Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) right, and Rep. Norman Dicks (D-Wash.), co-chairs of the House select committee on Chinese espionage, testify Wednesday. (AP)

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 1999; Page A3

One day after a House select committee delivered its Chinese espionage report in Congress, legislators in both houses began discussing what to do about it. Proposals ranged from requiring nuclear lab employees who visit sensitive foreign countries to be accompanied by an anti-spying expert to setting up a bipartisan commission to review counterintelligence across the federal government.

At a meeting of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) proposed the 17-member bipartisan commission, which he patterned after a blue-ribbon panel that looked into U.S. intelligence agencies after confessed CIA spy Aldrich H. Ames was uncovered. Graham said he planned to attach the measure to the fiscal 2000 Defense Department authorization bill being debated in the Senate.

"If we are committed to protecting our national secrets, we need to ensure that counterintelligence efforts are working on a government-wide basis," he declared.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) offered as the official GOP starting point in the Senate a 10-point plan that included several security-tightening proposals already being implemented by the administration. His suggestions also will be offered, probably today, as an amendment to the defense bill.

One section that drew immediate concern from the Energy Department and the White House called for all Energy Department employees who participate in lab-to-lab exchanges to be trained in protection of classified information and potential espionage threats. In addition, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson would be called upon to create a "pool" of employees and contractors, "specially trained to counter threats of espionage and intelligence-gathering by foreign nationals," whose job would be to accompany groups traveling to nations such as Russia and China that have been designated as sensitive by the State Department.

"U.S. delegations will now be like those of the old Soviet Union and China, with a delegated intelligence keeper," a senior Clinton administration official complained.

To avoid an early legislative fight, Lott dropped from a previous draft of his proposal a moratorium on all nuclear lab exchanges with sensitive countries. Such a ban has been part of several other Senate bills.

On the House side, proposals have been introduced by Reps. Jim Ryun (R-Kan.) and Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.). Dicks was ranking minority member of the select committee that issued Tuesday's 700-page report after a year-long investigation into security lapses at U.S. nuclear laboratories and technology transfers by U.S. companies launching satellites on Chinese rockets. Both proposals are expected to be debated when the defense bill reaches the House floor.

The committee chairman, Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), appeared with Dicks before the House International Relations Asia and the Pacific subcommittee and the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee to discuss their three-volume report.

Before the House committee, Cox speculated for the first time about one of the outstanding mysteries of his panel's report: why a Chinese walk-in agent turned over to the CIA the several-hundred-page classified military document on Beijing's nuclear weapons development that contained information Chinese intelligence had collected about U.S. nuclear warheads.

The document is the basis for the committee's broad charge that the Chinese have stolen information about all U.S. thermonuclear weapons and particularly the latest warhead, the W-88. The document, dated 1988, was among hundreds of pounds of other material, written in Chinese, that the walk-in agent delivered to the CIA in a still-unidentified country over a period of time, according to U.S. intelligence sources. By the end of his deliveries, the CIA was convinced that the walk-in was directed by Chinese intelligence, thereby putting into question the reliability of the delivered material.

Cox said one explanation for the delivery was as "an advertisement of the PLA," the Chinese People's Liberation Army, "and was meant to be intimidating" because "this information was also shared with Taiwan contemporaneously." China considers Taiwan to be a renegade province and has vowed to see it reintegrated with the mainland.

The California Republican said a second theory was that the document was written later but that China dated it 1988 in "an effort to hide the true origins of the acquisition of this information in order to protect one of their agents." A final possible reason was "that it was a mistake," that the walk-in agent grabbed a document that Chinese intelligence did not review or did not realize was among documents the double agent was to provide in the operation.

A senior U.S. intelligence official said CIA analysts do not know why the document was among the walk-in materials. All three of Cox's explanations have been suggested by the professionals, the official said, many of whom believe the "screw-up" notion is more likely correct.