ENCYCLOPEDIA OF Espionage, Intelligence, and Security Volume ...

Chinese Espionage against the United StatesMeanwhile, concerns had arisen with regard to Chineseweapons technology, its links with U.S. technology,possible espionage against the United States, and securitybreaches that had facilitated that espionage. These werethe issues that sparked the investigation by Cox’s committeein 1998.The PRC had never been involved in the kind ofbroadly based espionage on American soil that the SovietUnion had conducted through the KGB and its U.S. agents.The Chinese did, however, have an interest in U.S. technologythat had led to efforts at covert acquisition noted asearly as 1984, in a report by the Defense Intelligence Agency.The Cox Report, as the findings of the House committeewere called, asserted that the Chinese had appropriatedinformation on seven warheads, including the W88,deployed on the D-5 submarine launched-ballistic missile.This information, the committee concluded, had comefrom one of the U.S. weapons laboratories operated bythe Department of Energy (DOE).The investigation. The House committee completed itsseven-month investigation in December 1998, as Clinton’simpeachment on unrelated charges loomed (he wouldeventually be acquitted by the Senate), and published itsreport in May 1999. In the meantime, the FBI had undertakenan investigation, code-named “Kindred Spirit,” ofpersons who had access to W88 information.If the Chinese had indeed stolen data on the W88, thetheft had occurred in the 1980s, long before Clinton waspresident; therefore, the results of the Kindred Spirit investigationhad nothing to do with Clinton per se. However,the Clinton administration’s handling of the situationresulted in continued criticism.The Wen Ho Lee incident. Taiwanese-born computer scientistWen Ho Lee had been an employee at Los AlamosNational Laboratory for 21 years when Energy SecretaryBill Richardson fired him in March 1999. Lee was subsequentlyarrested by the FBI, charged with not properlysecuring classified materials and failing to report meetingswith individuals from “sensitive” countries, and heldfor a year. During this time, many observers maintainedthat Lee was a scapegoat, and some Asian Americanscharged that his arrest was motivated by racism. At histrial in September 2000, Lee was convicted on only one ofthe charges against him—illegally gathering and retainingnational security data. Though this was a felony count, thecourt released him on time served, and ordered him toundergo 60 hours of government debriefing.Many commentators charged that, if there was aninformation leak from the Los Alamos lab, and if Lee hadanything to do with it, he was only a small part of a muchlarger problem. Security at the laboratory was consideredby many security experts to be inadequate, given thesensitive nature of the work that took place there. Forexample, in April 2000, two computer drives disappearedEncyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and Securityfrom a high-security area and reappeared two monthslater behind an office copier in another part of the facility.Security breaches such as these prompted Congress tocreate the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)as a means of better protecting sensitive properties—andpartially removing oversight of those materials from Richardson’sDOE.The title of an article in the Wall Street Journal calledthe Wen Ho Lee case a “diversion,” and certainly the casedid create more questions than answers concerning Chineseespionage. One of the reasons U.S. authorities havehad a difficult time pinning charges of spying on theChinese is that much of their information seems to havecome from open sources. This became apparent with the“discovery” of a 1991 volume, published in Chinese inBeijing, titled Sources and Techniques of Obtaining NationalDefense Science and Technology.Authors Huo Zhongwen and Wang Zongxiao, bothPRC intelligence officers, were frank in stating that Westerntechnical journals “are the first choice of rank and fileS&T [science and technology] personnel as well as intelligenceresearchers.” Serendipity, combined with failedsecurity measures, also played a part; in the 1970s, theU.S. government had accidentally declassified more than19,000 documents on thermonuclear weapons. “This incident,”wrote Huo and Wang, illustrates that “…there is arandom element involved in the discovery of secret intelligencesources, and to turn this randomness into inevitability,it is necessary that there be those who monitorsome sectors and areas with regularity and vigilance.”This statement is all the more ironic in light of the fact thata copy of Sources and Techniques, which first came toU.S. attention in 1999, had been sitting in the Library ofCongress for seven years.Though the intricacies of the putative Chinese spyscandal in the late 1990s will perhaps never be known, itappears that much of the information the PRC acquiredwas not a result of subterfuge, but rather of Westernopenness—and, in some cases, the incompetence of individualscharged with guarding secrets. In any case, thepoint became all but moot after September 11, 2001. Notonly did the United States have far worse concerns thanChina, but President George W. Bush needed Chinesesupport for America’s war on terror. The issue of Chineseespionage, therefore, was not so much resolved as it wasset aside.❚ FURTHER READING:BOOKS:Cox, Christopher. U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic ofChina. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government PrintingOffice, 1999.Stober, Dan, and Ian Hoffman. A Convenient Spy: Wen HoLee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage. New York:Simon and Schuster, 2001.191