China — US turns to experts to guard N-secrets

The move, which began last year with the hiring of 150 specialists and will continue through 2001, was prompted by the suspected transfer of US long-range missile technology to Beijing that began at least five years ago, Bacon said. “We are hiring 450 people to improve protection of technical and industrial secrets,” Bacon said in response to questions on a report in the Washington Post, which yesterday revealed the major hiring step. “After the Cold War, we cut back the counter-intelligence force. Now we are building it back up,” Bacon said.

US officials, who asked not to be identified, confirmed the Post report that the move was prompted in large measure by the suspected transfer to China of highly classified material, including heat-shield technology on US submarine-launched missiles. “This is all part of a broader programme in which we have revised our counter-intelligence system, including the increased use of technology, to protect secrets,” he said.

Pentagon officials said the specialists, who are being checked and hired through the department’s civil service office, were coming from police forces and the military or were former government employees. Intelligence officials said a Chinese missile specialist went to the CIA in 1995 with thousands of pages of information obtained by Beijing, including data on the W-88 nuclear warhead on US Trident-2 submarine-launched missiles. But the translation of those documents into English took several years, and it did not become clear until at least 1997 how damaging the transfer might have been.

Officials said it still was not clear whether China had taken full advantage of the information from that and other cases to improve its own nuclear missiles. Bacon said another case that prompted the department action was a 1996 government probe into scientist Wen Ho Lee, who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The government did not charge Lee with espionage, and he was released from custody last month after spending nearly a year in jail. He pleaded guilty to downloading classified data to computer tapes.

Republicans have raised concerns about the Clinton administration’s ability to safeguard US nuclear secrets. In addition, a television advertisement targeting Democrat presidential hopeful and US Vice President Al Gore, on Chinese arms was set to air in Ohio, Michigan, Missouri and Pennsylvania. The advertisement which the New York Times said was sponsored by a Texas-based non-profit organisation that the Gore campaign called a “front” for a Republican consulting group charged the administration with effectively giving China the ability to threaten the United States with nuclear weapons.

The Post, quoting a 1999 CIA damage assessment, said that China apparently had made nuclear technical advances based on a number of factors. “China’s technical advances have been made on the basis of classified and unclassified information derived from espionage, contact with US and other countries’ scientists, conferences and publications, unauthorised media disclosures, declassified US weapons information, and Chinese indigenous development,” the newspaper quoted the report as saying.