WASHINGTON-A House panel probing U.S.-Sino ties is expected this week to release a long-anticipated report that concludes satellite technology transfers and nuclear espionage by China have severely compromised U.S. national security.
The release of the report, whose contents began leaking out last week, has been delayed because of fighting between the committee and the White House over which parts should be declassified. Some Republicans, for their part, appear eager to get political mileage out of the scandal and use it against Democrats in the 2000 elections.
The White House reportedly has agreed to implement 38 recommendations in the report, which traces security lapses and technology/intelligence thefts back to the 1980s.
“The Chinese have obtained damaging information,” said Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, who oversees U.S. labs that allegedly have been infiltrated by Chinese American spies.
The House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns With the Peoples Republic of China, chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), began last year as an investigation of suspected transfers of satellite technology from Hughes Electronics Co. and Loral Corp. after launch failures in 1995 and 1996 by two Chinese Long March rockets with U.S. satellites aboard.
But the probe expanded as new revelations surfaced that China may have stolen an arsenal of U.S. nuclear secrets. The Justice Department has been looking into the Hughes and Loral matters for months. The two firms, big players in the wireless industry, deny any wrongdoing.
“China doesn’t have a policy, doesn’t have a provision of stealing American high-tech … Some seven or eight years before the two countries established diplomatic ties, China successfully launched its man-made satellite into space,” Li Zhaoxing, Chinese ambassador to the United States, said on “Meet the Press” recently.
The backlash over alleged U.S.-China high-tech transfers prompted the GOP-led Congress last year to shift oversight of satellite export licensing from the trade-orientated Commerce Department to the more cautious State Department.
American satellite firms, which can secure rocket launches in China, Russia and the Ukraine faster and cheaper than anything offered in the United States, complain the change creates more bureaucratic red tape and makes U.S. firms that much less competitive.
