Cox Report Finally Released
But declassified portion says nothing about Wen Ho Lee
Staff and Wire Reports

WASHINGTON -- Much of the classified report long believed to implicate fired Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee was released Tuesday -- and though it contains plenty implicating Loral and Hughes Corp. and the Israeli and other governments in what it says was China’s stealing of information needed to build seven major types of bombs, the 700-word document does not mention Lee by name.

Yet the absence of a mention does not exonerate the 59-year-old American, fired almost three months ago. The report begins with a caveat that “significant findings and judgments contained in the Select Committee’s classified report cannot be publicly disclosed without affecting national security or ongoing criminal investigations.” About a third of the report remains under wraps.

“Since that’s an ongoing investigation, my assumption is that is the part of it that got cut out,” said Daphne Kwok, president of the Overseas Chinese Association.

According to the report, China stole U.S. secrets about the seven major warheads in the current American nuclear arsenal as well as the neutron bomb.

“These thefts of nuclear secrets from our national weapons laboratories enabled [China] to design, develop and successfully test modern strategic weapons sooner than would otherwise have been possible,’’ said the report, which stated that the primary focus of Chinese espionage was the weapons research labs of Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore in California.

The report also said that the U.S. sale of 600 high-powered computers to China may help that country develop its nuclear arsenal without actual nuclear testing. China has pledged to adhere to the nuclear test-ban treaty.

“Without the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States, it would have been virtually impossible for the PRC to fabricate and test successfully small nuclear warheads’’ prior to its 1996 pledge to comply with the treaty, said the report.

The report’s allegations were met with denunciations from Beijing. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao said the allegations were cooked up by people who want to slander China and declared that “their despicable attempt is doomed to failure.”

Kung Lue-Wang, founder of the Overseas Chinese Association and former executive director of the Committee of 100, said that what has been overlooked recently is that spying is part of intelligence gathering conducted by most nations.

“It’s our policy to collect information, for any country to collect information,” he said. “The CIA collects information on [many countries in] the world. In fact, the former embassador to China ... used to be in charge of the CIA in the early days in Beijing.”

Still, the fallout could have a profound impact on the operation of U.S. weapons labs and on U.S.-China relations. The House and Senate have called for in-depth hearings on Chinese espionage and U.S. nuclear security. And Energy Secretary Bill Richardson within days is expected to announce disciplinary action against a number of Energy Department and lab employees in connection with anti-espionage lapses.

So far, though, there have been no charges to back up investigators’ suspicions that Lee was part of any espionage -- an allegation he has denied.

Lee, who has been under investigation since 1996, has never been charged with a crime. Moreover, federal prosecutors who say he transferred secret computer data from a classified to a more open computer system admit that they do not know whether such mishandling of classified information in cyberspace constitutes a crime, according to a report in the Washington Post this week.

Even if he did, Democrats burned in the 1996 fundraising debacle have said publicly and often that Asian Americans as a whole should not be tainted as a function of race, as many Asian Americans believe happened four years ago. Since April, Richardson has spoken before national groups of Chinese Americans twice in the past two months to emphasize that point, and on May 20 said he had sent a letter to lab directors emphasizing that promotions and conference participation were not to be determined by race, and that even “snickers at meetings” would not be tolerated.

“People create racial profiles out of fear and misunderstanding,” Richardson said. “I will fight what I perceive to be discrimination against Asian Americans.”

Many of the five Republicans and four Democrats on the committee reiterated similar views this week, including Pennsylvania congressman Kurt Weldon, Kwok said. Democrats including U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi also stressed that the alleged espionage had taken place over many administrations -- including that of former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

“Because the security breaches have occurred over a 20-year period, it is fair to question why successive administrations either did not see the violations or may have been slow to respond to them,” said Pelosi, who represents San Francisco.

Given the report’s conclusions of widespread negligence, including by satellite manufacturers Loral and Hughes Corp., Wang said China’s alleged actions were unsurprising. “It’s a question of us not been able to protect our information carefully in our weapons lab. That is part of our fault that we’re not careful.”

Attorney General Janet Reno said this week that she would not step down, despite renewed calls for her to do so in light of revelations that the Justice Department in 1997 declined to seek a warrant for electronic surveillance of Lee.

“I’m right here, going strong,’’ she told two reporters who encountered her in a Justice Department hallway.

The administration first learned of the extent of China’s espionage in 1995 when the CIA obtained from a Chinese official a document dated from 1988 that showed China had obtained sensitive information about several U.S. nuclear weapons. Since last year, Clinton has been taking steps to counteract China’s espionage and improve security at the nuclear weapons labs, which included Lee’s firing March 8.

But in his speech before the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies’ banquet May 20, Richardson reiterated that he did not agree with Republican calls to restrict foreign-born visitors at the nation’s defense labs, who emphasized to the group that maintaining access to the labs was necessary to the “American tradition of scientific progress.”

While “some in Congress have called for the closing our labs to foreign-born scientists, even when the work is unclassified, I say that this is wrong,” Richardson said.

“I will not respond to reporters who ask me for the number of Asian Americans or the number of foreign-born scientists at Los Alamos or in my department.” Richardson added. “This is discrimination, and it will not be tolerated.”

He continued: “We will do all we can to make sure that allegations about espionage so far directed against one individual will not be used to impact the careers of other Asian Americans.”

Nevertheless, Kwok and others said they were worried that the scandal would be used in political gamesmanship. “I’m concerned about the continued fallout because of this country’s continued inability to distinguish between Chinese and Chinese-Americans and Chinese Americans and the rest of the Asian American community,” she said. “ This China bashing that’s going on, for political purposes -- that is something we’re very concerned about because we will continue to be victims of political bashing. And it’s going to go on until elections next year.”

Staff writers Perla Ni and Phil Nash, along with the Associated Press, contributed to this report.