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 China:
Spies With a Difference
Paul
Strand, reporter
May 10, 1999
The Stage: The Los Alamos nuclear weapons
laboratory. The Actor: A Taiwanese-American
already suspected of spying for the Chinese.
The Act: Apparently downloading the computer
codes that reveal most of America's nuclear
secrets.
If it's true, it's one more victory in
a long-running string of triumphs for
Chinese espionage.
But until recently, Chinese spying rarely
made headlines and few of China's agents
were ever caught. There are good reasons.
One is that America is so vulnerable because
the Chinese operate so differently from
the Soviet spies United States counterintelligence
is used to.
Thor Ronay at the Center for Security
Policy in Washington D.C. has studied
the Soviet Cold War style of espionage.
"They want to go get A bomb in A laboratory,
and they will send A team managed by An
executive to get that. And we'll be able
to follow that process in a fairly linear
way."
Ed Timperlake co-authored "Year of the
Rat," which chronicles how China has compromised
U.S. national security during the Clinton
years. He says the Chinese haven't operated
in the methodical, linear way of the Soviets.
"What they would do apparently is identify
an objective and then EVERYONE would come
to the party. They would bring professionals
at it. They would bring relatives!"
With more than a billion people, China
can afford to throw thousands of them
at espionage objectives. And it doesn't
mind going way outside the ranks of professional
spies. Ronay describes the process this
way: "The Chinese send thousands over, telling
them all, 'Go, have a good time, prosper,
do as well as you can, and one time or
another we may visit you, we may call on
you, we may send you a postcard from your
uncle." In other words, you may spend an
absolutely normal life, and just once
or twice, the spy network may ask for
just a little help here or there.
Ronay says even second-generation Chinese
here in the States are sometimes called
upon. "The Chinese call them 'fish at the
bottom of the sea,' just lying here waiting
for an opportunity to be surfaced."
What does China want? According to Timperlake
and Ronay, just about any hi-tech system
America has. Ronay: "Military, nuclear,
rocket, telemetry, guidance, telecommunications."
Timperlake: "They want to know how to
do supercomputers and p.c.'s and cell phones
and satellite dishes."
Ronay says China's effort to spy, buy and
steal U.S. hi-tech..."reaches into the
U.S. government, U.S. military, U.S. laboratories,
U.S. universities, commercial weapons programs."
With thousands of agents poking their noses
into all these areas, why have so few
ever been caught? It may be because they
don't act like secret agents, but more
like butterflies. Timperlake says of the
Chinese using this style, "It was very
clever, and in doing so, they would accomplish
the goal and then they'd fly apart and the
network would be disestablished, so there
were really no fingerprints."
Ronay: "There aren't cells. You don't find
one guy and his case and uncover his cell.
Each one is run directly. It's the advantage
of having a population of a billion-two:
you can afford to have a lot of case officers."
And now comes the news that just one alleged
agent inside the Los Alamos nuclear lab...Wen
Ho Lee...may have done more damage than
any other spy in U.S. history by (and
these are only charges at this point)
carefully and methodically over the years
moving millions of lines of data about
America's nuclear codes from a highly-classified
computer site to an easily-accessible
one.
Timperlake: "This is probably the most
damning spy operation this country has
ever faced...the greatest damage of the
century, if not of our whole history."
Timperlake says almost every secret the
U.S. had about nuclear weapons was thrown
out into the open. "By moving it to an open-source
computer, we now know that hits have been,
as reported, from the People's Republic
of China, from Russia and India. But God
knows who else heard about it."
Ronay warns, "This presents us with costs
on down the road that we will now have
to meet. And they will be very high."
Timperlake is clearly worried. "And it
may take a great tragedy, somebody doing
something stupid...some rogue regime doing
something stupid...to bring to the American
people how damning and dangerous and damaging
this whole mess actually is and will be
for our kids' kids' future."
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