerous criminal. Bill Clinton is saying he is 'troubled' by the case, while (Energy Secretary) Bill Richardson one day says the Lee case isn't over, yet the next day says he is concerned over Lee's treatment." Even hard-to-fool conservatives aren't sure who to blame anymore, or what they should be blamed for. "I think Louis Freeh and Janet Reno are both culpable in this mess," said Bob Novak on CNN's Crossfire. "But to tell you the truth, I don't know what to make of Wen Ho Lee." "There's a lot we don't know," Novak added, "and maybe the senators don't know either." Indeed, some members of Congress are starting to doubt what they first learned in 1998 -- that Chinese army intelligence had burrowed deep into our nuclear-arms labs. There's a growing sense now that President Clinton and his national-security adviser may have been somewhat justified in ignoring warnings of Chinese espionage. And Reno may have actually exercised sound judgment in 1997 when she effectively pulled the plug on the FBI's investigation of Lee as a Chinese spy. Poof! That whole bad patch with China? It never happened. But before you trash your copy of the Cox Report, consider the following. The KGB used disinformation to try to fool the U.S. intelligence community about the Soviet nuclear and military threat. They'd sew a lie into a statement of truth and hope we'd swallow the whole thing. What if our own government is employing the same tactic -- with the help of a pliant Washington press -- to fool us about the nuclear and military threat posed by China's People's Liberation Army? I know, it sounds crazy. But stay with me. First rewind to early 1999, when two radioactive stories finally broke. They'd been suppressed for years, it's plain to see now, because they threatened to spoil the Clinton administration's "engagement policy" with Beijing, an alarmingly comprehensive plan involving not just closer economic ties, but political and military exchanges too. The stories also threatened to make Clinton look traitorously soft on an aggressive communist power -- and they did, for awhile. One story revealed that the administration let a suspected Chinese spy -- Lee -- stay in his job at Los Alamos, where he continued to have access to secret nuclear codes. The other disclosed how the Chinese stole secrets to every nuclear warhead deployed in the U.S. arsenal, yet the administration did nothing to beef up security at the labs. Exposed, the administration fired Lee and tried to minimize the political damage from the three-volume Cox Report detailing Chinese espionage by claiming the lab security problem reached back 20 years and included Republican administrations. Disinformation campaign They turned to a trusted ally, the Washington Post, offering it a kernel of truth -- that Lee was targeted because of his race -- to sell it on the lie that the whole case against him was "built on thin air." Enter Robert Vrooman, the Post's go-to man. On Aug. 17, 1999, the disinformation campaign officially kicked off with Vrooman dropping his bombshell on the Post's front page that Lee was suspected largely for ethnic reasons, and that the case against him was "built on thin air." What's more, Vrooman charged that the secrets Lee was suspected of compromising -- the design of the prized W-88 miniaturized nuclear warhead -- had been disseminated to private contractors and "hundreds of locations throughout the U.S. government." In other words, the leaks didn't necessarily come from Los Alamos. Who is Robert Vrooman? None other than the chief of counterintelligence at Los Alamos when all the espionage allegedly took place; the chief of counterspying when all the Chinese spies were allegedly running amok. The Energy Department recommended disciplinary actions against Vrooman for allowing Lee to have continuing access to secrets even after doubts about him had been raised. He's no longer heading counterintelligence at Los Alamos. "Vrooman was a failure as head of CI at Los Alamos," Notra Trulock, former head of Energy counterintelligence, told me recently. "He was and still is on the Los Alamos payroll, and so has a vested interest in dismissing any allegations about espionage at Los Alamos on his watch." Not exactly an unbiased source. Yet Vrooman has been quoted or cited in no less than 15 Washington Post articles since August 1999. All written by Vernon Loeb, Walter Pincus, or both. Loeb and Pincus, the Post's national security reporters, are considered by many inside the Beltway -- and even by a few inside the Post's newsroom and front office -- to be stenographers for White House National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, a former (at least technically) China lobbyist. But as the Post goes, so go the pilot fish of the old media. A search of the Lexis-Nexis media database shows that Vrooman has appeared in 240 articles since the Post introduced him as a credible source. <p>Even the New York Times, which broke the Chinese espionage story on March 6, 1999, followed up with a front-page story on Sept. 7, 1999 -- just weeks after the Post story -- that cast doubt on its own conclusions. The leading skeptic cited in the story is -- surprise -- Robert Vrooman. Mea kinda culpa Such backlash convinced Times editors to pen a mea kinda culpa two weeks ago. Most in the press joined White House flacks in claiming the Times has backed off its original stories and is now critical of its coverage. They must not have read the same letter I read. Here are some excerpts in case you missed it:
The administration has a done a wickedly brilliant job of muddying the waters of the scandal surrounding Chinese espionage at the labs. Just last year officials, including the president, were defending themselves against charges they were too soft on spying. Now, in a stunning turn of events, they look like they've been tough -- even too tough -- all along. Reno had to go before the Senate last month to defend charges she was too hard on Lee, who was released from jail after pleading guilty to just one of 59 counts of mishandling nuclear secrets (but not espionage). She was unflinching: "Dr. Lee is no hero. He is not an absent-minded professor. He is a felon. He committed a very serious crime, and he pled guilty to it." She even sounded patriotic: "I share an awesome responsibility to protect the national security of this nation." Her FBI director, Freeh, seemed not to pull any punches, either: "Dr. Lee has been convicted of a very serious crime. Dr. Lee's conduct was not inadvertent, it was not careless, it was not innocent." But if you listened closely to their testimony, you could still hear the undercurrent of appeasement, if not cover-up. In the 8,296 words of their prepared opening statements, Reno and Freeh mentioned China a grand total of three times. Reno didn't mention China at all (in fact, she couldn't even bring herself to say Lee is ethnic Chinese, instead saying "he is of Asian descent"). Curiously, Freeh spoke almost entirely in generalities when citing Lee's ties to China and his contacts with Beijing officials.
That dovetails nicely with disinformation spoon-fed Pincus, Loeb and others -- that Lee may have been making his own copy of our nuclear codes to help him land a job with the Taiwanese government. 50 years of testing That would be of immense value to an established foreign nuclear power such as China, which has agreed to stop underground testing after conducting only a fraction of the tests we've conducted, but not a country like Taiwan, which has no nuclear program. The old communist hard-liners in China -- which, by the way, is the only country with long-range nuclear missiles pointed at U.S. cities (13 at last count) -- would like nothing better than to get their hands on data about testing problems, actual and simulated testing results and computer codes needed to design and test weapons. At least seven and as many as 14 tapes copied by Lee are still missing. Freeh said the administration cut a deal with Lee for "one overarching reason: to find out what happened to the missing tapes." Well, if you had searched Lee's computer in 1996, when Trulock and your FBI agents first put him on the suspect list, you might have seen what he was up to and seized most of the tapes back then. And if Reno had agreed to tapping his phone in 1997, when agents asked for it, maybe you'd know what he planned to do with the tapes. If you had monitored his computer that year, you could have nailed him downloading more secret-restricted data onto another tape. Instead, Reno gave the suspected spy continued unfettered access to secrets in the X Division of Los Alamos, which allowed Lee the opportunity to steal six additional files with information that could cause "serious damage" to national security if it fell into the wrong hands. One of the six files contains the complete source code for the most up-to-date primary weapon design code, called Code B. Another is an input file used by Code B to produce output for comparison with experimental implosion data. Another is an input file for Code B to set up and simulate a specific modern primary device. That tape, designated "N," is among those missing. Finally, if Reno and Freeh had forced Lee to cough up the whereabouts of the tapes before they let him out of jail, maybe they'd have them in hand right now. Good luck getting Lee back in jail if he refuses to talk about the tapes, or sends agents on a wild goose chase. How do you explain such fundamental missteps? Incompetence? Maybe incompetence by design. Remember that early on, the administration was more interested in plugging leaks to the media about leaks to China than the leaks to China. Why should we think anything has changed? Why should we now believe that the administration is truly worried about safeguarding our nuclear secrets and getting to the bottom of the espionage? Let's look at this with a really jaded eye. If Lee is indeed a spy and China his patron, nine months in jail and a few tepid insults at a Senate hearing are a small price to pay for helping pull off the biggest espionage since the Rosenbergs. Intelligence shows that China -- which thanks to Clinton export waivers, now has the supercomputers to tie our warhead designs and legacy codes all together -- has made quantum leaps in its nuclear program in recent years and is fast rising to superpower status. And if Reno and Freeh had to take the heat for bungling the case, humiliating themselves in public yet again, it's a small price to pay for protecting and preserving, not our national security, but the Clinton administration's unholy alliance with Beijing's communist leadership. Despite all of Reno's and Freeh's tough talk, here's what we're still left with:
Paul Sperry is Washington bureau chief for WorldNetDaily. |
