The case of Wen Ho Lee and the W-88warhead should come as no surprise. From the start, the Clintonadministration has spared no expense--even that of U.S. security--tocourt the People's Republic of China.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is acontributing editor for Reader's Digest and a frequent contributor toThe American Spectator.
ForPaul Redmond, the CIA spycatcher who caught Aldrich Ames, the case ofthe Chinese government espionage ring operating at the very heart ofthe U. S. nuclear weapons establishment was "worse than theRosenbergs." Not only had the design secrets of our most advancednuclear warhead been delivered lock, stock and barrel to Peking, butthe Chinese had been able to operate inside our labs for more than 14years, from 1985 until this March, apparently undetected.
But unlike Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whowere executed in 1953 for delivering atom bomb secrets to the SovietUnion, the Taiwan-born suspect who worked at the Los Alamos NationalLaboratory was merely fired from his job-- and that was only afterdetails of the case were revealed by the New York Times. Even moreunsettling: The Department of Energy, which oversees the labs,revoked Wen Ho Lee's Top Secret security clearance only thisFebruary, despite warnings dating back to 1995 from itscounterintelligence office of ongoing Chinese efforts to acquire U.S.nuclear weapons secrets.
The case of Wen Ho Lee, who allegedlycompromised the secrets of the W-88 warhead used on our Tridentmissile system, is not the only one in which the Clintonadministration's cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons andnational security has encouraged spying. In December 1997, anotherTaiwan- born scientist working in a U.S. nuclear weapons lab, PeterLee, pleaded guilty to giving the Chinese the secrets of a highlyspecialized laser plasma system used to test nuclear weapons. Thesystem is considered crucial to maintaining the viability of the U.S.nuclear weapons stockpile, now that the major nuclear powers haveagreed to a moratorium on nuclear testing. Until the invention of thelaser system, the U.S. had to actually detonate nuclear weapons fromthe stockpile to ensure that they worked. "This system gives Chinathe means to test new weapons and to validate their designs, withoutanyone having a clue to what they are doing," a former U.S.intelligence officer told TAS. For his crime, Peter Lee was fined$20,000 and sentenced to 12 months in a halfway house, from which hehas since been released.
It seems that every day brings newrevelations about Chinese spying in the United States and the weaponsprograms that have been compromised. Yet National Security AdvisorSamuel "Sandy" Berger continues to assert that the White House hasresponded "swiftly" to each case. In his solo news conference onMarch 19, President Clinton was flustered when a reporter asked aboutthe theft from one of the labs of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP)weapon--a Top Secret, non-nuclear device that destroys an enemy'ssilicon-based computer chips, and thereby his ability to communicateand to use most of his weapons. "You say they stole? Is that the wordyou used?" Clinton replied, buying time. Then: "To the best of myknowledge, no one has said anything to me about any espionage whichoccurred by the Chinese against the labs during my presidency. " Evenin the arena of national security, Bill Clinton invokes the Lewinskydefense of legalese and potentially faulty recollection.
The cases of Chinese nuclear spying revealedto date are "perhaps just the tip of an iceberg," says SenatorRichard Shelby, the powerful chairman of the Senate Select Committeeon Intelligence. The reason is simple, and systemic: From its firstdays in office this administration has disdained nuclear weapons,seeing them as the cause of an expensive environmental clean-up, notthe cornerstone of fifty years of world peace. Add the belief that wemight share U.S. military technology with the Chinese, because wewill always stay " one step ahead" of potential adversaries, and theresult is contempt for any form of national security export controls.Whether it's nuclear weapons secrets from our labs, or supercomputersand advanced telecommunications gear from Silicon Valley, thisadministration has presided over the greatest transfer of militarytechnology to a potential adversary of any administration in history.Repeated statements by Clinton and his advisors on the need to"engage" China, regardless of the spying scandals, can only encouragethe Chinese to go for more.
The Cox Report
Further evidence of Chinese spying is foundin a 700-page, still-classified report compiled by the House SelectCommittee on U.S. National Security and Military-Commercial Concernswith the People's Republic of China, established last year to examinethe impact on U.S. national security of U.S. technology transfers toChina (See "Loral Exams," TAS, July 1998). When Chairman ChristopherCox offered a vague summary of the Select Committee's findings onDecember 30, he promised that more details would follow once thereport had been scrubbed to protect classified sources andintelligence-gathering methods. Three months later, theadministration was still fighting to keep the report secret.According to committee staff members, an interagency review board waseven trying to classify information taken from newspaper accounts, intheir efforts to bottle-up the scandal. Cox told reporters onDecember 30 that the Select Committee had made 38 specificrecommendations for action to remedy lax security arrangementsgoverning U.S. technology transfer to China, and confirmed that theassistance provided by Hughes Aerospace and Loral to the Chinesefollowing the failure of a Chinese rocket in 1996 had harmed U.S.national security. "The technology transfer that has occurred goesbeyond the examples of the Loral and Hughes cases," Cox added. " Itgoes beyond, indeed, missiles and satellites, and includes militarytechnology. And the technology acquisition efforts of the PRC havebeen targeted at the United States for a period of at least twodecades, undoubtedly longer."
TAS has learned that the most sensitivesection of the report for the White House does not deal with thesatellite launches, or even the theft of W-88 nuclear weapons design.The White House leaked that information to the press in an apparenteffort to inoculate the public against the worst of the Cox Reportrevelations: details of how the People's Republic of China has usedits extensive network of commercial companies in the United States toprocure highly sensitive U.S. military technology and otherwise spyagainst the United States. Based on interviews with FBI agents,Customs Service investigators, Pentagon technology security officers,and other intelligence agencies, the message of the Cox Report isdevastating in its simplicity: Communist China is spying the pantsoff us, and it is using some 1,000 commercial companies, employingmore than 10,000 Chinese nationals residing in the United States, todo so. "The weapons suppliers and procurement companies are alsocollectors," says one source familiar with the report's conclusions."The operations that led to some of our most significant losses werenot run by (China's) Ministry of State Security, but were done rightout of those companies, which are closer to cabinet departments thancommercial companies." The administration is desperate to quash thisinformation because it has done nothing to curtail Chinese spying inthe U.S. since Clinton claimed the White House. Some would say thepresident and his policies actively encouraged the Chinese to expandtheir intelligence and influence- peddling operations in the UnitedStates.
U.S. law enforcement officials say they are"overwhelmed" by the sheer number of Chinese Communist agentsoperating in the United States, and can only focus on a fewhigh-profile cases. On February 11, for instance, Customs undercoveragents in Boston arrested Chinese national Collin Shu (a.k.a. ZhihongXu) on charges of attempting to purchase state-of-the-art fiber-optics gyroscopes (FOGs) used in guidance and navigational systemsfor ballistic missiles and combat aircraft. An affidavit by the chiefCustoms agent involved in the case shows that Shu and another Chinesenational, Yao Yi, had initially attempted to buy the gyroscopes fromtheir Massachusetts manufacturer and have them shipped directly toPeking, supposedly for use in various Chinese universities. Butbecause the gyroscopes were purely military items, their export wascontrolled by the Department of State, which denied them alicense.
Next, Shu and Yi shifted their business toLion Photonics in Montreal, Canada, a company they had set up"specifically for the purpose of sending technology to China,"according to Special Agent in Charge Allan Doody, who oversaw theinvestigation in Boston. "They were hoping to get around the U.S.licensing requirement by claiming the gyros would be used in Canada,"Doody tells TAS. When that also failed, they tapped a smallMontreal-based computer company run by Chinese nationals to make thepurchase, but they neglected to change the wording in their purchaseorder. The manufacturer smelled a rat and contacted the U.S. CustomsService, which set up a dummy company to handle the sale, gatheringevidence that led to the February arrest. "For every case like thisone," a Customs agent says, "there are probably a hundred other caseswe never see at all. We only catch these cases because we get lucky,or because someone tips us off. When the Chinese work with onlyChinese networks, we never see a thing."
Why Spy If You Can Get It forFree?
I have been investigating Chinese high-techespionage activities in the United States since 1993, and discoveredearly on just how sensitive a subject this can be. As a congressionalstaffer working for California Democrat Tom Lantos, I requestedlicensing records of U.S. high-tech exports to China from theDepartment of Commerce. When Commerce finally delivered the several-thousand-page print-out to the Rayburn House Office building in lateMarch 1993, I was prevented for three weeks from even looking itover, despite the fact that the information was not classified.Leading the charge to prevent my access was Rep. Sam Gejdenson(D-Conn.), currently slated to become chairman of the HouseInternational Relations Committee if the Democrats win back thechamber in 2000, and his top staffer John Scheibel, who went on tobecome a Washington, D.C. lobbyist for a computer export lobbyinggroup. They did not want the story to leak out of just how much dual-use technology U.S. companies had been allowed to sell to the Chinesemilitary, for fear that would impede the U.S.-China high-techpipeline.
Unbeknownst to most people at the time was aplan devised by top Clinton administration appointees to lift exportcontrols on a wide range of strategic technologies. The plan wasfirst laid out in a 1992 National Academy of Sciences study authoredby William Perry, Ashton Carter, and Mitchel Wallerstein, who allwent on to top Pentagon jobs under Clinton. Calling export controls a"wasting asset," they argued that for U.S. high- tech firms tomaintain a technological edge over their foreign competitors theyneeded to be allowed to export ever-more sophisticated equipment, sothey could plow those profits into developing new technologies. Whatbegan as an academic study in 1992 soon became election strategy, asClinton's campaign manager Ron Brown set out to woo corporate Americato the Democrats. First to join the Democrats' bandwagon with heftycampaign contributions and high-profile political support was theSilicon Valley computer industry, led by John Sculley, then-CEO ofApple, and Ed McCracken of Silicon Graphics.
After the election, William Perry becamedeputy secretary of defense and went to work putting the plan intoaction within the bureaucracy. Ron Brown, as secretary of commerce,was tasked with selling the decontrols to corporate America andCongress as part of an administration-wide "Trade Promotion" package,aimed at creating jobs and "growing" U.S. exports. On September 30,1993, Brown issued a landmark report, "Toward a National ExportStrategy," which first made the argument--oft-repeated until theLoral-Hughes satellite scandals erupted last year--that eachadditional $1 billion in U.S. exports creates 20,000 jobs in the U.S.Brown's report urged the administration and Congress to facilitateexports to ten "Big Emerging Markets." It just happened that thelargest of those markets, Communist China, was most interested inpurchasing precisely the type of technology that had long beensubject to export restrictions because of its military and strategicapplications. (As it turned out, U.S. companies exporting to Chinaexported technology and jobs, since the Chinese required them tobuild factories in China to replace products they would otherwise buyfrom America.)
Regulations governing export controls spanhundreds of pages, and are required under the Export AdministrationAct (EAA), first passed in 1979 to ensure that U.S. high-tech goodscould not enhance the defense industries in Soviet bloc countries andCommunist China. In 1993 and 1994 the administration tried to rewritethe EAA to eliminate most controls, but Congress balked; so theysimply made an end run around the law, and dismantled the controlsthrough executive branch regulations. The administration's effortsreduced the voluminous licensing lists I had once received, andDefense Department officials now complain there are no more recordsof what has been shipped to the Chinese military--and thus no way togauge the damage to U.S. national security. Like small-time hoodsdreaming of the perfect crime, Clinton's "best and brightest" thoughtthey had covered up all traces of their acts.
After leaving the Hill in late 1993, Ijoined Time magazine. After a three- month investigation into Chineseprocurement activities in the United States, I discovered the sale toa Chinese state-owned aerospace firm, CATIC, of virtually an entiredefense plant owned by McDonnell Douglas in Columbus, Ohio, where theB-1 bomber had been made. The CATIC deal was part of an audacious,and until then unreported, Chinese effort to buy cutting-edge U.S.defense manufacturing gear at auctions, as more and more defenseplants closed in response to the Pentagon's defense build-down. Mystory was pulled by Time the week O.J. Simpson burst onto the frontpages--but not because of O.J. The Commerce Department had written aletter to Time's editors (which I subsequently obtained), calling myreporting "one-sided" and "unfair"--all this before my story was evenprinted! Time fired me within hours.
The American Spectator published my articlesome six months later ("China Shops," March 1995), and has sincepublished nearly a dozen of my feature- length investigations ofChina's creeping infiltration of U.S. society. When I exposed theefforts of Defense Secretary William Perry to help the Chinese buyhighly sensitive U.S. telecommunications gear over the objections ofthe National Security Agency ("Peking Pentagon," April 1996), Perrythreatened to sue this magazine for defamation. Instead, he calledprominent conservatives to his office in an attempt to organize acounter-attack against me. Meanwhile, I learned, photocopies of myarticle were being passed around gleefully behind Perry'sback.
Making the Chinese Feel at Home
Congressman Cox at first intended to pursuemy investigation into a Chinese government procurement ring inCalifornia ("California Take-Out," TAS, November 1998), but abandonedthe effort for lack of time and resources. Instead, he focused on thelarger picture of Chinese intelligence and procurement operations inthe United States--operations which have blossomed like a thousandflowers under the security-lax Clinton administration.
One of the more shocking details I uncoveredin my investigation of China's California networks was that a frontcompany owned by the PLA's largest weapons manufacturer had set upshop directly above the CIA office responsible for contacts with U.S.aerospace manufacturers in the Los Angeles area, where some of theagency's most secret projects have been developed. The Chineseoperated there for more than two years without the CIA ever knowing,U.S. law enforcement officers in the L.A. area told me.
Given what we are now beginning to learnfrom the W-88 spy case, this monumental security lapse seems not anaccident but a natural consequence of the Clinton administrationpolicy. Deputy National Security Advisor Gary Samore, the officialput in charge of the W-88 investigation at the White House, revealedthe administration's attitude to Chinese spying when he spoke to agroup of national security experts and reporters at the CarnegieEndowment in Washington, D.C. on March 17. "China's strategiccapabilities are quite limited," and include "less than two dozenlong-range systems" capable of reaching the United States, Samoreexplained. "But if our policy convinces China that we are a threat,then that increases the possibility that China will devote theresources to significantly expand their strategic capabilities, andit is not in our interest to see that happen." The priority, then, isreassuring China, not protecting our military secrets.
Bill Clinton and his top advisors seeCommunist China as a strategic partner of the United States, not apotential adversary. During his March 19 press conference, Clintonrecited the litany of all the good things China has done in responseto the administration's policy of engagement. "I think if we hadn'tbeen working with China, China would not have signed theComprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention,"Clinton said. "They would very likely not have refrained fromtransferring dangerous technology and weaponry to countries that wedon't believe should get it. I doubt if they would have helped us asmuch as they have to try to contain the North Korean nuclear threator that we would have had the level of cooperation we had in tryingto limit the Asian financial crisis." But many of Clinton'sassertions are a matter of dispute, with Congress complaining thatChina has actually encouraged North Korea to up its price for openingan underground nuclear facility, and that China has continued to sellnuclear and missile technology to Iran, despite U.S. efforts to stopthem.
The Pentagon has been engaged for the pasttwo years in an extraordinary series of military-to-militaryexchanges and "confidence-building measures" with the People'sLiberation Army, which include the presence of Chinese militaryobservers at U.S. military exercises and visits to U.S. nuclearweapons labs. No reciprocal lab visits are allowed in China. Duringlast July's Cope Thunder war games, which are the largest jointmilitary exercises the U.S. holds with our Association of South EastAsian Nations (ASEAN) allies, the Chinese were first-hand witnessesat command headquarters when a computer glitch brought U.S. re-supplyefforts grinding to a halt. "That provided the Chinese with atremendous piece of intelligence," an aide to Republican CongressmanDana Rohrabacher said. "They were able to see first- hand howdependent we are on computers to run our entire military. It's noaccident that the Chinese have been devoting tremendous resources todeveloping new information warfare techniques to capitalize on thisvulnerability." According to a January 1999 Pentagon report toCongress on the security situation in the Taiwan Strait, "the PLA hasincorporated (information warfare)-related scenarios into severalrecent operational exercises," putting into practice what theylearned at last year's Cope Thunder. (Rohrabacher has been carefullymonitoring the build-up of Chinese military capabilities for sometime, and provided first-hand testimony of China's militaryoccupation of the disputed Spratley Islands in the South China Seawhen the Philippine air force flew him over Chinese warships anchoredoff the islands last December. For his efforts, he earned a WhiteHouse reprimand for interfering with U.S. foreign policy.)
The U.S.-Sino defense exchange program wasdreamed up by William Perry following the Taiwan Strait crisis inFebruary 1996, as a means of increasing the comfort level of theChinese (who had been made decidedly uncomfortable when two U.S.aircraft carrier battle groups steamed off the Chinese coast as awarning to Peking to cease its intimidating missile strikes duringthe Taiwanese presidential election campaign). TAS has obtained acopy of this year's exchange program "gameplan." For March it showsthe U.S. training a delegation of Chinese military procurementofficers in program management, a set of skills sorely lacking in thePLA's weapons development efforts. In April the U.S. was scheduled tohost a PLA Air Force logistics delegation. In June the PLA has beeninvited to observe a National Training Center demonstration by the82nd Airborne, to include future-generation unmanned battlefieldaerial surveillance vehicles (UAVs), remotely-targeted missiles, andbattlefield management computer systems.
Also in June, a flight of U.S. Air ForceC-130 and C-17 military transport aircraft will visit Peking,schooling the Chinese in how to improve their ability to airlifttroops and materiel, skills undoubtedly of great use, say, inproviding relief to flood victims (though also potentially helpful inmoving troops across the Taiwan Strait). In August and September, theChinese will attend an eight-week-long seminar in Hawaii on militarymedicine, perhaps in the hope of encouraging them to joininternational humanitarian missions. For several weeks in October andNovember, the PLA will participate in a workshop at the SandiaNational Nuclear Laboratory on "cooperative monitoring," where thesecrets of U.S. weapons-monitoring efforts, such as those arrayedagainst Iraq, will be shared. Both Secretary of Energy Richardson andNational Security Advisor Sandy Berger have said the lab visits willnot be canceled in the wake of the W-88 spy scandal, because there is"no evidence" that spying has occurred during foreign visits to U.S.nuclear labs or that any nuclear weapons information has beencompromised.
But in fact, the Department of Energyitself, in a 1983 report, acknowledged that "a significant amount ofimportant technology may have been lost to potential adversariesthrough visits" to the labs, a conclusion buttressed by a 1988General Accounting Office review. On March 15 of this year, SenateIntelligence Committee Chairman Richard Shelby called on theadministration to suspend Chinese visits to U.S. nuclear labs, since"the counterintelligence measures initiated by Secretary BillRichardson will require several years to be fullyimplemented."
The Maloof Memo
When the Clinton administration took powerin 1993, the Chinese had two ICBMs capable of targeting the UnitedStates. Today, says Deputy National Security Advisor Gary Samore,that has grown to "less than two dozen." But thanks to the theft ofthe W-88 warhead design, and the transfer by U.S. satellitemanufacturers of technology used to boost multiple satellites todifferent orbits, the Chinese may be able to put up to five MultipleIndependent Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) warheads on each missile.According to reports for the Office of Naval Intelligence, theChinese will soon begin building two new-generation missile systems,the DF-31 and DF-41, also equipped with multiple warheads, whichcould expand their nuclear forces exponentially over the next five toten years. From the bottom rank among the five declared nuclearweapons states (not including India and Pakistan, which demonstratedtheir nuclear weapons capabilities last year), China will soon slipinto third place, just behind the United States and Russia. All thishas happened as a direct result of the Clinton administration'spolicy of engagement.
Similarly, prior to January 1996, whencomputer export controls were lifted after intensive lobbying fromSilicon Graphics and other top DNC contributors, the Chinese had onlythree U.S. High Performance Computers (HPCs), all of which weresubject to stringent Defense Department monitoring. In April 1997--just 14 months after the decontrol--Undersecretary of CommerceWilliam Reinsch told Congress that U.S. companies had sold 46supercomputers to Chinese end-users, and that the Chinese were notallowing the U.S. government to verify how they were being used. ByJune 1997, concerned that we were helping the PLA to improve weaponsdesign, missile targeting, and nuclear simulation, the House voted torestore licensing requirements on HPCs. But the measure wasultimately defeated under intense industry and administrationpressure.
In January 1999, Reinsch's Bureau of ExportAdministration delivered its first congressionally mandated reportdetailing supercomputer exports over the preceding 12 months. Out ofa total of 390 HPCs exported by the United States during that period,191 of them had gone to China. Despite U.S. efforts, the Chinese onlyallowed government officials to inspect three of them once they hadreached China. Congressional sources tell TAS that they have beentold by administration officials that as many as 600 HPCs have beensold to the Chinese since the 1996 decontrols--more raw computingpower than can be found in the Pentagon and the Department ofEnergy's nuclear weapons labs, combined.
Supercomputers are only one element in adeadly mix of high technologies released for sale to the Chinese bythe Clinton administration since 1993. An internal memorandum writtenby Michael Maloof of the Pentagon's Defense Technology SecurityAdministration (DTSA), subpoenaed by the Cox committee, paints anastonishing picture of the cumulative impact of U.S. technologytransfer to the Chinese military over the past five years. Thecombination of supercomputers, satellite sales, and advancedtelecommunications switching technology since 1994 "have provided theChinese military with a nationwide encrypted command, control,communications, computers and intelligence (C4I) network that willserve it well into the next century," Maloof warned his superiors."Together, they provide the PLA with a communications infrastructurethat it could not have developed on its own."
Extensive manufacturing technologies weredecontrolled along with the actual products U.S. companies wereallowed to ship to China. Since 1993, the PLA has been importingmassive amounts of equipment to manufacture fiber- optics cable,which allows for secure communications links impervious to electroniceavesdropping. And companies tied to former colleagues of then-Deputy Defense Secretary William Perry led the way in transferringencrypted Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) telephone switchingequipment, now used by the PLA for its military communicationsnetwork. "The decision to allow... ATM switching technology in 1994occurred over the objection of DoD technical experts," Maloof wrote."Despite initial NSA concerns, it was silent when the decisionfinally occurred." As I wrote in "Peking Pentagon" in April 1996, itappeared that William Perry personally intervened to get NSA to droptheir objections to the sale of this technology, despite the factthat the Chinese buyer was a PLA-owned company.
More recently, Maloof wrote, was thedecision to allow Hughes to sell more than 500 ground stations toaccompany the telecommunications satellites sold by Hughes tocompanies controlled by the Chinese military. "The VSAT groundstation terminal equipment...was supplied and wittingly installed byHughes for Chinese ground and rocket forces and the PLAAF (AirForce)," Maloof wrote. "This equipment also was available to theMinistry of State Security," and included "an additional port forencryption equipment." Chinese encryption efforts have been given "agreat boost...from the U.S. high performance computers it hasreceived and the training in software development." A spokespersonfor Hughes Network Systems, Judy Blake, declined to comment on theMaloof memo or respond to detailed questions about Hughes's businessin China. Export licensing information obtained by TAS shows that theState Department licensed the export to China of 522 Hughes telephoneground stations valued at just over $5 million in March 1996. Theultimate buyer was the China Electronic Systems Engineering Company,an entity directly controlled by the PLA's General Staff Department,according to a publicly available chart prepared by the DefenseIntelligence Agency of China's International Defense-IndustrialOrganizations. The Hughes equipment was licensed as Munitions listitems.
Maloof's Office of Technology Security Operations objected lastyear to the sale by Hughes of a sophisticated new communicationssatellite to the Asia- Pacific Mobile Telecommunications (APMT)consortium, which is part-owned by the PLA, "because of an anonymoustip it received in late May 1998 that the son of the deputy directorof COSTIND (the Chinese State Commission of Science, Technology andIndustry for National Defense, which ultimately controls weaponsdevelopment plans in China) was project manager of APMT at Hughes'sU.S. facility." When Hughes sought approval in 1996 to allow the son,Shen Jun, to work at Hughes, their application stated he would "beonly a translator, although as it turned out he was an APMT projectdirector," Maloof told Congress. One of the most disturbing elementsabout the APMT project was a Chinese requirement that the newsatellite be configured so that it could handle separate encryptedchannels for Chinese military communications. The Chinese beganrelying on U.S.-built civilian communications satellites in 1996,Maloof wrote, after the catastrophic failure of their militarycommunications satellites. As a result, "they had no choice but toresort to the use of previously purchased U.S. satellites for theirencrypted communications."
Maloof's charges were confirmed laconically by the Department ofDefense in a May 1998 report to Congress on PRC Militarycapabilities, which acknowledged the assistance of Westerntelecommunications firms in installing advanced telecommunicationsequipment used by the Chinese military. In a separate report on thesecurity situation in the Taiwan Strait, delivered in February 1999,the Pentagon acknowledged that the PLA communications network " usesthe same types of communications mediums as the civil network.... Themilitary's lack of communications satellites could force the PLA torely on foreign satellite services to meet military needs in wartimeor a crisis," the report stated.
As a result of these sales, one congressional source told TAS,"our ability to decrypt Chinese military communications has beenseriously degraded." Meanwhile, of course, the capabilities of theChinese military have been greatly expanded. But all of that fallsunder the Clinton administration priority of making the ChineseCommunists feel more comfortable.
More scandals will emerge once the Cox report is finallydeclassified and made public. But one thing is certain: Nothing isgoing to stop the Clinton administration from pursuing its policy ofengaging the Chinese military and selling off U.S. security, short ofa political explosion back in the United States. What remains to beseen is whether the Republicans can capture the high ground onforeign affairs and national security issues, and get voters to careabout something other than their stock portfolios and the boomingeconomy.
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