Americans who are fascinated with spy and mystery fiction should get the Cox Report for their summer reading. It’s a fascinating whodunit.
The Cox Report establishes the nexus among Chinese espionage, trade with China, and illegal Chinese campaign donations. They are all cut from the same cloth, and the Cox Report stitches the pieces back together.
That Communist China engaged in massive espionage to acquire U.S. military secrets, which can some day be used to threaten us and our allies, comes as no surprise. What is sensational about the Cox Report is the scope of China’s success, and that it was achieved with the assistance of lax security, commercial transactions that concealed the transfer of military technology, and illegal campaign contributions to elect Bill Clinton and the Democrats in 1996.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has “stolen classified information” on all seven of the United States’ most advanced thermonuclear warheads, plus classified design information on our never-tested neutron bomb. The first of China’s mobile ICBMs, the DF-31, “may be tested in 1999 and could be deployed as soon as 2002.”
The nuclear secrets stolen by Communist China are not inconsequential; they give the PRC “design information on thermonuclear weapons on a par with our own.” The Cox Committee states that the PRC will surely “exploit this design information in its next generation of weapons.”
The hallmarks of the PRC’s espionage strategy are the blurred lines between military and commercial technology. The Central Military Commission adopted Deng Xiaoping’s “16-Character Policy,” his command to combine the military and civil, combine peace and war, give priority to military products, and let the civil support the military.
The Cox Report unravels the many ingenious Chinese techniques used to acquire U.S. military technologies. The Chinese constantly pressure U.S. commercial companies to transfer technology in joint ventures, and they extensively exploit dual-use products and services for military advantages.
Nepotism is the name of the game in China’s socio-political structure. The elite of the post-Deng ruling clique are the “princelings,” the sons and daughters of Party officials who are credentialed with exalted business, military and political titles.
Their status, as well as the cash bulging in their pockets, gave them extraordinary access to the Clinton White House. Among these specially anointed emissaries from China were Wang Jung, son of the late PRC President, and Liu Chaoying, daughter of the former most powerful PRC military boss.
Wang, who attended one of the notorious Clinton coffees in the White House, was connected to $600,000 in illegal campaign contributions made by Charlie Trie to the Democratic National Committee, and also to the 1996 Chinese attempt to smuggle AK-47 assault rifles to Los Angeles street gangs.
Liu, who was ostentatiously garbed with the titles Colonel in the People’s Liberation Army as well as Vice President of a major missile and space corporation, attended a Clinton fundraiser in California. She gave $300,000 to Johnny Chung to use for Clinton’s reelection in order “to better position her in the United States to acquire computer, missile, and satellite technologies.”
Hughes Space and Communications, after the explosion of two of its communications satellites launched by China, gave China valuable information to make its rockets “more reliable.” This information, which was directly applicable to China’s military rockets and satellites, was not licensed by the United States for export.
Loral Space and Communications, as a result of the 1996 crash of a rocket carrying its communications satellite, performed “an unlicensed defense service for the PRC that resulted in the improvement of the reliability of the PRC’s military rockets and ballistic missiles.” This information about Western diagnostic processes facilitates improvements in reliability for all PRC missile and rocket programs.
The Defense Department concluded that “Loral and Hughes committed a serious export control violation by virtue of having performed a defense service without a license.” The State Department referred the matter to the Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution.
Don’t hold your breath until Janet Reno indicts. Loral’s CEO was the largest Democratic contributor of legal campaign money.
We are kidding ourselves if we think that these are the acts of a friendly trading partner whose rough edges can be smoothed over by admission into the World Trade Organization (which means automatic status as what used to be called Most Favored Nation). Like all Communist countries, “the Party controls the gun”; i.e., the Communist Party is supreme over all government, military and civilian entities, including the army, navy, air force, espionage operations, government bureaucracies, commercial enterprises, and foreign trade.
Don’t let anybody tell you that the Cox Report is a dud. Even though the Clinton Administration censored out a third of the text, it’s an explosive missile.
