Do you want to know a secret?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 23, 1998 | by Timothy W. Maier

* Jorge Cabrera, a convicted Cuban drug godfather who donated $20,000 to the DNC and attended the 1995 White House Christmas party.

* Gregori Loutchanski and his partner Vadim Rabinovich, who allegedly are involved in Russian criminal syndicates engaged in trafficking nuclear weapons and smuggling narcotics. Both men met with Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. Rabinovich posed for a photograph with them during a 1995 fund-raiser even though his visa had been revoked a month earlier. According to State Department records obtained by Insight, Rabinovich managed to enter the country in May 1997 "because a variation in the spelling of his name failed to produce a hit in the INS' lookout system." In other words, he simply used a different name.

* Cambodian heroin trafficker Theng Bumma is a partner with fugitive DNC donor Ted Sioeng, who was granted repeated access to Clinton and Gore.

Add those names to pipeline dreamer Roger Tamaraz, a fugitive wanted by Interpol who managed to get the ear of both the National Security Council and the CIA; suspected Beijing agents Charlie Trie and Maria Hsia, under indictment in a moneylaundering scheme; and People's Liberation Army gunrunner Wang Jun, whose company was indicted for shipping 2,000 AK-47 assault rifles to California street gangs.

Even Clinton now describes his meeting with Wang and other undesirables as "clearly inappropriate."

In September, the GAO didn't lightly dismiss an audit request by House National Security Chairman Floyd Spence, a South Carolina Republican. After looking into the matter, the GAO issued a scathing report on security controls at the Department of Energy secret weapons-research labs. The findings show that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Sandia National Laboratories, which are responsible for conducting research and development involving the Energy Department's nuclear-weapons program, have serious security problems involving background checks on foreign visitors.

Livermore has been conducting background checks on about 44 percent of its visitors from sensitive countries, whereas Los Alamos and Sandia mostly avoided background checks to reduce costs. They checked about 5 percent of visitors from sensitive foreign countries. In some cases, foreign visitors are allowed unescorted, 24-hour access to facilities in controlled areas.

The GAO concluded that "as a result of obtaining fewer background checks for foreign visitors to these laboratories, questionable visitors, including suspected foreign-intelligence agents, had access to the laboratories without DOE and/or laboratory officials' advance knowledge of the visitors' backgrounds."

The Energy Department had been allocated an additional $5 million to improve its counterintelligence programs, but the GAO noted that intelligence officials doubt whether improvements would be implemented.

Should Clinton take the blame for national-security blunders, or are these events just an evolution of a series of problems that have grown throughout several administrations? Wallace Thies, professor of politics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, believes the dissemination of classified information into the wrong hands was a problem long before Clinton arrived on the scene.