The Chinagate scandal has finally hit critical mass, with lead stories appearing in major newspapers from coast to coast. Qualified observers from the military and the print media are terming it a more serious breach of national security than the Walker, Ames, or Pollard cases.
And indeed it is, for two very important reasons. First, as the broad contours of the scandal come more clearly into focus, we are beginning to see that the volume of information passed to the Chinese dwarfs that of all previous espionage cases. Second, those who facilitated thespying in this case occupy top positions in the executive branch of our government. Indeed, this spy scandal stretches right into the Oval Office.
In the following interview, conducted early this week, William Triplett discusses with Newsmax the impact of Year of the Rat, and the new information that has come to light since the book's publication.
TRIPLETT: We certainly hoped that it would have some impact on the impeachment process. It did not because it got out too late. In March Senator Inhofe went to the floor of the Senate and said that Mr. Clinton was impeached for the wrong reason. So, to a small extent, we are disappointed. That is on the negative side. On the positive side, we have sold a lot of copies. They have passed from hand-to-hand, with a lot of readership of the same copy. A deeper public understanding ofwhat is at stake has been achieved. We have sold about 100,000 copies, and we figure that two to three people have read each book, on average. That means around 250,000 people have read it, including a lot of people on Capitol Hill.
NEWSMAX: What impact has it had in the law enforcement and intelligence communities?
TRIPLETT: A large portion of the federal law enforcement people are handicapped in this regard because the Clintons are still in power. They are reduced to rather quiet, behind the scenes discussions, and off-channel comments about what has happened.
At the time we were writing the book, we were also assisting members of the press who were making inquiries into the activities of Hughes and Loral corporations. Finally, early this year, the administration had no choice but to cancel a satellite sale to China. So a half a billiondollars worth of satellite technology did not make its way to the Chinese military. I would say that we deserve at least partial credit for that.
NEWSMAX: In the book, you allege that President Clinton sold out our national security to China, in return for campaign cash. Has anyone made a serious attempt to rebut that thesis?
TRIPLETT: No, not even a non-serious attempt. We have been very surprised. We anticipated that there would be attacks from Clinton supporters all over the place. In fact, what they have done isbasically to try to shut us out of the national media. They have been partially successful. The reason is that the book has 650 footnotes; we took a lot of personal interviews and so forth, and it is very hard to attack this document. Consequently, they have done nothing in the wayof rebuttal.
NEWSMAX: What is the single most important fact to come to light since the publication of the book, which substantiates your thesis?
TRIPLETT: I would guess probably the Los Angeles Times series on Easter Sunday, where they confirmed one of the lines of money that came from the Chinese military into the Clinton/Gore system. The book has two parts, one of which is campaign finance, or the money in. The otherhalf is the favors out. On page 219, we have a chart which shows what in the intelligence business we would call an operation, the whole series of conduits of money going into Clinton/Gore. On April 4, Easter Sunday, the Los Angeles Times presented a very long article written by a team of reporters based on Johnny Chung's testimony to the grand jury. It not only confirmed that Johnny Chung lied, but because the case officer, that is Chinese spy Lieutenant Colonel Liu Chaoying, was bragging, we knew that other things were confirmed as well.
NEWSMAX: Admirals Moorer and Hill have stated that Chinagate is far more damaging to national security than Jonathan Pollard's spying. Paul Redmond, the CIA agent who caught Aldrich Ames, says it is worse than the Rosenbergs. Does what we currently know justify such statements?
The Chinese consulate in Los Angeles is a particular problem for American counterintelligence.
Now doesn't that sound like the labs? The Los Angeles consulate is responsible for [espionage conducted in the] New Mexico [national laboratories]. This is what they should have known, and the administration let it happen.
NEWSMAX: What is the extent of the damage to our national security?
TRIPLETT: We've lost it all.
NEWSMAX: When you say 'all', what do you mean?
TRIPLETT: We've lost all of our nuclear weapons secrets, all of our strategic deterrent; how we do it has been lost. It is lost in what we call the double bounce. You have to always remember that the Chinese have exported to terrorist countries every single military technology they have acquired. They are the only ones ever to have exported intermediate-range ballistic missiles, for example.
NEWSMAX: Was that to North Korea?
TRIPLETT: That went to Saudi Arabia, and also to North Korea. But you have to assume that everything that we give them ultimately, in one form or another, will be sold to terrorist countries.
NEWSMAX: So what you're telling me is the Clinton Administration's policy of engagement with the Chinese, trade engagement, will lead to perhaps the worst nuclear proliferation that we've seen in the past, what, twenty years?
TRIPLETT: Ever. In essence, we are back to where we were in the 1950s, when as an elementary school child I had to duck and cover under my desk.
Part II: The Chinese Agents
NEWSMAX: Who, specifically, was in charge of this Chinese intelligence operation?
TRIPLETT: General Xiong Guangkai. He's a four-star general and is the deputy chief of staff for intelligence. He's the chief military spy, the spymaster, if you will, for China. He frequently comes to the United States, and interestingly enough, he is responsible for themilitary-to-military exchanges between the United States and China.
NEWSMAX: Who were the most important assets or agents on the American end of this Chinese intelligence operation?
TRIPLETT: What we have found is that he ran a whole series of operations, and it is now becoming more and more clear that these operations were separate and they all had the same intent: to get Bill Clinton and Al Gore reelected in 1996. He funneled them through a general by the name of Ji, who was nominally the head of the agency of Chinese military intelligence. But that guy is really a lightweight. He got his job through family connections. So it is General Xiong who is running it. He had a whole series of people who were helping to carry it out. We are now finding that Charlie Trie had a line in there, John Huang had a line in there, and it's becoming more and more clear as time goes on that these lines are all connected.
NEWSMAX: You mentioned previously Johnny Chung's testimony before a federal grand jury in Los Angeles. What information did he reveal in that testimony?
TRIPLETT: He confirmed his own line. His case officer, Lt. Col. Liu, is not a very good spy. She made two mistakes. First, she allowed him to meet her superiors. In the espionage business you are not supposed to do that. If you're running an agent in the line below you, you don't allow that person to know to whom you report; but she did. So he knew that he was putting the money into Clinton/Gore, and he knew where it came from. The $300,000 came from General Ji, and Ji reported to General Xiong. So that previously dotted line becomes a solid line.
NEWSMAX: What did Chung have to say about John Huang?
TRIPLETT: Well, that's where we get into the second mistake she made. Her second mistake was to start bragging about other operations. You're supposed to keep spying as what they call a cell operation, so that people in one cell generally don't know what other people are doing. She bragged about other cells, and that's how they found out about the John Huang line, and they also confirmed the line that involves Charlie Trie, and the man from Macau, Mr. Ng.
NEWSMAX:. Congressmen I have talked to say they believe the illegal Chinese contributions to the '96 Clinton/Gore campaign and DNC are tied to changes in trade policy pushed by the President. These changes allowed the Chinese to acquire supercomputers and missile technology, to mention only two items.
TRIPLETT: That's on the export side. Your Congressmen and Senators are right. Normally when you say trade, people think about things coming from China. They are much more interested in getting the military hardware and technology from us, so it's on the export side.
NEWSMAX: These people have been careful to say that they don't believe that the link has been definitely established. Will Johnny Chung's testimony ultimately provide the link that shows the Chinese donations were definitely connected to the administration's give-away of our security secrets?
TRIPLETT: I think ultimately it will, because one of the things he's going to be asked, I'm sure, is about the companies he set up in California at the behest of his case officer, Lt. Col. Liu. He set up a whole series of Chinese companies, and they were designed to suck American military technology out illegally and send it back to China. My guess is that, to the extent that anything can ever be determined, I think it's going to happen.
But you have to remember you're dealing here with an administration that has great experience and capability of obstructing justice. For example, the Justice Department let the statute of limitations run out on the offenses that John Huang committed in 1992. So documentsdisappear, people suddenly have memory loss, etc. It's going to be tough, but at the end of the day, I think a fair observer will sit back and say, okay, this walks like a duck, flies like a duck and quacks like a duck - it's a duck.
NEWSMAX: Who is John Huang, and what, specifically, did he provide to Chinese intelligence?
TRIPLETT: We think that he provided a whole series of information from CIA briefings that he received. He was placed in the Commerce Department at the behest of Mr. Clinton, and he, through cracks in the system or whatever we want to call that, received a top secretclearance. He was in the position of having his own magic lamp, if you will. He could call in the CIA and say, tell me everything you know about such-and-such an item. Looking at the patterns of what his requests were, it is clear that he was looking for political, economic and military information that would be useful to China.
NEWSMAX: Do we know at this point that he was a Chinese agent?
TRIPLETT: At least one intelligence report links him directly to Chinese intelligence. It was clear that he was a conduit to his 'former' employers, and they are, without doubt, agents and partners of Chinese intelligence.
NEWSMAX: James and Mochtar Riady?
TRIPLETT: Right.
NEWSMAX: How did he get the information to the Chinese?
TRIPLETT: He used some traditional means. One of the things we discovered was that when he was in the Commerce Department, he was calling his former employers two or three times every business day. He also walked across the street to a secret office, which we call a kind of safe house, where he was able to transmit documents and use a private telephone line.
NEWSMAX: You said a secret office?
TRIPLETT: Right. No one knew about it. His secretary didn't know about it, and neither did any of his coworkers. A woman who had worked in this office testified before the Thompson Committee that her boss went to great lengths to make certain that people didn't know about it.
NEWSMAX: Who owned and/or provided this office to John Huang?
TRIPLETT: The Stephens Company, of Little Rock.
NEWSMAX: Is Jack Stephens also a business partner of Lippo Group?
TRIPLETT: On and off.
Part III: The American Players
NEWSMAX: In an April 13 article, Dick Morris wrote that Sandy Berger, our National Security Advisor, was a paid lobbyist for the Chinese Trade Office, before joining the administration. What has Mr. Berger's role been in this whole affair?
TRIPLETT: Berger's role has been very interesting. He was a very prominent lobbyist on Capitol Hill for Chinese interests, to the point that even Democratic members of Congress were complaining about him. For the first eighteen months of the administration, he more or less submerged. Nobody really saw him in the China area. But in the summer of 1994, he de facto took over China policy within the administration. Therefore, the paperwork generally began to go through him. Whenever you look at something awful that happened, frequently you find Berger's fingerprints.
NEWSMAX: When you say awful, you mean when technology was allowed to go to the Chinese?
TRIPLETT: That's right. Or alternatively, when it had gone to the Chinese and the federal bloodhounds were on the march, closing in on someone who happened to be the number one contributor, he arranged for a waiver to, in essence, give the man a get out of jail free card.
NEWSMAX: Are you talking about Bernard Schwartz, of Loral Corporation?
TRIPLETT: Sure. You also find his fingerprints on the discouragement of Mr. Trulock of the Department of Energy, who came to him not once, but twice, in an effort to get the espionage stopped at the labs. He was dismissed on both occasions. In fact, for his efforts, Trulock lost his job and was demoted.
NEWSMAX: That brings up the former acting Secretary of Energy, Elizabeth Moler. Trulock testified recently before the Senate that Moler denied him permission to brief the House Intelligence Committee about China's theft of technology, including the W-88 warhead. What is your impression of her role?
TRIPLETT: I watched her testify, I watched him testify; I don't know whether it is bias or not, but it certainly looked to me like he was credible and she was not. The fact of the matter is, on substance he is right and she is wrong. Prior to going to the Department of Energy, she was a Capitol Hill staff member who had a reputation for being very partisan.
NEWSMAX: How would you describe Ron Brown's role in this scandal?
TRIPLETT: It looks as though Ron Brown was probably deeply involved. There are rumors around the system that he was about to cut a deal with the independent counsel who was assigned to him. Had he lived, I think we would have known a lot more about what happened, and a lot sooner, and we might have been able to stop some of the losses. But when he died, and he also took with him John Huang's supervisor, it in essence stopped that whole line of investigation.
NEWSMAX: Nolanda Hill has allegedly said that Brown discussed with her administration policy for making our military technology available to China, which he said was close to sedition. What is the significance of her testimony?
TRIPLETT: We wondered about whether Nolanda Hill's testimony was credible or not when she first gave it - actually before she testified she told what she knew to ABC. We then went through the system to see whether her testimony was credible or not. The other information we uncovered supports her, in my opinion.
NEWSMAX: Who benefitted most from Ron Brown's death?
TRIPLETT: The Clintons, without a doubt.
NEWSMAX: Why is that?
TRIPLETT: Well, because if the stories are true that he was going to turn state's evidence, he knew where all the bodies were buried. He had been the head of the campaign in 1992. Of course, all the export control items, licenses and so forth, went right out of his office.
NEWSMAX: Wen Ho Lee was identified in 1995 as a suspect in the transfer of technology to the Chinese. FBI Director Freeh stated recently that this is now a top priority for the FBI. Why has Freeh taken so long getting around to covering this in the manner it deserves?
Is Freeh also complicit in covering for the Chinese?
TRIPLETT: This is a very good question about Freeh. Some people think he is an honest guy, because he has consistently called for an independent counsel on Chinagate. Others think he is just blowing with the wind. It is hard to say why he has taken so long. The real problem is less Freeh than it is the Justice Department. The Justice Department under Reno has become so corrupted that it has beaten down the FBI to the point that they cannot do their job. How does it happen that out of roughly 800 requests per year for wire taps, the only one that was turned down was this one [pertaining to Wen Ho Lee]?
NEWSMAX: Is it possible this was part of a sting operation against Chinese intelligence; that the wire tap was denied because the intelligence community wished to pass corrupted information to the Chinese?
TRIPLETT: Oh my gosh, no. I wish that were true, but there is no indication I can see that we were capable of doing that.
Part IV: The Cox Report
NEWSMAX: Have you seen a copy of the Cox Report?
TRIPLETT: Seen, as in held in my hand, no. Do I have some understanding of what it probably contains, yes.
NEWSMAX: Will it have revelations that go beyond what was in your book?
TRIPLETT: Oh, yes. Mr. Cox and I met, and every member of the Cox Committee and every senior staffer had a copy of Year of the Rat. Year of the Rat is a road map, if you will, for investigations.
NEWSMAX: What do you anticipate will be the most damaging allegation made against this administration in the report?
TRIPLETT: I think the report is going to be another double bounce. The first thing that will happen is the report, which does not talk much about campaign finance, will come out and say this or that bad thing happened. People will say, "Oh my God."
Then, fairly quickly, depending on how good people are with computers and match-up, people will begin to look and say, "there seems to be a pattern here of bad things happening at about the same time that money changes hands." What I'm saying is, I do not think it will be a one-daywonder.
NEWSMAX: In other words, this information will have to be developed and fleshed out over a long period of time?
TRIPLETT: That's right, and none of it will be good for the Clinton administration.
NEWSMAX: Jeff Gerth broke a big story on Sunday, May 2, based on a leaked document. Does the leaking that has begun to take place indicate some in the FBI and intelligence community have determined that the Cox Report will be so watered down by the time the administration getsfinished with it that it will have little effect, and that they are moving on their own to get the information out?
TRIPLETT: I think it is clear that there is a struggle, if you will, between the professional law enforcement community on the one hand, and the Clinton administration on the other. There is an effort being made by the White House to paint them as wrong and incompetent, and there isan effort by them to point to the administration.
Coming to your express question about what we can expect from the Cox Report, what percentage of it is ultimately going to come out, I don't know. It is clear to me that Mr. Cox is in the political fight of his life. What percent he can get out - 80%, 90% - I don't know. We arenow well into May, and the administration has been fighting with them for four months. They do not want to give up anything. If the information were not damaging to the national interest, or were harmless to the administration, they would not have fought like this.
NEWSMAX: When the first stories came out that the report was finished, it looked like the committee was unanimous in its findings. But a close observer watching Cox and Dicks on television talk programs will have noticed Mr. Dicks making statements that indicate the unanimity has dissolved. Is that a fair assessment?
TRIPLETT: I think, certainly, Mr. Dicks is under a lot of strain. On the one hand, he is a patriot; on the other hand, he is a Democrat. None of this is going to look good for a Democratic administration.
NEWSMAX: Jeff Gerth stated in his articles, "outsiders gained access and total control to create, view[,] modify, or execute any or all information stored on the system." This is with regard to the information that Wen Ho Lee made available to access from outside Los Alamos. Does this mean the Chinese could have altered our own codes in the Los Alamos computer system?
TRIPLETT: You are beyond my technical capability here.
NEWSMAX: Do you have any concluding remarks?
TRIPLETT: Last week, after Jeff Gerth's Wednesday article came out, I spoke to a U.S. Senator. I said, "does this mean we are standing here buck naked without a barrel?" And he said, "You got that right. We've lost it all."
NEWSMAX: Again, when you say all, you mean . . .
TRIPLETT: All of our strategic weapons. Design, information, how we do it, how we make it; what goes bang, what goes fizzle.
NEWSMAX: Have we had the last major news story on this scandal, or is there yet more to come?
TRIPLETT: We are in the overture.
NEWSMAX: This is only the beginning?
TRIPLETT: Oh, yes.
NEWSMAX: What more could there be if all our nuclear secrets are gone? How, indeed, could there be more?
TRIPLETT: There is a lot more.
NEWSMAX: More advanced weaponry? The next generation of weapons?
TRIPLETT: Sure.
NEWSMAX: The next generation of weapons has been made available to the Chinese?
TRIPLETT: Let's just say that it would not surprise me if a year from now we had this conversation and we said, "well, a lot more stuff certainly went out the door than we thought.
