Kenneth R. Timmerman, publisher of Iran Brief, is a frequent contributor to TAS.
BOOKS IN REVIEW :
The DNC's Chinese Money Laundry
The Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised American Security for Chinese Money :by William C. Triplett II and Edward Timperlake :Regnery / 256 pages / $24.95
If Bill Clinton and Al Gore are hoping that Topic A will indefinitely deflect public opinion from their appalling national security record until after the November 1998 elections, they should think again. In The Year of the Rat, two top congressional aides wrap up this administration's fundraising scandals with refreshing clarity, linking them to a concerted plan by the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate the United States government, steal high-technology, and acquire strategic intelligence, all with the goal of allowing China to dominate Asia in the twenty-first century.
Nineteen ninety-six was the Chinese Year of the Rat, and according to William C. Triplett II and Edward Timperlake, the rats were so plentiful at the Clinton White House that only a thorough house-cleaning will rid the place of the Chinese intelligence agents and mobsters to whom the Clintons are beholden. Their main thesis will not surprise readers of TAS: Bill Clinton made a series of Faustian bargains with the Communist Chinese and their agents in the United States, trading national security for hefty campaign contributions that ultimately financed Dick Morris's now infamous media blitz in late 1995 and 1996. Clinton's betrayal ranged from leaking classified intelligence documents to wittingly assisting the modernization of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The authors give new substance to Senator Fred Thompson's cryptic suggestions of a methodical game plan organized by the PLA, China's intelligence services, and the Chinese mob to infiltrate and ultimately control the American political establishment.
The Year of the Rat draws on the raw data files of Senator Thompson's investigation of the campaign finance scandals; interviews with former and current intelligence officials; and the authors' own reporting in Hong Kong and Macau, where they unmasked the Triad connections of DNC fundraiser Charlie Trie and his mob backer, the mysterious casino operator Ng Lapseng. The book also shows that the FBI, CIA, and NSA investigations of Bill Clinton's ties to Communist China are ongoing, serious, and could reveal grave damage to U.S. national security.
Item: John Huang--Lippo Bank official, friend of Bill, and representative of ethnic Chinese magnate Mochtar Riady--was actually an agent of Chinese intelligence, working under cover in the United States. The Riadys and their Chinese Communist intelligence bosses placed Huang at the Clinton Commerce Department in 1994, with the primary goal of gaining access to classified U.S. government files pertaining to China, U.S. investments in China, and counter- intelligence investigations of Chinese agents operating in the U.S. When security-conscious officials in the administration balked at placing Huang in such a sensitive position in June 1994, the Riadys turned to Hillary Clinton and offered to buy Huang's appointment with hush money payments to Webster Hubbell, the authors assert. Part of the money was doled out directly by Lippo, which paid Hubbell a $100,000 consulting fee that Hubbell has never explained. Further (and as yet unreported) payments came from Ng Lapseng, Triad godfather and financial backer of Clinton crony Charlie Trie. On Monday, June 20, 1994, the same day that Hubbell met with Mrs. Clinton to explain his dire financial straits, Mr. Ng "quietly arrived in the United States from Macau carrying $175,000 in cash," part of which the authors state made its way to Hubbell. Less than one month later, Huang started work at the Commerce Department.
Item: CIA representatives told the Thompson committee that during his brief tenure at the Commerce Department, Huang saw "between 370 and 550 CIA- produced pieces of American intelligence," including at least three documents marked MEM DISSEM. This was a classification code that meant: "unauthorized disclosure could result in the death of an asset." The authors comment: "The CIA surely does not exaggerate when it refers to these sources as 'extremely sensitive.'"
Item: When Dick Morris informed Clinton that his 1996 election campaign would fail without an expensive media blitz, Clinton turned once again to the Riadys, who agreed to place Huang at the DNC as a fundraiser, so that they could funnel yet more money through a series of cut-outs to the campaign.
During the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton and Al Gore repeatedly chastised President Bush for "coddling dictators" in Peking. Many Democrats in Congress believed that with Clinton's election, the White House would finally begin to support congressional efforts to block Most Favored Nation trading status with Peking, at least until China improved its behavior on human rights. What they didn't know was that behind the scenes Bill Clinton had already made a deal that would make Bush's temporizing on MFN look like firm moral leadership.
Only days before Bill Clinton took office in January 1993, James Riady and John Huang of Indonesia's Lippo Group donated $100,000 to the Clinton-Gore inaugural fund. Less than one month later, Huang wrote Clinton to arrange a White House visit for Riady's father, Mochtar. The elder Riady spelled out his interests in a "Personal & Confidential" letter to Clinton on March 9, 1993, which urged the new president to drop his opposition to MFN. "The best way of achieving political reform in China is through capitalist interaction," Riady argued. As the authors show, he was anxious to protect billions of dollars of investments in Communist China and the fortunes of Communist Chinese cronies known as the Princelings.
The first hint that Clinton had decided to tilt toward China--and renege on his campaign promises--was delivered by Ron Brown on April 27, 1993, at a meeting with Asian-American business leaders in Los Angeles. "I tend to agree that the best way to apply pressures for a more liberal policy in China would be through open trade," Brown said, echoing the Riady letter. "I would be surprised if China's most-favored nation status is not renewed." At the time, no one noticed the Asian-American "leader" who had asked Brown the question on MFN. His name was John Huang.
John Huang was appointed a trustee of the Democratic National Committee shortly after that Los Angeles rally. He became so close to the former DNC chairman that Brown asked on Jan. 31, 1994, that he be given an interim top- secret security clearance for possible work at the Commerce Department.
The authors of The Year of the Rat offer astonishing new evidence of Huang's ties to Chinese intelligence, noting the value of the Top Secret documents he spirited away from the Commerce Department to a private office maintained for him in the nearby Willard Hotel by Stephens Inc., Arkansas cronies of President Clinton and business partners of the Riadys.
They report that a former Stephens secretary testified during the Thompson hearings that:
-- Huang walked across the street to the Stephens office two or three times a week carrying a folder or small briefcase.
-- He received overnight packages and faxes at the office.
-- He sent faxes out of the office, used the copier, and made telephone calls from a small office set aside for visitors.
The authors write: "It is abundantly clear that Huang did not want anyone to know of this arrangement," and systematically disguised his relationship with the Riadys, Stephens Inc., and the Chinese government. The classified documents Huang allegedly sent to Lippo not only touched on U.S. national security concerns, such as encryption, but included other "insider information" of a more commercial nature, which the authors assert could have been worth billions of dollars to the Riadys since it allowed them to time strategic investments in China in accordance with secret policy decisions by the U.S. government.
It may have been that Huang made additional, as yet unrevealed, business deals with President Bill Clinton from the Stephens office at the Willard. We are told that the National Security Agency has electronic intercepts of telephone calls between the President and John Huang laying out the details of these arrangements.
Huang and the Riadys were but one chapter in the Clinton sell-out to China. The "open door" policy put in place by top appointees allowed Chinese intelligence agents to walk through sensitive military plants in the United States--including our nuclear weapons labs--taking video footage of classified assembly lines and transmitting them back to analysts in Peking. In this way, the China Aero-Technology Import-Export Company (CATIC) acquired an entire production line from a former B-1 bomber plant in Columbus, Ohio, and transferred it to a military production plant in China. According to a June 1994 Department of Defense strategic assessment, the deal constituted "a total turnkey transfer of a military aerospace factory" to China. The authors also assert that "at least some of the machine tools made their way to a PLA cruise missile plant."
The White House sponsored a bid by the state-owned China Ocean Shipping Corp., COSCO, to lease the navy yard at Long Beach, California, despite evidence that COSCO was running hostile intelligence operations in the United States and had been involved in gun-running and drug-trafficking. President Clinton made no fewer than five trips to Long Beach over an 18-month period to lobby the town council in favor of the deal, which was finally put on ice after strong protests in Congress and by local residents. The COSCO deal would have allowed the Chinese to conduct electronic espionage against such top secret facilities as Lockheed's famed "Skunk works," where the Stealth Fighter and other top-secret weapons systems are developed.
Some of the harshest condemnation in The Year of the Rat is reserved for Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry, recognized by the authors as " one of America's most brilliant military scientists." Perry's arrival at the Pentagon as deputy secretary in the spring of 1993 "caused an immediate reversal when it came to the Chinese military." One of the first results was the sale of telecommunication and encryption gear to the PLA by Perry crony John Lewis (first reported in these pages in "Peking Pentagon," April 1996). But that was only the beginning.
Once Perry became Defense Secretary in the spring of 1994, he launched a series of military exchanges between the United States and China that included sharing nuclear and strategic planning secrets with the Chinese, 19- gun salutes from the Pentagon honor guard to the perpetrators of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacres, and astonishing access to our best protected defense secrets.
"The administration's biggest mistake in military-to-military relations is its obsession with training the PLA in logistics," the authors write. "Any analysis of the PLA will show that modern logistics is one of its major weaknesses, a weakness we should not want to see fixed. Logistics is real war fighting capability. But the Clinton administration has quietly welcomed a number of PLA logistics teams to the United States. For example, the PLA was told that FedEx's system of package distribution at the Memphis, Tennessee airport is about 95 percent similar to the U.S. military's wartime logistics system. Senior PLA officers have been to Memphis repeatedly since the fall of 1996."
Another target of the authors is national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger. A long-standing friend of Bill who first met Clinton during the 1972 McGovern campaign, Berger was a Washington-based lawyer-lobbyist at Hogan and Hartson before joining the administration in 1993. One of his main clients, according to the authors, was the trade office of the Chinese government. " Under these circumstances, we believe that Berger should have recused himself from anything having to do with the PRC, certainly anything to do with trade." Instead, "it was Berger who led the charge to repeal export controls on satellites for China."
If you thought you already knew all there was to know about the China scandals, think again. The Year of the Rat is most remarkable for its masterful weaving of the various strands of the fundraising and national security scandals together into a single, coherent tapestry whose underlying theme is political corruption.
"Political corruption is like a cancer," the authors state in conclusion. " If not defeated, it continues to replicate....On the Republican side some consultants are beginning to talk quietly of a 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em' political strategy....Unless the cancer is halted promptly, this kind of thinking will surely spread. The Republicans will find themselves making the same sort of Faustian bargains for the soul of their party that Clinton and Gore did."