SENATOR RICHARD LUGAR is one of the few congressional Republicans who have supported the president on issues of foreign affairs and national security. The Indiana Republican strongly backed the president on NATO expansion, the chemical weapons treaty, and the nomination of William Weld for ambassador to Mexico. So it was something of a watershed moment when Lugar took to the pages of the Washington Post last week to denounce the Clinton administration’s China policy. His doing so sent a crystal-clear signal that White House policy toward China is in for a stiff challenge from the Republican Congress.
What provoked Lugar’s wrath was the revelation that the administration had withheld information from Congress concerning China’s theft of U.S. nuclear secrets. The story was reported in the March 6 New York Times in a 4,000-word article littered with instances of top administration officials, including Sandy Berger, the national security adviser, trying to prevent Congress from learning about the espionage. The pilfered secrets relating to the miniaturization of nuclear warheads significantly improve China’s nuclear-missile capability. “There is no more sophisticated secret that we have,” one Republican senator told me. The Times article quoted former CIA counterintelligence chief, Paul Redmond, saying the breach “was far more damaging to the national security than Aldrich Ames.”
Lugar is hardly alone in being outraged. A number of top congressional Republicans are asking pointed questions, as are many GOP presidential candidates. Lamar Alexander, Gary Bauer, Pat Buchanan, and Steve Forbes all called on Berger to resign last week, while Bob Smith said Berger should just be sacked. Buchanan said the espionage was “the worst breach of national security since the Rosenbergs.” John McCain wants the appointment of something akin to the Tower Commission, which investigated Iran-contra, to investigate the Clinton hijinks. “How can you trust this administration,” he asks, “to investigate something of this magnitude?”
Vice President Al Gore and energy secretary Bill Richardson angered Republicans further by trying to shift blame for the episode to . . . Republicans. In a March 9 interview with CNN, Gore twice said the breach occurred during “the previous administration.” Richardson took the same tack, telling CNBC’s Chris Matthews, “We don’t think this issue should be politicized,” but then quickly adding that “this started in the ’80s and so there is plenty of blame to share.”
Porter Goss, the mild-mannered chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and hardly an outspoken Clinton critic, responded that such comments “display how this administration is more concerned with their party’s progress than with the well-being of the country.” He singled out Gore for criticism: “I expect more from the vice president. He knows better.” Goss’s anger is typical of Republicans on the Hill. Indeed, GOP distrust of the Clinton foreign-policy operation has become deep and widespread. In separate conversations, two respected congressional Republicans told me they thought White House officials leaked the espionage story to the Times and the Wall Street Journal in hopes of putting their best spin on an embarrassment they knew would become public.
Nevertheless, the story of the espionage, the administration’s delayed reaction, and its attempt to keep Congress unaware, broke at a sensitive moment for Clinton’s foreign policy. With Zhu Rongji, China’s prime minister, scheduled to visit Washington next month, Republicans are eager to highlight their differences with Clinton’s soft-on-China policy. “The center of gravity has undertaken a dramatic shift toward containment,” says Randy Scheunemann, a former foreign-policy aide to Trent Lott, the Senate majority leader. Lott, usually an outspoken advocate for unfettered trade with China, wants to block China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. He is lending his support to an amendment by Republican senator Tim Hutchinson requiring congressional approval before Beijing can enter the international body.
Elsewhere, congressional Republicans are predicting passage of sweeping new restrictions on who can visit America’s nuclear labs and where lab personnel will be permitted to travel on official business (the rules in both cases are notoriously lax). Similarly, if the Pentagon doesn’t scrap its plan for a yearlong exchange program with senior officials from China’s People’s Liberation Army, Capitol Hill aides say Congress will scrap it for them. And the chances that missile-defense legislation will be passed in the Senate have improved.
More contentious are the findings of a congressional committee that investigated the transfer of U.S. technology to China. Late last year, the nine-member bipartisan committee, headed by representative Chris Cox of California, unanimously approved its top-secret report. Since then, the committee has been wrangling with the administration over precisely which material, and how much of it, can be made public. Cox says the White House is asking the committee “to suppress significant findings, to eliminate examples that buttress our conclusions, and to change our conclusions from statements of fact to mere possibilities.” Cox and the committee’s top Democrat, Norm Dicks, jointly requested a meeting with Clinton last month. They’ve received no response, and may move to release the report soon.
In the meantime, the Senate’s Intelligence and Armed Services committees are slated to begin holding hearings on the espionage and the administration’s laggard response. Members of both committees told me there are countless questions they want answered. Why was the senior federal government employee who first learned about the espionage ordered not to share the information with Congress? Why was this employee demoted after blowing the whistle? Was the administration afraid that publicizing the espionage would undermine U.S. trade with China? Why did the administration continue to push for liberalized export controls on supercomputers, and why did it want the Commerce Department to have jurisdiction over export licenses? And why, as even Katie Couric asked last week during an interview with Bill Richardson, was the alleged spy fired from his lab job only after the story broke in the national media?
The wild card for Republicans is whether the administration will cooperate with any congressional inquiries. And if the White House chooses not to cooperate, will congressional Democrats back it up (as they have so often in the past)? Richard Lugar urged in his Washington Post piece that “the administration not yield to its impulses to place damage control above all else.” For in this case, he wrote, “it will not be good enough for the administration to ask for congressional understanding. . . . It will have to earn it.” A reasonable request — though, given the Clinton record, few Republicans expect it to be met. And, given the past performance of Congress, the administration may expect the inquiries and accusations will fade away and no coherent assault on the administration’s policy will be sustained. Will this time be different?
Matthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
