symposium

Insight on the News, Nov 6, 2000 by Kenneth R. Timmerman, Mark A. Groombridge

Q: Has Clinton's China policy put U.S. national security at risk?

Yes: Under lax export controls and reckless sharing of information, Clinton/Gore have armed a new enemy.

When Bill Clinton and A1 Gore came to power in January 1993, the United States was at the apex of its power. The People's Republic of China (PRC) was then a minor player on the world's stage, both militarily and diplomatically. The Chinese Communist leadership had shocked the world by ordering the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to open fire on pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and was still reeling from the international isolation that followed. President Bush, harshly criticized by then-Arkansas governor Clinton for "coddling dictators from Baghdad to Beijing," had in fact issued an executive order cutting off military sales to Communist China following the Tiananmen Square massacre, much to the chagrin of major U.S. defense contractors. The Bush administration also tightened export controls on dual-use technologies, which have both civilian and military applications.

China's inability to gain free access to advanced U.S. technologies after 1989 had a direct impact on China's military hardware. When Clinton and Gore came to power, the PLA had no modern air-defense systems; it lacked a military communications network; it had no modern command-and-control systems; it had no imaging or electronic eavesdropping satellites; its strategic rockets were unreliable and its theater missiles were at a nascent stage of development, hampered by technology bottlenecks. And in all of these areas, there was no solution on the horizon.

What a difference seven years have made. In this interval we have seen dramatic changes brought about by the Clinton/Gore administration in the way the United States manages its national-security export-control system. Unbeknownst to voters, or even to most policy experts, the new administration came to Washington in January 1993 with a coherent plan for gutting the entire export-control system, which it called a "wasting asset" left over from the Cold War.

The plan was devised by William Perry, Ashton Carter and Mitchel Wallerstein and published with little fanfare in 1992 by the National Academy of Sciences. Perry, Carter and Wallerstein were appointed to the Defense Department during the first weeks of the new administration and given responsibility for putting the plan into action.

Among the critical technologies the Chinese needed -- and the administration wanted to give them -- were U.S. supercomputers. At the time, no other nation on earth save Japan had computer capabilities even remotely approaching those developed by U.S. companies such as Cray Computer. To protect our technological advantage, and to keep militarily critical supercomputers from falling into the wrong hands, the United States had a bilateral agreement with Japan to review each export before it occurred. The Clinton administration progressively ramped up the limits on what could be exported to Communist China and eventually did away with the agreement with Japan. By the end of 1998, the bilateral commission headed by Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., and Norman Dicks, D-Wash., found that more than 600 military-grade supercomputers had been shipped to China, many of them directly to PLA-controlled military enterprises or weapons-design centers.

In 1994, then-deputy defense secretary Perry used his personal influence to ram through the sale of encrypted military communications gear to the Chinese military, a deal brokered by John L. Lewis, Perry's colleague and crony at Stanford University.

Also in 1994, the administration began allowing the auction of entire U.S. defense plants, closed for lack of U.S. government orders at the end of the Cold War.

I first became aware of these auctions while working at Time magazine, and I traveled to Columbus, Ohio, to investigate the sale of equipment from Plant 85 -- the B-1 bomber plant then operated by McDonnell Douglas. Patriots within the local Machinists' Union had alerted me to nocturnal visits by a team of Chinese technicians who were taken on tours of still-classified production lines. According to a memorandum of investigation prepared by the U.S. Customs Service, the Chinese even were allowed to videotape these areas, thus gleaning precious knowledge about classified military-production techniques unavailable elsewhere.

Time ultimately pooh-poohed my investigation and, after a written complaint from an administration official, fired me rather than run the story. Five years later, McDonnell Douglas and the purchaser, China's National AeroTechnology Import-Export Corp., finally were indicted by the Justice Department for violating U.S. export-control laws.

When the Clinton/Gore administration found these laws inconvenient, they simply changed them. Today, the Commerce Department has lifted most restrictions on the sale of high technology to Communist China and pared down its licensing staff. Meanwhile, the Defense Technology Security Administration -- the Pentagon office that coordinates the national-security review of such exports -- has been gutted, splintered and finally moved beyond the Washington Beltway, essentially exiled from day-to-day policy decisions.