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AIM Report

The Chinese Spy Scandal

By Reed Irvine
April A 1999

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Exerpt from April, 1999 Report
This suggests that the President and his aides did not take the evidence of spying that had been presented to
them seriously, influenced by the Chinese money that was flowing in to help fund Clinton=s reelection
campaign and his legal defense fund. Edward Timperlake and William Triplett, the authors of The Year of the
Rat, provided a another possible explanation for this in The Washington Times on March 22. Demanding
Berger=s resignation, they wrote, AMr. Berger was an unfortunate choice for a national security position with
the government because of his prior role as the chief Washington lobbyist for the Chinese government=s trade
office. Having once had a personal financial stake in the promotion of pro-Beijing policies raises an immediate
question of his present judgment and decision-making.@

Sam Cohen, the inventor of the neutron bomb, has a radically different theory about how China acquired our
nuclear weapons secrets. In response to stories about the Cox Committee report, Cohen presented his theory
the following article in The Washington Inquirer of Jan. 25, 1999.

Chinese Nuclear Espionage; Fact or Convenient Fiction?

by Sam Cohen

In 1988, The Washington Post printed a brief dispatch stating that China had tested a neutron bomb
underground. The story came and went, producing practically no public attention. But knowing quite a bit
about the neutron bomb (I invented it), my attention was greatly piqued.

Here was a bomb that produced mainly nuclear radiation (neutrons) and precious little blast, making it
essentially impossible to detect and analyze when tested underground. So how did the story get out in the U.S.
media unless the U.S. government knew what had gone on and deliberately leaked it? I very strongly suspect
this is what happened, for geopolitical reasons having to do with the U.S. arming of its new Chinese ally,
formerly a bitter enemy, to be better able to defend itself against the then-existing Soviet threat.

About two years after this seemingly innocuous revelation came out, a very shocking story appeared in the
U.S. media. It seemed that Chinese scientists who had been making regular visits to the Lawrence Livermore
nuclear weapons laboratory in northern California, ostensibly on an unclassified basis, had managed to take
advantage of Livermore=s lax security and stolen sufficient secrets about neutron bomb technology to enable
them to develop and test one of their own. Washington professed to be outraged and Livermore=s security
system was put under the most intense scrutiny. A government official was quoted as saying there was Aa
total, complete lack of management oversight@ that was Aabsolutely devastating.@

Former CIA Deputy Director George Carver declared outright that AIn 1988 the Chinese blossomed forth with a
neutron bomb, which was made from data stolen from U.S. research centers.@ Yet, despite this outrage over
Chinese perfidy and U.S. security laxity, no arrests were made, nor was it revealed that any U.S. scientists had
been appropriately punished for such a serious security breach. Nor had any Chinese spies been caught. All of
which strongly suggests that there had been no security violations and that the alleged Chinese thefts actually
had been a planned clandestine technology transfer designed to significantly bolster China=s ground defenses
against an otherwise greatly superior Soviet army.

Some years earlier, while working in Paris with a military strategic institute sponsored by the French
government, I was introduced to a Colonel Wang, the Chinese military attaché to France. The French, who had
been receiving substantial assistance from the U.S. on their neutron bomb program, had told him who I was,
while keeping my identity and presence a secret from the media and practically everyone else, for political
reasons. Col. Wang informed me that the Chinese government thought very highly of the neutron bomb and
also very highly of me for having invented it. He had received permission to invite me to visit China as a most
honored guest. Would I come? The answer was no. I had no trust in them at that time and still don=t.

On the other hand, I told myself at the time that sooner or later the Chinese would acquire a neutron bomb
capability, which with no small measure of thanks to the U.S., they did. In what numbers I do not know, but
after all these years they could be very considerable. The irony of all this is that today, stemming from a
decision by President George Bush after the Persian Gulf War, the U.S. neutron bomb stockpile amassed during
the Reagan Administration, is zero. In fact, the Bush decision eliminated all battlefield nuclear weapons from
the stockpile. Many of our potential large enemies, it would appear, now have such weapons. Should a day
ever come when we find ourselves in ground combat with China, we could be operating at a very substantial
disadvantageCa disadvantage of our own making. "

Cohen told AIM he believes that the W-88 warhead design was also given to the Chinese in the 1980's to make
them less vulnerable to a Soviet attack. This would jibe with the explanation Trulock gave Berger for the value
of this weapon to the ChineseCthat it would enable them to mount nuclear missiles on trucks, helping them
respond to a nuclear attack. Cohen points out that Wen Ho Lee was not stripped of his pension when he
resigned and that he has hired a lawyer to sue for wrongful dismissal. Cohen believes that Lee may have been
used to transmit weapons secrets to China that were approved at a high level. If so, this would explain what
seems to be the lack of any serious effort to find evidence of his guilt and his retention of his security clearance
for over three years after he became a suspect. Perhaps the Cox Committee report will clear all this up when it is
released, or perhaps it will be so heavily redacted that questions will still remain. But Sam Cohen has
introduced some new and some long forgotten facts that suggest that even the long articles by James Risen
and Jeff Gerth in The New York Times have overlooked an important part of the story.