Only hours before she taxied down a dark runway for her last fateful flight over the Colombian mountains on July 23, U.S. Army pilot Jennifer Odom had a worried, agitated conversation with her husband in El Paso, Texas.
U.S. efforts to stop the flow of Colombian cocaine, she complained, including her own nighttime electronic spying missions, hadnt amounted to “even a speed bump” against the surging illicit traffic. The flow of drugs north had doubled in the past year.
More worrisome, she said, her four-engine turboprop, crammed with sophisticated electronic gear to eavesdrop on cellphones and take infrared photos of cocaine factories, had been “lit up” — tracked — by hostile missile radar on recent flights.
That meant only one thing to Odom and her husband, retired Army Lt. Col. Charles Odom, an officer who’d had top secret clearances: Narco-guerrillas in the jungle below had obtained advanced ground-to-air missiles, the kind that emit pre-launch signals a plane like Odom’s could pick up. The war in Colombia, the Odoms agreed, had entered a new stage, and Jennifer believed her plane could be blown out of the air at any time.
Sometime after 3 a.m. that same night, Odom failed to make her regularly scheduled contact with an Army Intelligence communications base in Key West, Fla. She and her crew of four Americans and two Colombian liaison personnel had crashed on the side of a steep, unmapped mountain near the border with Ecuador. All were dead.
Thus did Jennifer Shafer Odom, 29, a slim, motorcyle-riding brunet and top graduate of West Point, become the first U.S. military casualty of Washington’s “war against drugs” in Colombia. Now, a year later, Congress is sending $1.3 billion in direct military aid to Bogota, raising the stakes even higher. The measure includes an untold increase in U.S. military and civilian “advisors,” on top of the several hundred DEA agents and Green Berets already there, ensuring that Odom wont be the last to disappear into the Colombian maelstrom.
Indeed, the U.S. is likely to plunge even deeper into the bottomless civil wars of the Andes, where the differences among cocaine traffickers, left-wing guerillas, right-wing death squads and corrupt government troops have become increasingly blurred, and every element — even the U.S. military, apparently — has been corrupted by drugs.
As Congress debated the aid package, a Colombian rebel leader said the escalation of military assistance would “throw fuel on the fire” of the nations civil war, and threatened to launch missiles against U.S. aircraft. But the family of Jennifer Odom believes that already happened. The Pentagon just didnt want anyone to know.
Almost a year after Odom died, her family is still seeking answers about what really happened that moonless night in southeast Colombia. The Army classified her death as a “mishap,” saying she unwittingly flew the plane into an uncharted mountain even though she was an experienced pilot flying in good weather conditions, in a plane equipped with state-of-the-art, forward-looking radar and navigational aides. Her family suspects she was shot down.
No such evidence can be found in the Armys thick, three-pound report on the incident, although so much of it was blacked out by censors that answers to the hard questions can’t be found in it.
Most disturbing to the family, Odom reported to Col. James Hiett, the top U.S. counter-narcotics official in Colombia. Hiett meanwhile was helping his wife launder the proceeeds of her cocaine smuggling through the U.S. embassy with the help of his chauffeur. The arrest of the Hietts five months after Odoms death shocked the family and left it wondering whether Hiett or other U.S. officials responsible for sensitive drug interdiction missions could be trusted.
“Jennifer briefed Hiett on her mission on July 14th. Nine days later the crew was dead,” says her grief-stricken mother, Janie Shafer.
No evidence has surfaced that Hiett had anything to do with Odom’s death. But if the U.S. chief of counter-narcotics in Colombia cant be trusted, Shafer wonders, who can?
Hiett, who is scheduled to be sentenced in mid-July, could not be reached for comment. His wife is serving a five-year prison term.
Few Americans even realized Jennifer Odom and four other soldiers had died in Colombia on July 23. The media’s attention was riveted on the disappearance of another small plane, this one piloted by John F. Kennedy Jr. near the posh Martha’s Vineyard resort off Cape Cod. Indeed, the Pentagon deployed a virtual armada to search for Kennedy, his wife and sister-in-law, at a cost of untold millions. Navy divers eventually recovered their remains, and a solemn funeral followed at sea.
In stark contrast, no U.S. military planes could be found to look for Odom and her crew mates in Colombia. Two days passed before their crash site was even located by a Colombian plane, and four more days passed before U.S. Embassy personnel rappeled down from hovering helicopters to pick through the wreckage and retrieve the bodies.
Through all this, the families waited in agony for definite word of their loved ones’ fate. When it finally came, low-ranking officers called. The Pentagon, meanwhile, tightly held the names and addresses of the crew from the media.
The families of Odom and the other casualties were also given constantly conflicting dates and times for when the caskets would arrive at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Only the last-minute intervention of U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, who represents Odom’s rural western Maryland district, allowed her husband and family to get there on time.
No senior White House officials were on hand to greet the arrival of the crew’s flag-draped coffins at 1:30 a.m., in sharp contrast to the high-profile, prime-time attendance of U.S. presidents when other American personnel have been killed in service abroad. Attorney General Janet Reno, a civilian, did attend. The solemn ceremony was closed to the media.
“It was almost as if they didn’t want us to be there,” Odoms grieving mother said last week as she sat in a living room darkened by drawn shades and filled with mementos of her only daughter’s achievements in 4-H Club, high school and West Point, where she graduated in the top quarter of her 1992 class. Outside, a searing hot breeze ruffled the family’s corn fields.
There is no joy in this house, a plain white clapboard bungalow in the rolling farmland of Maryland. The Shafers are simple people, farmers, American Gothic. They don’t understand why their daughter was mixed up in Colombia, an undeclared war. They can’t fathom why they were treated in such a dismissive, even hush-hush way by the Pentagon.
Shafer and her son-in-law, Charles Odom, suspect that the White House and Pentagon deliberately played down the crash of Jennifer’s top-secret “Dash-7″ to dampen speculation about the full extent of U.S. military intervention in Colombia’s civil war, which is “much bigger” than commonly thought, Odom asserted, with “hundreds of Special Forces people running all over the country.”
“We’re pretty involved down there,” Odom said, “and we don’t want to let people know how deeply we’re involved. And that FARC” — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the main Marxist guerrilla group fighting the government — “may have shot that plane down.”
“Every time they came back from a mission,” Odom recounted, “there’d be small-arms bullet holes on the fuselage or the tail. I asked her about it, and she said, ‘It’s a dangerous place. We’re always getting shot at and lit up (by guerrilla radar).’
“It wasn’t Colombian government radar,” Odom declared. “It was a missile lock.”
In congressional testimony last March, the commander of U.S. forces in Latin America, Gen. Charles Wilhelm, said intelligence sources were reporting the presence of ground-to-air missiles in the rebels’ inventory, including U.S.-made Redeyes and Stingers and Russian Sam-16s, all available on the black market. Only the newest models emit pre-launch signals that a target plane can pick up.
That was alarming enough. But a bigger point went unremarked: If Jennifer Odom’s DeHaviland-7RC aircraft was detecting missiles, that meant the U.S. Army had either drifted over the line from tracking narcotics to gathering intelligence on the rebels, or that the cocaine cartels and the guerrillas had now become inseperable. Either way, the U.S. was taking sides in Colombia’s civil war, a shooting war, without the American public’s knowledge, understanding or approval.
“We have no choice right now but to believe that they crashed,” says Adam Isacson, who follows the drug war for the Center for International Policy, a liberal think tank in Washington. “But they were intercepting communications at night — not your traditional counterdrug mission. And the only communications you intercept when you’re flying over Putamayo are guerrilla communications.”
In a statement last year, FARC’s commander neither claimed credit for nor denied the rebels had shot down the plane. But he warned that the U.S. was risking more casualties if it chose to interfere in Colombia’s civil war. FARC and two other leftist groups hold nearly half the country.
To maintain the appearance of noninvolvement in the civil war, U.S. Army policy mandates that intelligence on FARC not be turned over directly to their Colombian counterparts, but sent up through channels to Washington. Only then is it passed to the Colombian army.
The Central Intelligence Agency has “hundreds” of officers in Colombia, Isacson and others said. Companies like DynCorp, in Arlington, Va., have been hired by the Pentagon to deploy at least 200 more former U.S. special warfare types to Colombia, and hundreds more, along with advanced U.S. helicopters, are expected shortly with passage of the new military aid bill.
Several aspects of Odom’s death inspire her family and more than a few former colleagues to doubt the Army’s official verdict.
First, the recon missions were regularly flown in groups of three aircraft, they said, the better to look out for each other in the treacherous, mostly uncharted high mountains. On the night of July 23, Odom’s plane was sent out alone because the unit’s two other planes were in maintenance. She was also weary from many missions, her husband said, although she’d be the last officer to duck an order.
“Odom’s peers and her chain of command considered her as a very competent and meticulous PC [command pilot] and a professional aviator,” the Army said in its incident report.
Odom had flown helicopters and multi-engine craft on reconnaissance missions in dozens of countries, from Bosnia to Latin America, many of them classified, with 600 hours in the Dash-7 alone. She was dispatched to look for Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s plane when it went down in Croatia in 1996. She was a favorite of top army commanders, known for taking her Harley-Davidson roaring down the desert highways outside El Paso, the home of Company D of the 204th Military Intelligence Battalion.
On the night she died, she’d been flying over the Andes for 13 months and was scheduled to take command of her company the following week.
The forecast for her flight path that moonless night was generally clear, with scattered and broken clouds at 10,000 feet and winds variable at 5 mph, according to mission records. The weather report heightens many people’s doubts that an accomplished pilot, aided by advanced radar, could have flown dead-on into a mountain.
Of course, accidents are always possible. “You can’t predict what can happen,” said one soldier with experience flying the missions, echoing a common view. “The winds and fog and rain come out of nowhere. There can be a quick downdraft or wind shear that knocks you off course.”
But inexplicably, the Army report says Odom had turned off the instrument radar (IFR) in favor of visual navigation (VFR) while flying through a 10,000-foot high moutain range in the pitch black night.
If that’s true, how the Army knows it is another mystery. Curiously, and against tremendous odds, neither the aircraft’s voice cockpit or flight data recorder were working that night, according to the Army’s report, further eliminating any chance of gathering objective evidence on what caused the crash.
Additionally, maintenance records for the recorders “were not made available” to the accident investigating team, and the full-page conclusion of its findings on the recorders was also kept classified.
The Army says Odom flew into the mountain “at cruise airspeed,” pulverizing the aircraft and crew. But the entire “Finding” section of the report, released to her family, is blacked out by Army censors.
“Why is that blacked out?” Chuck Odom asks. “Does that have something to do with national security?”
There’s yet another troubling aspect to the incident: A U.S. Special Forces team was dispatched to blow up the remains of the aircraft. Its rationale was to destroy remnants of the classified electronic intelligence gear that had been on board, but photographs of the crash site show that that the aircraft already had been smashed to bits by hitting the ground at a force of 200 Gs.
An eyewitness called Chuck Odom to tell him that “he was deeply upset by that decision, and he was having trouble sleeping and so on,” because it was so obviously unnecessary to set explosives to the wreckage. There had to be another reason, the eyewitness source told Odom, such as obliterating “traces of a missile hit.”
Why? To obscure the clear and present danger of the flights, Odom says, and the fact that U.S. military personnel were involved in an undeclared war.
Finally, the corruption of Army Col. James Hiett, the top U.S. counter-narcotics official, and his drug-dealing wife, Laurie, upset the family tremendously.
The Hiett scandal obscures a more common — and deadly — reality, says Robert White, a former U.S. ambassador to Paraguay and El Salvador: the subversion of local narcotics-fighting agencies that the U.S. must work with.
“Cocaine is now Colombia’s leading export,” White says, ridiculing “the idea that an operation of that magnitude can take place without the cooperation of business, banking, transportation executives and the government, civil as well as military.”
Now the corruption has spread to a top American official. With the U.S. working hand-in-hand with local authorities, the leak of sensitive information, like the flight paths of U.S. surveillance plane, is inevitable, White suggests.
“There’s always been a fear of this by sensible people in the Pentagon,” White said. “You know, the legend is that the United States military is incorruptible, but that has proven not to be the case. There are quite a few instances of this corruption.”
A group of U.S. Army sergeants were corrupted by the Noriega regime in Panama, a handful of local and federal prosecutors have succumbed, and customs agents are regularly arrested for taking bribes, but there’s been nothing like the arrest of Hiett and his wife to surface — yet.
Shafer can’t help but wonder whether the corruption tied to Hiett had anything to do with her daughter’s death. But no evidence of that has surfaced.
“It’s been very, very hard on her,” Chuck Odom says gently of his mother-in-law. “The bottom line,” he says of his late wife, “is that she was a great gal, a great soldier, a great wife and no one in this family will ever get over this loss. We just go on numbly each day.”
In a morbid coincidence, he notes, she died on their seventh wedding anniversary. The family will gather for a memorial ceremony next month in her hometown of Brunswick, Md., where she is buried.
Beneath Odom’s grief, however, is a steady, quiet determination to get to the bottom of his wife’s death, about which there remain so many unanswered questions. Odom, who has had sensitive intelligence assignments himself, says he will not give up until he gets all the facts.
Jennifer’s mother, meanwhile, says she’s a long way from being over her daughter’s death. She still thinks about the day, weeks after Odom died, when the doorbell rang unexpectedly. When Shafer opened the door, she saw a UPS truck driving away, and found a small cardboard box at her feet. She opened it up. Inside were a handful of her daughter’s personal effects, unceremoniously shipped home to Maryland with no condolence message from her Army superiors or colleagues.
“You get up every day feeling sick, and there’s nothing you can take for it,” said Shafer, lines of unending sadness etched in her face.
At the very least, she wants the Clinton administration to come clean about how deep it’s involved in South America’s drug wars, now that Congress is about to add $1.3 billion in direct military aid to Colombias army.
“What are we hiding here?” she asks. “If that happens to be our cause, let’s be upfront about it.”
Tennis chat, anyone?
John Deutch, the ex-CIA chief whose security clearance was stripped because he had 17,000 pages of classified documents on his home computer, also maintains a very un-spooklike visibility on the internet.
In his America Online profile, which AOL subscribers fill out at their own choice — and risk — Deutch lists his family status (married), occupation (scientist) and hobby (tennis). His residence is listed as Bethesda, Md. His AOL screen name is not much of a disguise, either — JDeutch@aol.com.
According to CBS, someone using that account has visited porno sites on the Web.
But if he has other names for, say, tennis talk in AOL chat rooms, he’s keeping that private. Otherwise, he’s hiding in plain site — not much of a James Bond.
All of which has apparently outraged an unlikely alliance of CIA malcontents and defenders of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, who charge that current agency chief George Tenet and his honchos adopted a double standard for Deutch after gumshoes brought his computer indiscretion to their attention.
He should have been prosecuted, they say, just like Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese scientist who’s been jailed since nuclear documents were found on his computer.
But this is about back-stabbing, Washington-style, not spies. If the spooks spent as much time conspiring to get rid of Saddam Hussein as they did trying to ruin each other, the Iraqi dictator would be playing golf with Baby Doc Duvalier instead of pulling out the fingernails of CIA agents in Baghdad.
“There’s more covert action inside CIA than outside it,” one agency old hand says.
This latest Gilbert and Sullivan production from the CIA began Monday, when somebody leaked the results of an agency investigation to the New York Times, charging that current CIA boss Tenet and his minions soft-pedaled the internal finding of classified documents on Deutch’s computer. The drift was that enemy spies could have stolen the computer or hacked their way into Deutch’s hard drive via AOL and stolen valuable CIA secrets.
Like what, one might ask. Deutch was forced out at the CIA when he contradicted White House claims that U.S. missile strikes on Iraq were effective. The attacks hadn’t damaged Saddam Hussein one whit, Deutch told Congress in an unusual display of Washington candor. It cost him his job. Perhaps he had more “secrets” like that on his computer.
The fact is, Deutch remains an unpopular figure inside the bureaucracy, and his protigi Tenet has ruffled feathers by bringing big changes to the CIA. This week’s skirmish is just bureaucratic back-stabbing, CIA style.
Besides telling the truth, Deutch was disliked because he tended to be impatient and brusque.
“He’d come into a room and say, ‘Get to the point, I don’t have time for this twaddle,’” a former intelligence official says. “Just unnecessarily … Deutch almost seemed to enjoy hurting people. But he’s a very bright guy.”
“Knowing him, and I do,” the official added, “I would guess his having that stuff on his own computer was … typical. He thought he was above all of the petty rules which apply to mere mortals.”
Confronted with the alleged security lapse, Deutch immediately erased the documents from his home computer, according to reports, and signed up as an unpaid consultant to the CIA so that he’d officially be permitted access to information. After considering the matter for several months, Tenet stripped his former boss of his top-secret clearance, a striking rebuke in Washington, where security badges are equated with penis size.
“I quite frankly was almost shocked at the time that he was humiliated by yanking his clearance,” said a former colleague. “I thought that was pretty brutal.”
Only in a ritual sense, however. It’s highly unlikely any of the Pentagon and CIA-connected corporations whose boards Deutch sits on have barred him from the door.
In any event, the CIA probably loses more documents in a day than Deutch ever stored on his computers. Tales abound of the CIA selling off surplus computers or office furniture with classified material still in it. Last year a classified U.S. military data cartridge was found in a scrap yard in Budapest. The State Department, it has been reported, failed to tighten security even after the FBI warned it a Russian bug had been planted in the building.
Charges that Deutch’s security lapse is comparable to those committed by Wen Ho Lee or even CIA traitor Aldrich Ames have a partisan ring.
“It seems to be a pattern. I think it’s very troublesome,” Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott told reporters at a hearing Wednesday. The still-classified findings of the CIA inspector general raise “fundamental questions,” he said. Even those who really dislike Deutch, though, disagree.
“It’s probably a slow news day,” said one source, “plus somebody’s playing games inside … My God, this to me is a nothing.”
Deutch, meanwhile, is going on about his way at MIT, where the bespectacled professor teaches chemistry and has a Web page.
James Abourezk savors a story about Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., the man who now holds the fate of President Clinton in his hands.
It was 1973. Abourezk, a fiery populist, held the seat Daschle now occupies, railing against oil companies, neglect of the Indians in his state and the war in Vietnam. Daschle was his skinny young legislative aide, fresh out of the Air Force.
“I had a bunch of hostile American Legionnaires in my office one day,” Abourezk recalled over the telephone from Sioux Falls this week. “They were on my ass about the Vietnam War. The vote bell rang and I said, ‘Tom, you speak to these folks and answer their questions until I get back.’”
He chuckles.
“I was so happy the vote bell rang. I came back later and they were almost hugging and kissing. Tom had them eating out of his hand.”
Abourezk added, “He’s been so good at that over the years. He’s always been that way. Tom brings people to accommodation.”
Ironically, it’s something Tom Daschle and President Clinton, generational peers, share. In many ways, they are mirror images of each other. Both came from poor, hardscrabble homes. Both were the first college graduates in their families. Daschle’s dad was a bookkeeper in a South Dakota auto parts dealership, Clinton’s Arkansas father was famously absent.
Both barely squeaked into national office on their first tries, Clinton ascending to the presidency with 43 percent of the vote in 1992, Daschle winning his first run for Congress in 1978 by the skin of his teeth. The election-night tally had him the victor by only 14 votes; a recount would later increase the margin to a whopping 139. In 1994, he won the post of Democratic leader in the Senate by a single vote.
But looking back, their fates could be said to be defined in a single decision in 1968, in the depths of the Vietnam War. While Clinton was at Oxford trying simultaneously to dodge the draft and maintain his “political viability,” as he famously put it in a letter to an Army colonel back home, Daschle was serving a three-year hitch as an enlisted man in the Air Force.
Nobody is going to bring up Clinton’s draft dodging this week, or the fact that Daschle served. It’s an old story about choices made in the fog of a long-ago, and bitterly divisive, war. But the fact that one made the hard choice while the other didn’t speaks volumes about where each of them stand today: One in the dock, the other both a member of the jury and a key defender of the accused.
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Despite the Democrats’ sufficient numbers to block impeachment, nobody is predicting what will happen in the Senate, a notoriously unpredictable body. Some Republicans are resisting Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s attempts to quickly conclude the process, but Daschle is a counterforce Lott must reckon with. And by some accounts on Tuesday, he was close to hammering out a compromise with Lott for a quick up-and-down vote that could avert a trial.
Nobody’s putting money on that outcome, but nobody who has worked with Daschle would be surprised. He’s been pulling rabbits out of hats for years. And leaving even his enemies respectful.
In the 1970s, for example, Daschle took on the entire corporate and government health establishment over Agent Orange, the Vietnam defoliant that was making veterans sick. Both the Veterans Administration and Rep. Sonny Montgomery, D-Miss., chairman of the House Veterans Committee, denied any connection between the chemicals and the illness. Daschle came up with a solution that had the National Academy of Sciences study the evidence and the V.A. accept its findings — whatever they turned out to be. The NAS study, as Daschle anticipated, linked Agent Orange to various cancers and the V.A. was forced to start treating veterans.
“He was the guy who was responsible for the Agent Orange issue finally gaining credibility,” said Mike Leavick, then legislative director for the Vietnam Veterans of America Inc. “If it wasn’t for him, it never would’ve happened. He’s the guy.”
With his easy smile and low-key manner, Daschle was considered too soft to negotiate with the swaggering Republicans when he ran for the Senate leadership post in 1994.
One of his foremost critics was Sen. Robert Byrd, the silver-maned West Virginian and leader of the Democrats in the 1970s and early ’80s. But he came around after he saw Daschle in action.
“I did not support Tom Daschle in 1994, in the main, because I did not think he was tough enough to deal with the likes of Bob Dole,” he told a gathering of Democrats last year. “I am here today to tell you that I was totally wrong about this young man. He has steel in his spine, despite his reasonable and modest demeanor.”
Many Senate Republicans had already learned that. In 1997 Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia had the Senate Rules Committee expand an already discredited investigation into alleged voting irregularities in the Louisiana election that sent Democrat Mary Landrieu to Washington.
“I think everyone in this town knows what’s going on,” Daschle told reporters, suggesting Warner was playing to extreme Republicans. “John Warner wants to be the next chairman of the Armed Services Committee … I think the Republicans are trying to steal this election.” With Warner’s toga effectively ripped off in the eyes of the press, the investigation never gained traction.
Unlike Clinton, who so often sets traps for his enemies but won’t confront them outright, Daschle is not afraid to stand up and draw a line in the sand. When the Republicans moved to scuttle the Democrats’ hike in the minimum wage, Daschle threatened a filibuster: “We are simply going to shut this place down.” When Dole complained, Daschle merely said, “Welcome to the Senate, Sen. Dole.”
The differences in style were never so apparent as when the impeachment trial began to loom in the Senate. Desperate Clinton attorneys, no doubt encouraged by lawyer Clinton, floated an idea of challenging the constitutionality of the House vote.
Senate Democrats (read: Daschle) gave the idea a cold shoulder. Their message: It’s time to stand up and fight in the open — on the issues.
No doubt Tom Daschle flashed his hole cards to Trent Lott when they began bargaining over the shape of the Senate proceedings last week.
Hole card No. 1: 45 Democrats, enough to block a guilty verdict. Hole card No. 2: Public disdain for a long trial.
But Lott has a few cards, too: a guess that a fickle public might turn on Clinton if any one of a number of rumored bombshells concerning the president’s love life explode this week. Or that the public might be tiring of the drama and demand Clinton quit just to get it over with.
“This place is just one big finger to the wind,” Jim Abourezk thundered on the Senate floor years ago during a debate on oil monopolies.
Indeed. The wind is blowing hard in Washington this week, and the man shielding President Clinton is the man he could have been.
As the case against Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist accused of spying for China, seems on the verge of unraveling, critics have raised the volume of their complaints about the fact that Lee was targeted at least partly because of his Chinese origins. But U.S. espionage experts say scientists of Chinese descent working in this country are trapped in an endless game of spy vs. spy between the United States and China, tangled in a web of espionage so subtle that many don’t even know they’re players.
And for the foreseeable future, these experts say, Beijing won’t stop targeting them for recruitment, thus provoking the attention of FBI gumshoes who run roughshod over the lives of Chinese-born scientists like Wen Ho Lee because they don’t know what they’re looking for.
Paul Moore, the FBI’s top China hand from 1975 until he retired last year, called China’s spy system “espionage without evidence,” so impenetrable to U.S. counterspies and prosecutors that it was “bulletproof.”
China’s espionage operations are so subtle, he and others added, that scientists might not even know they were handing over valuable information. Thus the United States is wasting time pursuing Los Alamos espionage suspect Lee and turning its nuclear labs upside down in security sweeps.
“It’s nice to think, but it’s not true, that where there’s espionage there inevitably is evidence of espionage,” Moore told Salon News in a two-hour interview. “The Chinese have found a way to commit espionage against the United States which does not leave sufficient evidence behind for there to be successful investigations and successful prosecutions.”
With the resignation this week of Energy Department security official Notra Trulock, the prime source of alarm over Chinese espionage in the media and on Capitol Hill, many critics are lambasting the FBI for singling out Lee because he is Chinese-American, when Beijing could have acquired U.S. nuclear secrets from multiple sources.
Chalmers Johnson, a University of California China specialist, called the Lee investigation America’s version of the Dreyfus Affair, wherein a Jew was scapegoated for French security lapses a century ago.
“The sole evidence cited against [Lee] is that in June 1988, during the Reagan administration, he along with 200 other scientists attended an International Computational Physics Conference in Beijing with the permission and clearance of the Los Alamos Laboratory,” Johnson wrote.
But engaging scientists at conferences is exactly how the Chinese operate, Moore says.
“Their major effort is to try and develop relations with Chinese-Americans, as many of them as possible, in the hopes that the relations will turn out to be profitable — someday, somehow, somewhere,” Moore said.
Understandably, FBI sources bristle at charges of racism, and say if anybody should be tagged with that brush, it’s the Chinese, for singling out scientists of Chinese descent.
“First critics say our government is racist because the government is targeting Chinese-Americans because they are Chinese,” said Harry Brandon, a former head of FBI counterintelligence who retired in 1995 as the Los Alamos probe was heating up. “And the answer is, Yes, we are targeting them, because they are targets (of Beijing).”
“The only people racially biased in this case is the Chinese intelligence service,” Brandon said in an interview, “which continues to target Chinese-Americans for the only reason that they are ethnic Chinese.”
Brandon said that “probably 99.99 percent of Chinese-Americans wouldn’t have anything to do with” Chinese spying overtures. But Moore said that Beijing’s spy operations are so subtle that most U.S. scientists “wouldn’t even know” they were supplying valuable information to China.
China rarely employs professional intelligence officers to recruit American spies. Instead, he said, it uses its own scientists to elicit “small bits and pieces of information” from their American counterparts during conferences and private conversations, almost always in China.
Chinese spy masters eschew secret meetings with agents, cryptic chalk signals on Washington mailboxes, or “dead drops” of money or documents on rural roads — all the well-known facets of the Aldrich Ames and Walker family spy cases in the 1980s. The Chinese avoid clandestine contacts of any kind between agents and handlers, on U.S. or even their own soil, Moore said, preferring to elicit information in open contacts with U.S. scientists. Chinese spy handlers, he said, rarely even ask a source for a classified document.
That leaves nothing to be tracked or photographed by U.S. counterspies
looking for proof of espionage, he said, as in the case of Lee. The FBI
and its critics both miss the point of how China conducts spying
operations, he suggested, by squabbling over whether Attorney General
Janet Reno was right to decline warrants for wiretaps on Lee’s home and
telephones. The liklihood of finding a “smoking gun” was scant, Moore says:
Beijing’s spy masters “want what’s between their ears, not what’s in the
briefcase.” He added that he couldn’t conceive of Chinese spy masters asking
Lee or any other scientist, Chinese or not, to download classified documents
and deliver them to Beijing: too much risk.
“It would not be the kind of thing anybody would ask them to do,” Moore said. “If you’re asking if someone would come along and give them the Rosetta stone of U.S. nuclear secrets, that’s possible. Possible, but not probable. It doesn’t fit the Chinese MO.”
Beijing’s spies don’t target Chinese-Americans because they’re susceptible to recruitment, Moore emphasized, but because they’re more accessible. It’s simply easier for Chinese spies and officials to meet and create rapport with Chinese-Americans, especially in the United States.
And they’re willing to wait years for the opportune time to pitch a target for a sliver of useful information, bypassing a formal recruitment altogether. The target won’t even know he’s been “developed.”
“What the Chinese are after is an indiscretion,” Moore says — usually after a scientist has had a full day and a few drinks. “It doesn’t have to be classified, it just has to be helpful, and they want it to be more than what they would normally get, more than what they are entitled to get. That’s the way they play the game: They want ‘X-plus.’”
“I call it espionage by indiscretion,” Moore says, and it’s not even worth the time of U.S. counterspies to try to catch it. “The name of the game for the counterintelligence people, and even the security people, is not to try to stop Chinese espionage, because Chinese espionage in this model almost doesn’t exist. It’s a by-product of indiscretion.”
“It’s an essentially impossible counterintelligence task,” Moore said, and “the U.S. is losing.”
Despite the furor over the Wen Ho Lee case, Chinese-American scientists can still expect to be bombarded by Beijing’s approaches for information, Moore and Brandon said. The only way to keep from being caught up in the spy and counter-spy game, they said, is to avoid situations where they might be vulnerable.
“Don’t go into a room alone with them,” Moore said. Stick with a friend on a junket to China. “Just like a school trip,” he half-joked. “Hold hands with your partner.”
Ten years ago this summer, the families of 47 Navy sailors were grieving over the loss of their loved ones after a gun turret exploded on the battleship USS Iowa as it steamed through the Caribbean, off Puerto Rico, on April 19, 1989.
Now they have reason to grieve again, for the Navy has effectively suppressed the results of the lone independent investigation of the accident. That investigation lays blame for the deaths squarely where it belongs: on the Navy itself.
In April, W.W. Norton published “A Glimpse of Hell: The Explosion on the USS Iowa and Its Coverup” by Charles C. Thompson, a highly regarded Washington author and veteran investigative producer for CBS’s “60 Minutes” and other network news programs. Among Thompson’s past triumphs were discoveries that the Pentagon had paid $500 for toilets, that the $1 billion a copy B-2 Stealth bombers weren’t invisible to radar, that the Bradley Fighting Vehicle could catch on fire and, ranging further afield, that Elvis died of a drug overdose, not a heart problem. As testimony to its accuracy, “A Glimpse of Hell” was praised by reviewers and chosen by the Military Book Club as its main selection last March.
While Thompson’s reputation is sterling in publishing circles, however, respect for his work is apparently not shared by the U.S. Navy, which refused to cooperate with the writer after he began to peel away the rotten layers of official misconduct coating the Iowa affair. The Navy has now blocked sales of the book in bookstores on military bases — retail venues critical to the success of such a book.
It’s easy to understand why. Among Thompson’s major discoveries was that the Iowa, a World War II battleship de-mothballed at immense expense during the Reagan administration’s naval expansion in the 1980s, was “a 59,000-ton accident waiting to happen.” But what most people remember about the disaster is that the vicious explosion in gun turret No. 2 was deliberately set off by a homosexual sailor — Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Clayton Hartwig, 24 — in a murderous, suicidal response to being rejected by a gay shipmate.
But that was false, as Thompson discovered. Hartwig was not gay, nor was his friend who died with him in the blast. They had not had a love affair, pleasant or tormented. Thompson traced the slander to Navy detectives who browbeat one sailor into making a false statement that gay revenge was at the bottom of the accident, then peddled the dirt to credulous reporters — in particular NBC’s Fred Francis. Francis repeatedly libeled the dead sailor with stories of gay sex, all based on anonymous sources. Francis still covers the Pentagon for NBC, and still stands by his stories, now shown to be patently absurd.
The sailor’s false statement was later retracted, a fact that the Navy also covered up in its zeal to pin blame for the affair on Hartwig. Naval officials even went so far as to conceal the retraction from FBI agents who worked at the agency’s behavioral studies unit and who produced a “psychological autopsy” buttressing the detectives’ theory. The Navy’s coverup also included the suppression of evidence showing that Hartwig couldn’t possibly have caused the explosion.
Why was the Navy so anxious to blame Hartwig for the blast? Blaming the victim deflected attention from the Navy’s own culpability. That culpability included bad maintenance of the 16-inch guns, unsafe working conditions, poor ship leadership and the use of half-century-old gunpowder.
“The environment was one notch above hell,” Thompson writes. “It was hot, grimy, nasty, hazardous and cramped. The Iowa turret decks were slippery, coated with hydraulic fluid and oil. A tumbling shell could pulverize a man. One misstep in the gun house and a sailor could plunge into the pit, where he might be crushed to death by moving machinery or by an elevating or traversing weapon. Friction and static electricity were constant sources of anxiety. A spark could trigger an explosion.”
“Some men couldn’t handle life in the turrets. They were prostrate with fear every time the guns were discharged.”
In fact, as Thompson discovered in letters and interviews, many sailors aboard the Iowa were as certain as Captain Ahab’s crew that they were steaming toward death.
While the Navy’s unhappiness with such a book is understandable, any effort to suppress it would be illegal. Unlike private bookstores, taxpayer-funded shops at military bases cannot refuse to stock a book just because the Pentagon doesn’t like it.
But that’s exactly what has happened to “A Glimpse of Hell,” according to Thompson. The author has filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the Navy, an effort that has already pried loose some nuggets. Among the documents he’s obtained are a sheaf of internal Navy e-mails showing how officials canceled his lecture and book-signing at the Naval Historical Center museum in Washington. The Navy’s explanation was that the museum couldn’t host such an affair because “litigation of this incident is still pending.” (The Hartwig family, who maintain that the Navy made Clayton a scapegoat to conceal problems with gunpowder, is suing the Navy for defamation.) “Associating the Navy Museum and thus the Navy with Mr. Thompson in that context could have been misleading and confusing to the litigants, and detrimental to the legal process,” Rear Adm. John D. Hutson wrote to Donald L. Lamm, chairman of W.W. Norton.
How making space for a book signing in the museum could affect “the legal process” was not explained. Navy officials contacted by Salon Books refused to expound upon their previous statement.
The Navy’s efforts to suppress sales of the book went further. According to internal e-mail, the Navy banned author signings at any PX, effectively killing book sales at stores where it presumably would find its most eager, and important, readers: Navy sailors.
“I will call book wholesalers and tell them not to set up book signings with this author,” a Navy public affairs officer wrote to fellow staff on April 15. She added, “I don’t think we should send e-mail to the field.”
Another officer wrote: “I guess we need to let whoever sets up the book signings, be it the stores or the vendor, know of the Pentagon’s concerns.”
“I think we all agree,” wrote another. “We will work with wholesalers to insure no book signings.”
Book signings can dramatically increase sales — if they’re coordinated with newspaper, radio and television coverage, according to W.W. Norton publisher Donald Lamm, reached by telephone in California, where he’s taking a sabbatical to write a book on 20th century political memoirs. “It’s like a gathering storm,” he said of the synergy between signing and publicity. “We seldom send an author 2,000 miles just to do a signing.”
Conversely, the cancelation of bookstore signings rattles up and down the merchandising chain. Cancelations can depress a store’s orders for a book and dampen media coverage beyond review sections, which are read by relatively few people; many newspapers don’t even have review sections. Local broadcast outlets almost never pay attention to books unless an author’s nearby appearance has been featured in the paper. When a signing is canceled, everything else folds with it.
The Navy insists it hasn’t “banned” Thompson’s book, but canceling signings has certainly diminished, if not entirely dried up, orders.
“It’s a Catch-22,” Thompson complains.
A spot check found the book was not stocked by major Navy PXs at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., the submarine base at New London, Ct., or Norfolk, Va., headquarters for the Atlantic Fleet and the Iowa’s former home port. Presumably, the thousands of former crew members and their families who attended a melancholy USS Iowa reunion at the Norfolk base in April when the book came out would have been interested in buying a copy, but it wasn’t available in any of the local PXs.
Thompson suspects, but cannot prove, that the Navy-induced chill spread to wholesalers, who rely on continued good relations with the global network of PXs.
“When they call book wholesalers and tell them that this thing is not in favor with the Pentagon, a bookseller is probably not going to stock that product,” he says.
And that really hurts a book like “A Glimpse of Hell,” says Seymour M. Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of investigative books on the Army’s coverup of the My Lai massacre and the Soviet downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007 (“The Target Is Destroyed”), among other military-oriented titles.
“I got letters from people who served in the intelligence community who bought it at PXs,” Hersh said of “The Target is Destroyed.” “I certainly know we sold copies in PXs because I heard from military people in Japan and other places,” Hersh reported in a telephone interview. “If they’re doing it, there’s no question they’re really hurting the ability of someone who’s writing critically about the military to make a living.”
No one in the Navy, meanwhile, has disputed the accuracy of Thompson’s book.
“Every word in this book is true,” Clayton Hartwig’s sister, Kathy, tearfully declared at a publication party in Washington.
Thompson’s book may be a special case. After all, the Pentagon didn’t interfere with Hersh’s searing book about My Lai, or Gregory Vistica’s scorching reprise of the 1992 Tailhook naval aviator scandal, “Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sunk the U.S. Navy.”
Perhaps that’s because so many of the Navy officers involved in the USS Iowa scandal are still on duty, including Navy detectives who leaked false theories of Hartwig’s sexuality to the media. Moreover, none of the officers responsible for the Iowa disaster were punished, even after Congress held hearings on the Navy’s own investigation and concluded it was deeply flawed.
True to his calling, Thompson has thrown himself into investigating the Navy’s blackballing of his book with the same doggedness that characterized his inquiry into the causes of the USS Iowa disaster, digging up documents that could lead to a lawsuit.
If he can prove what he suspects, “I’ll have a pretty good torts claims act, based on what I’ve been able to get so far,” he told Salon Books. “That is interference with commerce, and it’s being done by a branch of the government, and that just can’t be.”
