China obtained missile secrets: paper

WASHINGTON, OCT. 19. China has obtained a huge amount of U.S. missile secrets in addition to America's innermost nuclear weapon classified information, including those relating to the building of the W-88, the most modern nuclear weapon in the U.S. armoury, a media report today said.

``There is no denying that China stole nuclear secrets. However, the belated new review of Chinese military documents provided by a Chinese defector as early as 1995, has led U.S. intelligence agents to conclude that Chinese espionage has gathered more American missile technology than nuclear weapons secrets'', senior U.S. officials told the Washington Post.

The new conclusion about the success of Chinese espionage in obtaining America's missile secrets as well as secrets of weapons like the W-88, was reached only this year because the CIA and other intelligence agency linguists did not fully translate the huge pile of secret Chinese documents, totalling 13,000 pages, until four years after the agency obtained them, according to a senior law enforcement official, who described the delay as ``a major blunder.''

The belated translation and analysis, said the paper, has prompted a major reorientation of the FBI's investigation into Chinese espionage. From 1996 until late last year, the FBI probe centred on the suspected loss of U.S. nuclear warhead data, and quickly narrowed into an investigation of Mr. Wen Ho Lee, an ethnic Chinese from Taiwan.

Now, however, the FBI, which never found evidence that Mr. Lee spied for China, has shifted its focus to the Defence Department and its private contractors.

The documents were provided by a ``walk-in'' defector, who at that time was suspected to be a double agent because he had sent some of the documents by an American multinational courier, Dhl, and brought other documents personally.

They show that during the 1980s, Beijing had gathered a large amount of classified information about U.S. ballistic missiles and reentry vehicles.

The new conclusion is that the missile secrets are far more likely to have come from U.S. defence officials or U.S. missile builders than from the U.S. nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos and other nuclear weapon labs, the paper said.

The documents brought by the Chinese defector, said a former intelligence official who has reviewed much of the translated material, appeared to be a five-year ``strategic plan'' for the development of China's new generation of missiles. Another intelligence expert familiar with the material described it as ``an embarrassment of riches.''

When the walk-in defector from China first delivered the documents, a former U.S. official said, the CIA read and translated the titles of each major portion, then ordered a full translation of a 76-page section dealing with ``nuclear'' information - ``data on U.S. warheads, including the most advanced weapon in the U.S. arsenal, the W-88.''

One nuclear weapons official familiar with the process said the CIA had Chinese linguists read the documents for `intelligence purposes,' to see whether they contained valuable information about Chinese missiles and warheads, and decided (wrongly) that they did not. The CIA did not perform the normal ``counter- intelligence review'' to determine whether they contained classified information about U.S. missiles and warheads, the official said.

Because of the CIA's belief that the walk-in was a double agent, a full translation of the documents seemed less pressing. ``He failed in an agency polygraph,'' the intelligence official explained defensively. The CIA's suspicions about the informant also slowed the FBI's already limited investigation at Los Alamos of Wen Ho Lee.

- PTI

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