Barely noticed in the media blizzard swirling around Elian Gonzalez,
the stock market crash and street protests in Washington last month,
the Clinton administration quietly proposed a plan to compensate
Department of Energy workers ailing from illnesses related to
beryllium and radiation exposure. This is the U.S. government’s first
real response to a long-term problem it has only recently admitted:
The stockpiling of nuclear missiles during the Cold War era came
at a considerable human cost. The DOE now acknowledges that radiation
exposure at its nuclear plants has led to an increased risk of cancer
for the agency’s own employees.
Spurred by Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, the White House
proposes to spend an estimated $400 million over the next five years
and give the DOE sweeping powers to determine how and if workers
should be compensated. Though still subject to congressional
approval, this plan is deeply flawed, because it roughly equates to
giving the tobacco industry authority to decide who, if anyone,
should be compensated for smoking-related diseases.
Furthermore, the DOE would allocate funds to the program from its
overall budget — forcing sick workers and their families to compete
for cash during the congressional budgeting process with other
departmental priorities, like the powerful nuclear weapons
laboratories, massive environmental cleanup programs and ongoing
research and development efforts. Given the clout of the weapons
program alone, it doesn’t take a nuclear rocket scientist to figure
out how well the sick workers will fare.
Nevertheless, the decision to even try to compensate nuclear weapons
workers — with payments as high as $100,000 in extreme cases — is
an acknowledgment not only of the cost of disease in the workplace
but also of the DOE’s past abuse of power in putting people at risk
without their informed consent.
Richardson first announced his agency’s shift in tack last July, when
he said that President Clinton would seek to establish a federal
compensation program for sick Energy Department employees. As part of
an interagency effort convened by Clinton, the DOE compiled recent
health studies (both published and unpublished) of its employees.
All told, workers at 14 DOE facilities were found to have increased
risks of death from various cancers and nonmalignant diseases after
exposure to radiation and other substances. Some of the studies also
supported the controversial 1976 findings of Thomas Mancuso, Alice
Stewart and George Kneale, who documented a tenfold increase in
radiation-caused cancer risks in employees at the Hanford nuclear
reservation in Washington state.
Since the days of radium’s discovery by Marie Curie, Americans
have struggled with the dangerous health effects of atomic energy.
Curie’s own denial of radiation dangers is emblematic of the legacy
we now face as America’s long romance with the atom slowly degrades
into a bad memory that won’t fade away. The once-dynamic and
sprawling federal nuclear weapons industry and its civilian
counterpart are phasing down, leaving behind serious environmental and
health issues that will need to be addressed for centuries to come.
The DOE’s long-standing indifference to sick workers originated in
the Cold War culture of isolation and secrecy, wherein sick workers
who filed claims were looked upon as threats to the nation’s goal of
nuclear deterrence.
The DOE relies on contractors to perform about 90 percent of its
work, including the day-to-day operation of its nuclear plants, and
to guarantee a safe working environment. But the agency has
perpetuated its disturbing record by blocking any outside regulation
of worker safety. No other federal entity engaged in hazardous
activities has been permitted to maintain such sweeping
self-policing powers, without outside accountability. As a result,
the DOE still does not have a meaningful worker safety regulatory
regime in place.
And until 1988, DOE contractors were shielded from any criminal and
legal liability for the extraordinary dangers of nuclear production,
with the U.S. government picking up the tab for any lawsuits brought
against them, even for criminal acts of willful negligence. Legal
protections afforded to contractors were used to block compensation
of sick workers in workplace-exposure lawsuits.
In the not-so-distant past, the DOE even went to illegal extremes to
shield itself from worker suits. In the early 1980s, it was
discovered that the state of Nevada had had a secret agreement with
the DOE and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, dating
back to the 1950s that allowed the agencies to determine radiation
compensation claims filed by Nevada test site workers or their
survivors. In 1984, a federal appeals court ruled that the program
was illegal. This aggressive policy to avoid legal liability for
worker compensation at all costs persists, despite the best efforts
by a succession of energy secretaries to change it.
For instance, on May 14, 1997, an explosion occurred at Hanford, exposing 11 workers to
dangerous materials. They suffered blistering, hearing loss, coughing
fits and headaches minutes after being marched outside under the
toxic explosion’s plume. Mandatory equipment to test for radiological
exposure, such as nasal swabs and
urine-testing equipment, suddenly disappeared when it was most
needed. The workers were told to drive themselves to the hospital,
but after consulting with Hanford officials, physicians refused to
perform blood and urine testing. The workers were then sent home in
their contaminated clothing. Today, many are still sick and can’t
return to work.
Only after direct intervention that year by then-Energy Secretary Federico
Peqa did the DOE and its Washington contractor grudgingly agree,
after lengthy delays, to fund limited independent medical tests. But
after Peqa’s departure from the department, the Hanford victims were
effectively ignored, their case buried in bureaucratic mire. The only
public acknowledgment of negligence the victims
received was an indirect apology on television by the contractor’s
president — after a scathing report by the state was released.
In recent years, workplace safety has steadily decreased at several
DOE sites. The skilled and qualified personnel needed to ensure safe
storage and processing of nuclear materials are rapidly graying.
“Some sites are in danger of losing this expertise through retirement
and have not implemented provisions to maintain the necessary
knowledge base,” stated a September 1998 DOE
oversight report. More recently, in a stinging professional dissent
in February, a senior nuclear weapons safety official noted: “The
department delegated safety to those running the hazardous
operations. The tradition of ‘leave it to those who know best’
colored and compromised” safety at
the DOE’s nuclear facilities.
Between 1991 and 1999, there were at least 18 incidents at a
high-level radioactive-waste incineration facility at the DOE’s Idaho
National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory in which workers
were exposed to excessive levels of radiation, a separate September
1998 report noted. “Workplace safety at INEEL has deteriorated since
1994 … corrective action plans found that deficiencies were not
resolved and that lessons learned from previous accidents were not
being effectively applied … One-fifth of all INEEL occurrences in
1997 were related to radiation protection (personnel contamination),”
the report read.
From the
1940s to the present, the senior ranks of the DOE and its
predecessors were well aware of continuing problems of exposure at
nuclear weapons sites across the country. But they chose to suppress
this information and avoid taking necessary protective measures.
According to once-classified records, from the late ’40s
through the ’60s, the leadership of the AEC was told on several
occasions that numerous workers had been exposed at federal nuclear
sites in New Mexico, Washington, New York, Ohio, Colorado and
Tennessee. In some instances, workers showed current medical evidence
of harm.
In 1951, the AEC’s Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine was
told that exposure to radiation at AEC plants was “a very serious
health problem. This problem is present in other AEC manufacturing
plants and will be important in new installations not only from the
standpoint of real injury but because of the extreme difficulty of
defense in cases of litigation.”
The same year, after repeated efforts to persuade the AEC to conduct
radiation-related cancer studies, the advisory committee’s vice
chairman, Ernest Goodpasture, wrote to AEC Chairman Gordon Dean,
stating, “Cancer is a significant industrial hazard of the atomic
energy business … The committee recommends the cancer program be
pursued as a humanitarian duty to the nation.”
His plea went unheeded, and the AEC decided not to inform workers of
their exposure or to take any medically protective action because,
according to a 1960 memo uncovered at a Paducah, Ky., facility, the
release of such information “is reflected in an increase in insurance
claims, increased difficulty in labor relations and adverse public
sentiment.”
The recent disclosure by the Washington
Post of lax working conditions at the DOE’s
plant in Paducah demonstrates that this pattern of behavior has not
changed much. For decades, Paducah workers were not told they were
being exposed to dangerous radioisotopes such as plutonium-239,
neptunium-237 and technetium-99. The
government and its contractors chose not to tell them
because they feared the workers would seek
compensation for harm to health and the unions would
demand hazardous-duty pay. In February, the
Post revealed that an unknown number of nuclear
weapons components are buried and stored at
Paducah, posing additional risks to workers there.
From the dawn of the nuclear age, researchers
recognized that the risks posed to nuclear weapons
workers over time were poorly understood.
Robert Stone, head of the health division of the
Manhattan Project, noted shortly after World War II
that worker radiation protection … rested on rather
poor experimental evidence.” He concluded,
“The whole clinical study of the personnel is one vast
experiment. Never before has so large a
collection of individuals been exposed to so much
irradiation.”
Beginning in the mid-1970s, studies of DOE
workers engendered considerable controversy, in
large part because of concerns over the DOE’s
conflict of interest as an employer. The person who
sparked the controversy was Mancuso, a
quiet, unassuming researcher. The Atomic Energy
Commission approached Mancuso in 1964 to
study the potential long-term health impact on
workers at several government nuclear
facilities. As an AEC advisor described it, “Much of the
motivation for starting this study arose from
the ‘political need’ for assurance that AEC employees
were not suffering harmful effects.”
But instead of reducing pressures in the AEC,
the research Mancuso did with Stewart and
Kneale only exacerbated matters.
Indeed, the DOE, the AEC’s successor, expressed its
ingratitude for their groundbreaking work by
terminating their research contract.
In 1990, the DOE was forced by Congress to
turn over data from other DOE sites to Stewart, who
had, along with her colleagues, continued the
research with independent funding. The same year,
also as a result of congressional pressure
and a growing lack of public trust, the DOE entered into a
formal agreement with the Department of
Health and Human Services to manage and conduct DOE
worker health studies. Yet these studies have
been obscured from public attention, largely because
the controversy within the DOE had died down.
As the DOE confronts its nuclear legacy, the
pattern established by Curie is repeating itself.
First, the early warning signs appear — as
when young journalist Florence Pfaltzgraph in 1926 told
Curie about the young women at a radium plant
in Essex, N.J., who were dying from necrosis of
the jaw after blithely ingesting deadly
amounts of radium, which their managers had told them
would add to their vitality.
Today, the signs are still either ignored or
attacked as not being credible. Then
official disbelief sets in until the evidence
becomes overwhelming. (Curie herself refused to accept
that radiation had anything to do with the
New Jersey tragedies, only to die herself less than a
decade later of bone marrow cancer.) By the
time officials acknowledge the problem, it’s too late.
Even though the American victims of the Cold
War have a powerful supporter in Energy Secretary
Richardson, he will soon be gone, perhaps
even before the end of the Clinton adminstration. In his wake, many
questions will remain: Will the next energy secretary be as committed
as Richardson to helping the sick workers? Even if Congress enacts
compensation legislation this year, will it be enough? And will
Congress be willing to continue the program next year? If the DOE is
allowed to decide on compensation, will sick workers get as much
priority in the next administration as nuclear weapons production and
environmental cleanup? What form of justice,
if any, will America’s Cold War veterans ultimately
get?
Live by the leak — die by the leak. That might serve as the epitaph for Notra Trulock’s brief jaunt across the public stage during the first half of this year. For months, Trulock, a high-ranking Energy Department counterintelligence operative, stood as a pillar of the far-flung edifice of scandals and pseudo-scandals which have buzzed around the Clinton administration’s China policy since the end of 1996.
Those scandals — in case you haven’t read a newspaper in the last couple years — ran the gamut from alleged attempts to take money from Chinese nationals and launder it into the 1996 Clinton-Gore reelection campaign; to lax controls over missile technology exports to China; to espionage at the nation’s prized nuclear weapons research laboratories.
Some of the country’s more feverish commentators wove each of these allegations together into a single grand meta-scandal which had the Clinton administration passing the Chinese our dearest national secrets out of some uncertain mix of greed and ideological sympathy. But whatever one made of this melange of accusations, there was one thing almost everyone seemed to agree on: that Trulock had uncovered evidence that an American nuclear weapons scientist named Wen Ho Lee had passed secrets to the Chinese, and that the administration had let years go by without giving the matter any serious attention.
Trulock frequently exaggerated the magnitude of his findings. (In one outburst of self-promotion he told “Meet the Press’” Tim Russert that he believed the espionage he had uncovered was potentially “on a magnitude equal to the Rosenbergs-Fuchs compromise of the Manhattan Project information.”) But even Bill Richardson, Clinton’s energy secretary, rewarded Trulock with a $10,000 bonus for his doggedness and instituted a raft of measures meant to tighten up security at the nation’s weapons labs.
But in recent weeks everything has changed. After an inspector general’s report failed to confirm Trulock’s central allegations about an administration attempt to cover up his findings about Lee, he abruptly resigned his job. But even before his resignation, the fingers of accusation, which were so recently pointing at Lee, were pointing at Trulock. A host of named and unnamed critics had begun to accuse him of focusing on Wen Ho Lee because of his ethnicity. (Lee is a Taiwan-born American citizen.)
And as more and more outside reviews failed to confirm Trulock’s basic contentions, his charges and claims became more intense and dramatic. He scolded former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H., chairman of the president’s National Security Review Board, which issued a report questioning the extent of any loss of secrets due to espionage and criticized Trulock’s team for focusing so exclusively on Lee. Rudman shot back at Trulock, skewering him for what he called Trulock’s “wildly inaccurate assertions and reckless accusations.”
But the final blow to Trulock’s quickly diminishing credibility came not from one of his growing chorus of detractors, but from Trulock himself. As the storm grew around him, he posted a message of thanks and support to the members of the ultra-conservative Free Republic chat site. (For those not familiar with the site’s political stance, Free Republic has co-sponsored various anti-Clinton rallies, backed by the dean of Clinton conspiracy theorists, Larry Klayman.) “During some of the most trying times,” he told loyal Freepers, “FR has been a source of moral support.”
The denizens of Free Republic are so resolutely wacky — even Lucianne Goldberg and Matt Drudge abandoned the site out of frustration with its extreme stands — and so thoroughly anti-Clinton that his posting almost certainly lost Trulock his last thread of credibility as a dedicated civil servant simply trying to get at the truth. But the end of the story is not simply Trulock’s exposure as some sort of right-wing nut bent on destroying the president. The reality is both more complex and more revealing.
Few observers who have watched the case closely believe that Trulock came to his work with any strong ideological or political agenda. The man himself is hard to shoehorn into the standard, but all too familiar, model of a Clinton hater. His accusations were often reckless, particularly toward the end. And he tended to see dark motives where others might simply have found inattention or laxity. But he supported Secretary Richardson’s plans to toughen up security at the agency, for instance, which one would not expect from someone simply interested in doing political damage to the administration. And Trulock often qualified his allegations in ways that his more feverish congressional supporters never did.
Yet by the end of his tenure at the Energy Department, Trulock was painting an ever-widening picture of conspiracy and coverup. Close observers say he got caught up in the intense cross-fire between the Clinton administration and congressional Republicans. “People underestimate what happens when you get attacked like that,” says Walter Pincus, the Washington Post reporter who’s written extensively on the Trulock story. “He became radicalized. It’s the way this city works. Once he gets attacked then he gets defended by the hard right. It happens to all sorts of people. He’s not the first guy to get caught up in the media hype. He was a decent bureaucrat. But he got caught up in the politics.”
Most observers contacted by Salon News agreed with some variant of Pincus’ account — that Trulock found himself ignored or attacked by the administration and its defenders, embraced by the far right, and was grateful for its “moral support,” as he wrote in Free Republic. And all agreed that the process was circular and self-reinforcing. The administration’s congressional opponents latched on to Trulock’s most damaging and dramatic claims and hurled them at the White House. This led to counter-blasts from the administration, which in turn drove Trulock even further into the arms of the right-wingers who had flocked to his cause.
Yet whatever we make of Trulock, the heart of this story is really about the culpability of congressional Republicans and much of the national media in turning this story into a political firestorm. The firestorm did not ignite out of thin air; it was carefully cultivated. Ever since the end of the last decade, when the Republican political coalition began to crumble in response to the end of the Cold War, the party’s older, ultra-conservative and isolationist impulses have reasserted themselves with a vengeance. And nowhere has this been more apparent than in the increasingly shrill and angry rhetoric the party aims at China. With China’s mix of communism, resistance to missionary Christianity and widespread use of abortion, the China issue strokes all the exposed nerve endings of the conservative body politic.
This impulse from the right has been joined by many members of the GOP’s foreign policy establishment who see U.S.-China confrontation as a way to resurrect the Republican-friendly Cold War politics that prevailed before 1989. It’s not that there is nothing about China to be criticized or that our relations with the Chinese do not present a significant foreign policy challenge for the United States. But the larger context of these dark impulses has remained largely unexplored in the various China-related stories filling newspapers in recent years.
There is an odd symmetry at work here, because a similar set of circumstances afflicted our politics in the early years of the Cold War when congressional Republicans made hay with the notorious rallying cry of “who lost China?” Then as now, congressional Republicans were not content with disagreements over policy but rather indulged their appetite for wild-eyed charges about a Democratic administration selling out the United States to the communists or foolishly leaving the country vulnerable to some imminent Chinese attack. What is so disappointing is that the Washington political press broadcast the charges with so little sense of these rather transparent parallels.
The reality behind the scandal turns out to be both less sinister and more complex than the comic-book version that blanketed the airwaves last spring. Few doubt that the Chinese made some use of American technological specifications in making a breakthrough in the miniaturization of their warheads. What is less clear is whether they got that information from a spy, or whether they got it from artfully gleaning from information sources in the public domain.
One of the most telling ironies is that perhaps the best article written to date on this whole complex subject was by William Broad in the New York Times Sept. 7. What makes this ironic, and not simply praiseworthy, is that Broad covered much of the same ground Times reporter Jeff Gerth did in “breaking” the Trulock-Wen Ho Lee story earlier this year — but without all the breathless detail and implication of scandal and national-security disaster.
Broad’s article reported that experts are not at all certain whether the Chinese achieved their success in warhead miniaturization by espionage, hard work or some mix of the two; that the common wisdom of a few months ago alleging “espionage” probably placed far too much emphasis on the Los Alamos Laboratory and on Wen Ho Lee in particular; and that even the extent of the damage to national security may have been greatly overstated. It put the Times in the odd position of correcting the mistakes, rushes-to-judgment and misapprehensions that the paper itself disseminated in the first place.
That hasn’t been missed by observers who questioned Gerth’s reporting on the Trulock story from the outset. “Broad reinterviewed all of [Gerth's] sources,” New York Daily News columnist Lars-Erik Nelson says. “You don’t do that to a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter unless you have real doubts, unless you think he’s made a major mistake.”
The unraveling Chinese spy scandal has revealed once again that too many members of our elite political press have ferocity and doggedness in abundance without the historical consciousness or political acumen to make sense of what they report. From start to finish, the Trulock-Wen Ho Lee affair now looks like a case wherein last year’s Lewinsky-style “print it first, think it through later” reporting got applied to the real-life world of foreign policy and national security. Only in this case the stakes are much higher.
Diplomats are people who are sent abroad to lie for their country. The joy of being U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is that instead of lying in some far-off foreign field, you can lie at home, and make the TV chat shows as well. We can be sure that Richard Holbrooke will take full advantage of any such opportunity — if the Senate finally confirms his position next week, after a year-long holdup by Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., got resolved only to be succeeded by the stonewalling of Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
We can also be sure that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright knows it too, since that is how she got her present position. The U.N. ambassadorship is a cabinet post with a highly visible domestic presence. Secretaries of state often have problems with U.N. ambassadors cleverer and more telegenic than themselves. James Baker ditched the highly effective and admired Tom Pickering for that reason, and he was not even in the cabinet. Albright consistently tried to dampen Bill Richardson’s enthusiasm for television appearances while he was U.N. ambassador, officially to make sure that the message was coherent — but mostly for fear of being overshadowed.
In the case of Holbrooke, Albright’s fears are soundly based. He is simply several leagues above her — and a publicity hound to boot. Leaving a well-compensated job with Credit Suisse to become a civil servant implies some considerable degree of ambition: Albright will be lucky to see out the rest of the Clinton term. There is every expectation that Holbrooke will follow in her footsteps, especially if Al Gore is elected.
But while Helms, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, has been converted to support Holbrooke, Grassley has been threatening to hold up his appointment unless the State Department lifts the suspension of Linda Shenwick. You might ask, Linda who? She is a perfect symbol of why even America’s best friends roll their eyes when Congress gets involved in foreign policy. Shenwick for many years has been the eyes, ears and oh-so-loud mouth of Jesse Helms at the United Nations.
She is less a whistle-blower, as Grassley thinks, and more a stoolie for the senatorial right. Back in 1987, when she was in charge of U.N. mission housing, she was fingered by GOP representatives on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for buying a plush New York condo with her government housing subsidy. “It’s absolutely improper,” one of the GOP aides told the New York Post at the time. Shortly afterwards, she was denouncing the United Nations — and the U.S. mission to the United Nations — on a regular basis.
Whatever policy the White House, the State Department or the ambassador had, Shenwick only took instructions from Helms and his chum, former South Dakota Republican Sen. Larry Pressler. They let it be known that anyone who interfered with her tenure in any way would find it very difficult to take up an ambassadorship (or, by implication, secretary of stateship).
Under their patronage, she was soon advanced way beyond her abilities — at least according to diplomatic colleagues. Albright, when U.N. ambassador, wined, dined and canvassed other U.N. envoys to get Shenwick elected to the crucial U.N. budget committee. It was not because the future secretary of state loved her. On the contrary, it was because she wanted to be the future secretary of state, and was well aware that Helms wanted Shenwick there.
Once on the committee, she treated her colleagues to pointless diatribes, like the time that she spent a day haranguing about the cost of haircuts for the peacekeepers on the Iraqi border. Suspicions about the inspiration for her invective, one U.N. source said, were confirmed when records from her U.N. phone revealed that most of the calls that day were to the Foreign Relations Committee, or to Pressler’s office.
Her erratic behavior, and her insistence on bypassing U.S. mission and State Department staff, left her with no friends in the U.S. mission, and her distinctive injection of congressional ignorance and arrogance into diplomacy had even America’s best friends complaining about her tirades. As a result, European diplomats pledged en masse that they would not support her for another term on the budget committee. She was moved into administration but clearly kept her contacts on Capitol Hill.
Flushed with the success of Kosovo, someone in State finally had the courage to suspend her June 18 for “insubordination,” apparently a reference to her continual contacts with congressional aides behind the back of the mission. Now Sen. Grassley proposes to leave the United States without an ambassador to force the State Department to take back the United Nations’ least-popular diplomat.
It has been embarrassing for Washington not to have had an ambassador for such an eventful year. It’s likely that Kosovo rescued Holbrooke’s nomination from the jaws of Jesse Helms’ opposition, and made his Balkans experience seem that much more crucial to the post.
Most diplomats represent their government’s policy; they do not shape it. However, Holbrooke’s 1995 Dayton experience promoted him into the statesman class, a considerable cut above the suave messenger-boy role so many ambassadors played in the past. Many of the diplomats canvassed at the United Nations have no doubt that he can be very effective when the full faith and credit of U.S. foreign policy is behind him — but in recent years that is about as often as a transit to Venus.
Ambassador Sir John Weston, who returned to Britain just after Holbrooke’s nomination was announced, described him as “one of the life forces in the world of the foreign-policy professionals.” However, he added: “It’s important to listen to what others have to say, and be seen to do so. Very often that is the secret of getting things done in the United Nations. I have no doubt that a person of Dick Holbrooke’s political experience will understand that very quickly,” he said, a diplomatically oblique way of casting doubt on Holbrooke’s capacity to learn to listen.
Others are more explicit in their doubts about both his ethics and effectiveness. For example, in his negotiations in 1997 as special representative on Cyprus, he wanted the European Union to admit Turkey — and did not seem to understand that Europe would not admit a country that had the death penalty, imprisoned journalists and bombed Kurds just because it suited Washington’s Middle-East policy.
Even before then, as President Jimmy Carter’s assistant secretary of state for Asia and the Pacific, he loyally smoothed over the diplomatic ruffles as South Korean troops officially under U.S. command massacred thousands of protestors in the city of Kwangju in 1980. And while he would likely be a tough negotiator now with the Indonesians, in Carter’s good old days he covered for Suharto as the Indonesian military killed a far higher proportion of the East Timorese population than Milosevic did of the Kosovars.
While one can excuse his behavior in the Carter administration as simply carrying out orders, in the Balkans he helped shape policy. One can hardly regard his negotiations with Slobodan Milosevic as a success, either. Convinced that the Serbian leader was a man he could do business with, Holbrooke produced the awesome mutation of the Dayton settlement that allowed the Serbs to keep their ethnically cleansed Bosnian gains, and even to regain some territory they had just lost to the Bosnian and Croatian armies. And as for Kosovo, he would be better off deleting from his risumi any mention of the deal he brokered with Milosevic last October, although to be fair, it was far from clear just how big a stick he had behind his back at the time.
Albright can take some considerable comfort from the fact that her rival will be in a very hot seat. He will arrive at the United Nations just as the world body is charged with building peace in the desert that is now Kosovo. Another U.N. headache is the chronic controversy over his nation’s back dues. Parallel to Holbrooke’s confirmation hearings, the Senate passed a bill to pay U.N. appropriations that unilaterally wipes out a third of the past-due amount, and decided that future payments be reduced without negotiations with other U.N. members — members who have made it plain that they will not accept any such deal.
The only consolation is that as well as the usual loony-tunes riders the Senate added — for example, that the United Nations promises not to take over the U.S. in the near future — Rep. Chris Smith in the House will add his now-traditional amendment cutting international family-planning funds. That means Clinton will veto the bill, which could put the United States over two years in arrears in its U.N. dues. So Holbrooke could find himself in the embarrassing position of having a veto in the Security Council, but no vote in the General Assembly — and no money to pay for the U.N. role in Kosovo that is essential to boost Gore’s candidacy, which may hinge on his ability to play vice-victorious warlord.
So will tough-guy Holbrooke stand up to Congress, get the money for the United Nations and rescue American diplomacy from its present mess? Not if the grovel-fest of his confirmation hearings is any indication. Tamed and tutored by the year-long wait to get this far, he repeated and affirmed every fatuous prejudice of his know-nothing senatorial inquisitors. Of course he is a diplomat, with political ambitions, so it is not impossible that he may not have been sincere in his sentiments.
He will now have to choose. If he is going to be effective at the United Nations, the other ambassadors there will expect him to be more closely tied to reality than to the congressmen who think that making the Statue of Liberty a UNESCO world heritage site is a U.N. land-grab. If he is not, then we can expect more fiascoes like Rwanda and the Balkans, where firm, multilateral action at the beginning would have prevented huge bloodshed for the locals and heavy financial costs for the United States later.
Of the many ironies apparent in the flap over China’s nuclear spying, none is so glaring as the government’s plans to rely more heavily on lie detectors to root out future moles — even though Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese-American scientist suspected of supplying nuclear weapons secrets to Beijing, passed a polygraph test in November 1998.
A close second on the irony-meter is official Washington’s professed alarm over Beijing’s espionage, when it was the CIA’s own spy inside China who first showed up with evidence that U.S. nuclear arms laboratories may have been penetrated. In yet another twist, the CIA eventually decided that its Chinese spy was actually a double agent under Beijing’s control.
Despite months of investigation and partisan recriminations over who’s responsible for the alleged success of Chinese espionage, which extends over four administrations reaching back to Jimmy Carter, no one has yet been arrested. Only one outcome is already clear: Untold millions of dollars are going to be spent to bolster security at government arms labs — well after China has already acquired U.S. weapons designs.
Among the measures will be a dramatic expansion of employee polygraph tests, even though their reliability has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years.
Wen Ho Lee was not the only alleged spy to pass a lie detector test. Other notorious moles who beat the machine include Aldrich Ames and Larry Wu-Tai Chin, another Chinese American spy. Ames was Moscow’s agent inside the CIA for eight years, until he was caught in 1995. Larry Chin, a 20-year intelligence analyst, spied for Beijing for untold decades until he was arrested in 1985. Both, as well as Wen Ho Lee, first passed, and then eventually failed polygraphs, but only after mountains of other evidence had been compiled against them. Chin committed suicide in jail before he was tried. Scores of the CIA’s Cuban agents, who turned out to be really working for Fidel Castro, also fooled U.S. government polygraphers for years. The same happened with CIA spies dispatched to the Soviet Union and North Vietnam. In most cases they were given, and passed, polygraph tests.
“Well, they don’t work,” Ames told retired Sen. Dennis Deconcini, D-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. An FBI polygrapher once told a scientific conference he could teach his teenage son how to beat the machine “in a few minutes.”
Wen Ho Lee’s case seems to come right out of the pages of John Le Carre. In 1978 the diminutive China-born scientist was hired by the Los Alamos Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was born in 1945. Sometime in the early 1980s, according to reports, he began helping the FBI on at least one case of suspected espionage. In 1987 Lee’s wife, Sylvia, a secretary at Los Alamos, herself became an informant for the FBI, providing information on visiting Chinese delegations. During this time her husband traveled to China to give scientific lectures on U.S. arms developments.
The FBI, meanwhile, had suspected that U.S. nuclear warhead secrets were leaking from Los Alamos for a while. In 1997 it began to zero in on Lee, and asked the Justice Department for permission to wiretap Lee, but was rebuffed. In November 1998 Lee was given, and judged to have passed, a polygraph examination. Subsequently, counterintelligence agents got more information on Lee and in February 1999, when he was polygraphed again, he failed.
Despite mixed results in this and other high-profile cases, the U.S. Senate Defense Authorization Bill includes funds for expanding polygraph tests to 20,000 employees of the Department of Energy, where the China spying flap is centered.
Responding to the exploding China spy scare, C. Bruce Tarter, Director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory of the University of California, on May 5 told Congress that its plans to protect itself from future threats would “focus primarily on the need to expand the DOE’s current polygraph program …”
This despite Senate testimony from a senior FBI scientist that the tests were virtually no better than tea leaves, Ouija boards, and witchcraft in ferreting out spies. The tests have “a complete lack of validity,” testified Supervisory Special Agent Drew C. Richardson. The government’s reliance on them may actually endanger national security, he said.
“I believe that there is virtually no probability of catching a spy with the use of polygraph screening techniques,” Richardson, a Ph.D. physiologist, testified. “To the extent that we place any confidence in the results of polygraph screening, and as a consequence shortchange traditional security vetting techniques, I think our national security is severely jeopardized,” he added.
For the first time, the views of Richardson and other polygraph skeptics in the scientific community are being heard. Last week the Senate Intelligence Committee asked the FBI and CIA to “come up with alternatives to polygraph testing” within 90 days, according to committee spokesman Bill Duhnkey.
“Given the potential unreliability of the polygraph system, the committee believes the alternatives to the polygraph should be explored,” the committee reported on May 11.
“I don’t think they know yet what the alternatives are,” said a government scientist who follows the issue closely. “They just know the polygraph is screwed up.” The committee’s directive, however, won’t affect the DOE’s plans to expand its reliance on polygraphs.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a severe critic of FBI laboratory practices, has also been examining reported abuses in the FBI’s polygraph screening program for employee applicants, with an eye toward hearings.
Polygraph alternatives include full background checks of employees and closer monitoring of travel and spending habits. An FBI study of convicted espionage felons, called Project Shadow, also recommended co-workers take note of dramatic personality changes in their colleagues, due to divorce or being passed over for promotion. Better control of classified information is also a more effective way to reduce vulnerability to spies than polygraph tests, and specialists say agencies must work harder to limit access to secrets to employees to with a genuine need to know. Ironically, many security experts say the government should drastically curtail the number of documents it classifies, to make sure harmless information isn’t being treated with the time-consuming care that true secrets deserve.
Counterintelligence agents were appalled by the loose security at Los Alamos and other labs, according to reports, with classified papers strewn about desks and uncleared visitors frequenting the installation.
“Some feel Wen Ho Lee was not guilty of anything, that he’s a scapegoat for a sloppy environment, and that various minor security allegations were trumped up against him,” said a government agent whose expertise is unchallenged. “The polygraph really didn’t support anything one way or another.” While his take on Lee’s culpability could not be corroborated, it was a sign that there is skepticism about the Lee case even within the security community.
Meanwhile, the difficulty of nailing moles with the polygraph is compounded when foreign nationals are involved, experts agree. The emotional pull of the homeland tends to skew answers to certain questions.
“You don’t ask an ethnic: Are you loyal to a government other than the United States?” a retired deputy chief of counterintelligence for the FBI told Salon. “In fact, that’s one the agency [CIA] used to ask. Most ethnics will flunk that, because if they’re first-generation ethnics, they have ties to the homeland, even if they’ve fled. The question shouldn’t be if they’re loyal to a country, but if they’re working for another country’s government.”
Further complicating the security challenge is the fact that Chinese-American scientists may not know they are helping Beijing’s spies when they hand over scientific papers. Chinese intelligence also sends “sleeper agents” to the United States, such as college students, where they may remain dormant for years before being activated, a CIA source said.
Polygraphs can also boomerang on innocent employees, tie an agency’s security personnel in knots, and end up giving employers a legal and public relations headache. As Salon reported exclusively last June, a 28-year-old CIA lawyer named Adam Ciralsky was put on paid leave last year after flunking an agency polygraph even though he had passed three previous tests. His lawyer, former Justice Department Nazi hunter Neal Sher, is preparing a suit against the CIA.
Scientists outside the close-knit brotherhood of polygraph operators say the only way a “lie detector” can be completely reliable is when a suspect is being interrogated about information only he and the investigators could know — the combination to a safe, say, or a closely held code word.
Meanwhile, no one is yet predicting the fate of Wen Ho Lee, the figure at the center of the scandal, who was suspended from his job at Los Alamos after classified documents were found in his private computer files. He has not been charged with anything.
In all the hue and cry over allegations in the Cox Report, it has largely gone unnoticed that evidence of Beijing’s theft of U.S. nuclear secrets came in the form of a Chinese document that fell into the hands of the CIA. According to a New York Times account, the document was in a “suitcase” full of material handed over by a Chinese spy who “walked into the CIA’s arms” in Taiwan. Later, however, the man was judged to be under the control of Beijing. Puzzled CIA experts don’t know what to make of the incident, but they still regard the document as genuine.
In yet another irony relevant to the case, little notice was taken recently of a security violation similar to Lee’s by one of the CIA’s own past chiefs. Agents making a routine inspection discovered the home computers of former CIA Director John M. Deutch filled with classified documents that he was unauthorized to possess. A referral was made to the Justice Department, which declined to prosecute.
Closer to home, the Washington Post reported recently that the CIA itself had unloaded scores of its own laptops for sale — while they were still filled with CIA documents. One of the newspaper’s columnists is running a tongue-in-cheek contest for readers to guess what was in the files.
The current Chinese espionage controversy is “the most alarming nuclear espionage scandal in nearly 50 years, certainly since the Rosenbergs,” says CNN’s Lou Dobbs. What makes it similar to the “Soviet espionage of the 1940s,” according to arch-conservative columnist Phyllis Schlafly, “is the cover-up by the administration.” This avalanche of outrage was triggered on March 6, when New York Times staff writers Jeff Gerth and James Risen revealed that in the mid-1980s, China obtained U.S. technology that allows nuclear warheads to be miniaturized down to not much bigger than a large television set. But the fat really hit the fire two days later when Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced the firing of Los Alamos weapons designer Wen Ho Lee, the Taiwan-born Chinese-American scientist believed to be at the center of the espionage. The days that followed have brought a steady chorus of calls for congressional investigations, for the resignation of National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and for a new get-tough policy with China.
But before heading to the bomb shelters to wait for Chinese missiles to rain down upon us, it’s worth getting some political perspective on the controversy. The furor over Chinese espionage has more to do with right-wing nostalgia for the Cold War and U.S. domestic politics than it has to do with threats to American national security.
Ever since 1994, when conservative Republicans took over Congress, hostility to China on the American right has grown apace. Under pressure from Republicans, President Clinton approved issuing a visa to the president of Taiwan, which China considers a rebellious province — a move that roiled U.S.-Chinese relations for several years. More recently, Republicans have accused the Chinese of posing all manner of threats to the United States, including peddling AK-47s to American street gangs. And just this week, one of the Republican Party’s most vitriolic critics of China, GOP presidential candidate Gary Bauer, said that “America’s China policy must recognize the Cold War posture of the current Chinese regime.”
Why are Republicans so trigger-happy when it comes to China? Several reasons — the first of which is baldly political. Nothing has done more to damage the unity of political conservatism than the end of the Cold War. The robust 1990s economy, the rise of the fractious religious right and the increasingly centrist position of the Democratic Party have each played a role in fomenting the divisions that bedevil today’s GOP. But none is so important as the end of the Cold War. With so many problems finding a unifying agenda on domestic issues, Republicans are looking to China to provide the party with a solid national defense issue in 2000. And a new Cold War would help Republicans in innumerable ways.
As GOP foreign policy guru Richard Kagan, himself one of the China-hawks, recently put it, “China is going to be a big issue in this campaign, including the primary campaign. It’s a core grass-roots issue for Republicans. When a candidate goes before a conservative audience, China is an applause line.” And Kagan’s right. Lamar Alexander — once known as a GOP moderate until he decided he wanted to be president — was the first out of the gates calling on National Security Advisor Berger to resign. He was followed by almost every other candidate for the Republican nomination. And now the whole question of China has turned into a political football with a host of second-tier candidates trying to bait GOP pacesetter George W. Bush into ending his silence on the China question.
None of this is meant to imply that China does not represent a serious foreign policy challenge to the United States or that the theft of nuclear weapons technology has not compromised U.S. national security. There is some debate about how much the Chinese would have been aided by the miniaturization technology allegedly stolen from Los Alamos. But even many of those who are sympathetic to Clinton administration foreign policy concede that the technology transfer “probably was fairly serious.”
Lawrence Korb, a foreign affairs expert who is now director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Salon on Friday, that if the allegations are true, “It’s probably the most serious violation of the ground rules we’ve been working under with the Chinese” in recent years. Particularly in the 1980s, when China was still a strategic ally vis-à-vis Russia, the United States worked with the Chinese military in a variety of ways to improve their capabilities. And, given the more contentious relations between the two countries today, argues Korb, one would imagine they would be even more aggressive in seeking to acquire American technology today.
But, as many of the same experts point out, it is precisely because China is such an important foreign policy issue that it is so important not to let our policy toward the Chinese be hijacked by a bunch of hysterical right-wingers. “What I am afraid of,” says Korb, “is that this gets politicized. This may be one of those incidents that will cause us to overreact and do the wrong thing. [You've got] those conservatives who want to spend more on the military, those who want to attack Clinton and so on. [These fears about China] could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nations do this [spying]. It’s important. But it’s not the end of the world.”
Of course, Democrats can’t claim innocence on the issue of politicizing American foreign policy with China. The Bush administration followed much the same policy on China as the Clinton administration has done over the last five years and, Democrats — including Bill Clinton in 1991 and ’92 — criticized them for it mercilessly.
But there’s more to the Republicans’ current fascination with China than just politics — or at least more than just politics so cynically conceived. The China question holds a unique emotional intensity for conservatives. After the so-called Chinagate scandal broke in 1997, Newt Gingrich charged that President Clinton “had approved turning over missile secrets to the Chinese.” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., chairman of the Space and Aeronautics subcommittee, claimed the president “betrayed the interests of our country.” And Rep. Charlie Norwood of Georgia went so far as to charge that Clinton was “guilty of high treason.”
This right-wing fascination with China has a long history. For decades, the interwoven issues of China, communism and Christianity have touched upon the most erogenous zones in the conservative body politic. It’s no accident that the most notorious right-wing organization of the second half of the 20th century, the John Birch Society, took its name from a Christian missionary turned U.S. intelligence officer who was killed in China after allegedly being sold out by a U.S. government intent on coddling Chinese Communists. And while the Red Scare of the early 1950s focused principally on U.S.-Soviet relations, it was touched off by the Communist victory in China and the subsequent demagoguery over “Who lost China?”
The 1990s has witnessed a stark replay of the emotions and agendas tied to the first scare over communist Chinese, or as many conservatives have once again come to call them, “Chi-coms.” While the Chinese government has a notorious record on human rights, there is little denying that it is a vastly more open country than it was 25 years ago. Looked at close-up, much of the intensity of conservative concern about human rights in China turns out to focus on the oppression of Chinese Christians and the admittedly egregious Chinese system of state-controlled family planning. Every controversy over U.S.-China policy has been laced with accusations that the current administration has either foolishly or treasonously sold out American interests to the Chinese — a rank rehashing of half-century-old accusations that Democrats are soft on communism, or worse.
The reality is that Chinese military strength is minor compared to the military power of the United States. But there is every reason to think that China will become a major power in the 21st century. The size of its population, its geopolitical position, the strength of its economy and, yes, its military all point in that direction. The question — as the Clinton administration and most of the saner foreign policy minds have conceived it — is how to manage China’s entry into great power status on the best possible terms. Will China be a belligerent and embittered power like Germany was in the first half of this century, or a relatively responsible power willing to play a constructive role in maintaining regional peace, reducing weapons proliferation and helping to provide a climate amenable to economic prosperity? The Clinton administration approach to insuring the latter course, as Council on Foreign Relations’ China expert Liz Economy explains it, has been to “draw China into a web of international organizations and institutions.”
Whether the Clinton administration has succeeded in that approach is a matter for debate, and many reasonable observers give the administration less than favorable reviews. But in the current feverish response to Chinese nuclear espionage (which all parties agree actually occurred while Reagan was president; the Clinton administration is accused of covering up the scandal for political reasons) it is well to remember that the critics on the right see any efforts at engagement as just so many examples of “appeasement.” But that just shows how reckless and distorted a prism it is through which conservatives view the whole question.
To many right-wingers, anything short of kicking ass in every conceivable situation amounts to “appeasement.” But real foreign policy is more complicated than that. Second- and third-rate powers can afford histrionic responses to provocations and outbursts of insecure chest-beating. For them it may even have a therapeutic effect. But it’s a dangerous indulgence for superpowers. The evidence of Chinese espionage should remind us not to have any illusions about the current Chinese leadership. But we shouldn’t be dissuaded from the basic wisdom of our policy of engagement. And we shouldn’t take our foreign policy lead from reactionary voices on the right.
