Panel Says Chinese Arms Used U.S. Data
House Committee To Release Report On Spying's Effects
By Juliet Eilperin and Vernon Loeb, Washington Post, May 25, 1999; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-05/25/072l-052599-idx.htmlA House select committee concludes in a long-awaited report that China has stolen design secrets on the United States' most advanced thermonuclear weapons and used them to help develop miniaturized warheads and a new mobile intercontinental ballistic missile that could be tested this year.
The 700-page document, adopted unanimously by a panel of five Republicans and four Democrats headed by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), also concludes that penetration of U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories by Chinese spies probably continues to this day as part of a massive Chinese effort to steal or purchase U.S. military technology, according to a review of the report.<snip>
But the report, in its detail, is rich with new findings. Chief among them is the fact that a secret 1988 Chinese document obtained by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1995 that triggered the Los Alamos National Laboratory espionage investigation was provided by a double agent under the direction of Chinese intelligence.
The committee cites a CIA conclusion that nonetheless the document
contained classified U.S. thermonuclear warhead design information and other technical information on U.S. nuclear weapons. The CIA, in its own review of Chinese espionage, said it was unable to determine how much of the information China stole from the United States, how much it obtained from open sources and what impact it had on Chinese warhead design advances.<snip>
The committee concludes that Hughes Electronics Corp. and Loral Space & Communications passed sensitive technical information to China as part of a 1996 investigation into the failure of a Chinese Long March rocket carrying a Loral-built commercial satellite without an export license, even though both companies knew they needed a license.<snip>
It singled out as particularly damaging the loss of design material from one of America's most sophisticated warheads in the 1980s.<snip>
From other WP articles:
Information on a total of seven U.S. warheads, including two of America's most modern, is believed to have been obtained through Chinese espionage in the 1980s, although the losses were not discovered until the mid-1990s. <snip>
Two U.S. satellite manufacturers, Loral Corp. and Hughes Electronics,
provided China with valuable information to improve the reliability of missiles used to launch communications satellites. However, the report said, the same know-how passed on by the U.S. companies could be used to make China's nuclear missiles more reliable.``Loral and Hughes showed the PRC how to improve the design and reliability
of the guidance system used in the PRC's newest Long March rocket,'' thereport said. It said these activities went beyond the license authority given the companies.<snip>
In the winter of 1995, a Chinese spy walked into the CIA's arms in Taiwan, carrying a suitcase crammed with secret documents. But the CIA eventually decided that the man was under the control of Chinese intelligence, sent to deliver a message whose meaning no one has been able to translate. The only valuable paper in his suitcase contained evidence that China had obtained secret information on American nuclear weapons. Earlier that year,three scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, analyzing three years'
worth of data from Chinese nuclear tests, voiced similar suspicions. Theirfears and the Chinese documents are the seeds from which the new report grew. The report's conclusions are blunt, say those who have read them: China hasstolen data on every significant American nuclear warhead, the stolen secrets helped China design and test modern nuclear weapons, and Chineseespionage at the biggest government weapons labs is long-standing and continuing.<snip>
The report says the crucial document in the Chinese briefcase contained stolen information on six nuclear weapons -- the crown jewels of the American nuclear arsenal, officials said. The theft of information is believed to have occurred in 1988. Yet a decade later, long after the investigation was under way, key intelligence and law enforcement officials focused only on one weapon
system, the W-88, not all six, the report said.