The Administration Quashes Truth Tellers On China

By Michael Ledeen,
The Wall Street Journal, 10 June 1999

We hear from President Clinton and his defenders that he is not to be blamed for the
Chinese
espionage detailed in the Cox committee report, nor for the illegal transfer of missile technology
to China by American corporations like Hughes and Loral, since both the espionage and the
technology-transfer policy began years ago, in the Reagan era. For the most part, neither the
media nor Republicans have challenged this line, Mr. Cox himself being a notable exception.
But it is false. President Clinton has done two things that were inconceivable in the Reagan
years: He has armed China with our best military technology, and has silenced anyone inside the
executive branch who has dared challenge this policy.

During the Reagan years, the U.S. crafted an international system to prevent dangerous
technology from going to dangerous countries. This required enormous input from professional
civil servants, particularly in the military, to evaluate the impact of high-tech sales to actual and
potential enemies. It would have been unthinkable for those experts to have been silenced or
coerced into lying about matters that directly affected national security. Yet this has happened
repeatedly during the Clinton years, as some recently uncovered documents show.

Shortly before Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s arrival in Washington in the fall of 1997, the
White House was pushing the State, Defense and Energy departments to support a presidential
certification of China as a nuclear nonproliferator and to sign off on the creation of an
“information exchange and technical cooperative reciprocal arrangement” on ostensibly civilian
nuclear technology. This arrangement would give the Chinese easy access to American civil
reactor sites, provide them with detailed information on how the U.S. handles fissionable
materials, and give them access to operational data on U.S. nuclear sites.

Despite pressure from the White House, Jonathan Fox, an attorney on the arms-control staff
of
the Defense Special Weapons Agency, wrote a memo stating with certainty that China was a
nuclear proliferator and that the proposed arrangement was “a technology transfer agreement
swaddled in the comforting yet misleading terminology of a confidence-building measure.” Mr.
Fox’s memo argued against the agreement on these grounds:

• It “presents real and substantial risk to the common defense and security of both the United
  States and allied countries.” It “can result in a significant increase of the risk of nuclear
  weapons technology proliferation.”

• “The environment surrounding these exchange measures cannot guarantee timely warning
  of
  willful diversion of otherwise confidential information to non-nuclear states for nuclear
  weapons development.”

• There was no guarantee that the nuclear information would be limited to nonmilitary
  applications in China itself.

Mr. Fox noted that the Chinese chafed at their inferiority to the West and “now [seek]
to
redress that balance through industrial, academic and military espionage. China routinely, both
overtly and covertly, subverts national and multilateral trade controls on militarily critical
items.” (Those who have been lured into the deceptive debate over when we knew about
Chinese espionage should note that civil servants like Mr. Fox, well below the pay grade of
National Security Adviser Samuel Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, were well
aware of the general phenomenon).

On Oct. 24, 1997, Mr. Fox was called out of an interagency meeting to receive an urgent
telephone call. According to three people to whom he gave a contemporaneous account of the
phone conversation, he was given an ultimatum from superiors in the Office of
Non-Proliferation Policy in the Department of Defense: either revise the memo and recommend
in favor of the agreement, or look elsewhere for employment. (Mr. Fox himself declined to
comment on the matter.)

Within an hour, all the critical language had been deleted, and the memo now simply
concluded
that the agreement “is not inimical to the common defense or the security of the United States.”
Worried that his earlier draft might fall into unfriendly hands, Mr. Fox’s superiors insisted that
somebody else sign the new memo.

The arrangement was in place in time for the summit with the Chinese ruler, who was no
doubt
quite satisfied that his American friends had given him a good-conduct certificate, even though
he, Mr. Clinton and the entire American national-security team knew full well that China was
spreading militarily useful nuclear technology to such nations as Iran and Pakistan.

Indeed, it was precisely this knowledge, and the fear that somebody in the media or
Congress
might enunciate it at an embarrassing moment, that drove the administration to silence potential
truth-tellers.

Mr. Fox is not the only weapons expert in the government to have been instructed to lie or
remain silent about the true consequences of sending military technology to China. Notra
Trulock and his colleagues were told by their superiors at the Department of Energy that they
should stop annoying people with accounts of Chinese espionage at Los Alamos. Similarly,
professionals in the Pentagon such as Michael Maloof and Peter Leitner were told to keep quiet
about the approval of high-tech licenses that would strengthen Chinese military power. Both of
them spoke out; others remain silent.

But even when the professionals stick by their principles, their superiors have chosen to
substitute facts with politically expedient disinformation. On at least two occasions, military
experts who argued against high-tech exports to China later discovered that their
recommendations had been altered in the Pentagon’s computerized data base.

Had President Reagan’s appointees attempted such heavy-handed censorship, the Democrats
in
Congress, constantly on the lookout for cooperative whistle-blowers, would have cried bloody
murder. Yet despite being well aware of the level of internal censorship, Republican leaders
from Rep. Dick Armey to Sen. Fred Thompson have all but remained silent. Mr. Thompson’s
Governmental Affairs Committee asked the Pentagon’s Inspector General to investigate this
matter last August. With the lightning speed that has characterized Republican investigations,
the Inspector General’s report is due to arrive on June 18, nearly a year later.

Congress’s behavior is thus the reverse of what it was during the Reagan years, which is one
reason the president has breezed through revelations that would have threatened the tenure of his
predecessors. Republicans have yet to present a coherent challenge to the administration’s China
policy, and for several years have largely ignored the cries of alarm from the professionals who
have spent their lives protecting our security.

We don’t yet know why Mr. Clinton chose to help arm China and why Congress has been
slow
to stop it. But one thing ought to be clear: The blame for this scandal lies not in the distant past
with the Reagan administration, which tried to prevent our military technology from falling into
the hands of real and potential enemies, but with Mr. Clinton, who has consciously and
systematically done the opposite. On this point, there must be neither doubt nor silence.

Michael Ledeen is a Reagan administration official and resident scholar at the
American
Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “Machiavelli on Modern Leadership,” just published by
St. Martin’s Press.