Another espionage scandal rocks US

The new conclusion about the success of Chinese espionage in obtaining America’s missile secrets as well as secrets of weapons like the W-88, was reached only this year because the CIA and other intelligence agency linguists did not fully translate the huge pile of secret Chinese documents, totalling 13,000 pages, until four years after the agency obtained them, according to a senior law enforcement official, who described the delay as "a major blunder."

The belated translation and analysis, said the Post, has prompted a major reorientation of the FBI’s investigation into Chinese espionage.

From 1996 until late last year, the FBI probe centred on the suspected loss of US nuclear warhead data, and quickly narrowed into an investigation of Wen Ho Lee, an ethnic Chinese from Taiwan.

Now, however, the FBI, which never found evidence that E spied for China, has shifted its focus to the Defence Department and its private contractors.

The documents were provided by a "walk-in" defector, what that time was suspected to be a double agent because he had sent some of the documents by an American multinational courier, DHL, and brought other documents personally.

They show that during the 1980s, Beijing had gathered a large amount of classified information about US ballistic missiles and re-entry vehicles.

The new conclusion is that the missile secrets are far more likely to have come from the US defence officials or US missile builders than from the US nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos and other nuclear weapon labs, the post said.

The documents brought by the Chinese defector, said a former intelligence official who has reviewed much of the translated material, appeared to be a 5-year "strategic plan" for the development of China’s new generation of missiles.

Another intelligence expert familiar with the material described it as "an embarrassment of riches."

When the walk-in defector from China first delivered the documents, a former US official said, the CIA read and translated the titles of each major portion, then ordered a full translation of a 76-page section dealing with "nuclear" information — "data on US warheads, including the most advanced weapon in the US arsenal, the W-88."