Cox Reports

Jeff Taylor & Michael W. Lynch from the August/September 1999 issue

(Page 3 of 6)

Reason: The White House spin, which was picked up by many news organizations, is that this espionage is a long-running problem dating back for at least three administrations. In your estimation, how much blame is borne by the Clinton administration?

Cox: Our report states that the magnitude of the problem was not known until 1995. As a result, the critical time period has been the last four years. Questions properly have been raised over whether the response has been adequate. I am outraged as chairman of this select committee that Congress was kept so much in the dark. Sitting to my left during our 34 hearings was the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee; sitting to my right was the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. I guarantee you, because I saw the looks on their faces and heard the anger in their voices, that they had never heard these things before.

Reason: Why hadn't they? National Journal notes that "the sheer breadth of the security lapses, misguided policy shifts, and negligence by U.S. agencies just since 1992 strains the logic of the official explanation: that it was all the result of many separate and coincidental instances of bureaucratic incompetence." What accounts for the Clinton administration's failure to pay more attention to Chinese espionage and report it to you in Congress?

Cox: I asked Jim Woolsey, who was President Clinton's first CIA director, how interested President Clinton was in the problems of espionage by the PRC. How much time did the president take to learn these things? I was told that the sum total of time that the director of central intelligence briefed the president--not just on China but on the rest of the world--during his entire tenure was two hours. This is compared to President Reagan who had a briefing every morning.

Reason: President Clinton later on did seem very interested in China, particularly in making domestic connections with Chinese who helped fund his soft money presidential campaign. What role, if any, do you think these political connections played in his lack of interest in national security threats from China?

Cox: No one who watches television would think that President Clinton isn't concerned about gun control. Why then would he meet with Wang Jun, a notorious arms dealer whose company at that very time was under indictment for smuggling over 2,000 AK-47s into San Francisco?

Reason: When did he meet with him?

Cox: That was at one of those notorious coffees in 1996.

Reason: Why did the campaign-contribution connection fall out of the report?

Cox: It did not. We included all of the original material we were able to generate on those points. And specifically the dots that had heretofore been unconnected are now a bright red line leading directly from PLA military intelligence to the 1996 campaign.

Gen. Ji [Shengde], who is the head of the Military Intelligence Division of the People's Libera-tion Army, met with PLA Col. Liu [Chaoying] and [Democratic Party donor] Johnny Chung in Hong Kong. It was agreed that $300,000 would be wired to Chung three days later. That amount of money was wired from Col. Liu's account at Citibank to Chung's account in Hong Kong. On that same day, $300,000 was wired into Colonel Liu's Citibank account from CITIC [China International Trade and Investment Company, headed by Wang Jan and described in the Cox report as "the most powerful and visible corporate conglomerate in the PRC"] Industrial Bank. CITIC is described in rich detail in our report.

Beyond this, we included in our report, for the first time for the American public, information about the possible connection of Charlie Trie to bribery scandals involving the PRC government and satellites manufactured by Hughes for foreign launch in the PRC. We also attempted to include in the unclassified version of the report, but included much more in the classified version, information on [former Commerce Department official and Democratic Party fund-raiser] John Huang's access to classified information, which was extensive. And his maintenance of an office a few blocks away, unbeknown not only to his boss at Commerce but also to his secretary, where he had constant telephone and fax contact with the Lippo Group. And we described the Lippo Group's affiliation with China Resources, a known [Ministry of State Security] front.

We also had a number of witnesses who took the Fifth Amendment and/or fled the jurisdiction. A reason we did not expand further beyond what other House and Senate committees have done in the area is that we ran into the same brick walls in terms of cooperative witnesses.

Reason: A third of the report is still classified. According to some news reports, much of what's classified has to do with the later years. Were you happy with the negotiations with the Clinton administration over how to unclassify the document?

Cox: I am very concerned that some of the information that ought to be out for people to make policy judgments is not out. This is particularly true in the area of the very recent export of high-performance computers to particular end users in the People's Republic of China. But the deletions were made in order to protect sources, and second-guessing the representations of the intelligence community on that score is a matter of life and death.