Douglas Burton
Insight Magazine, February 2000
Clinton fund-raiser Charles Trie has admitted to the FBI that he conducted a business deal that gave Red China equipment capable of producing deadly biological weapons.
Peter Leitner, a senior Defense Department licensing analyst who specializes in export controls of dual-use technology, has reviewed Insight’s copies of the confidential FBI interviews with Trie. Leitner says the transfer of the highly sophisticated pharmaceutical-grade fermenting machine poses significant risks to U.S. security at home and abroad if used to make advanced germ-warfare products such as anthrax and botulism.
The evidence of the fermenting machine’s sale and transfer sometime in 1993 to the Changchun Biological Products Institute is alarming, according to Leitner, given that the Chinese facility has been flagged by some experts as a biological-weapons laboratory run by the People’s Liberation Army. Leitner tells Insight: “This whole affair has the classic earmarks of a Chinese military-intelligence operation.”
A summary of Trie’s depositions to the FBI reads, in part: “Trie acknowledged being a close friend of Dr. Peter Fu, a research biochemist who was chief of the toxicology branch of an FDA facility near Little Rock,” adding that “the Fus withdrew from the partnership in 1992 or 1993.” Trie also told the FBI that Zhang was present when Trie formed United Biotech and that Trie had introduced Fu to Zhang in Little Rock.
The 500-liter fermentation tank transferred to the Changchun facility would be prohibited for sale by the Department of Defense’s Militarily Critical Technologies List because it allows the manufacture of large quantities of biological agents, such as botulism or anthrax bacteria, for military purposes, Leitner says. Several 500-liter tanks of this type were discovered in Iraq and seized as contraband by U.N. Special Commission inspectors in 1991. According to government sources, China has listed the Changchun facility on the international registry of facilities producing biological or chemical agents but claims its only use at this time is for the production of pharmaceuticals such as hepatitis vaccines.