Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China (10 page)

The principal neutron bomb developed by the United States was designed for the W-70 warhead, produced at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the Army's short-range, tactical Lance missile. President Kennedy initially decided against building the neutron bomb, but approved production after the Soviet Union broke a voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing in the atmosphere in 1961. President Carter deferred production of the neutron bomb in 1978 after mass protests in Europe against US plans to deploy the weapon there.

President Reagan ordered production of the bomb resumed in 1981. The W-70 was never deployed, and President George H. W. Bush retired the weapon in 1992, after the end of the Cold War. The last W-70 warhead was dismantled four years later.

In 1999, however, the Cox Report made news about the neutron bomb. "In the late 1970s," the report stated, "the PRC stole design information on the U.S. W-70 warhead from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.
The U.S. Government first learned of this theft several months after it took place."

According to the report, "the FBI developed a suspect in the ... theft. The suspect worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and had access to classified information including designs for a number of U.S. thermonuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile at that time.

"In addition to design information about the W-70, this suspect may have provided to the PRC additional classified information about other U.S. weapons that could have significantly accelerated the PRC's nuclear weapons program.

"The Clinton administration has determined that further information about these thefts cannot be publicly disclosed."

Without identifying Gwo-bao Min by name, the Cox Report was describing the
TIGER TRAP
case. How China may have acquired the design details of the neutron bomb was the critical secret hidden in the government's
TIGER TRAP
files, the secret that "cannot be publicly disclosed."

The Cox Report did not provide any details that led it to assert that design information about the neutron bomb had been stolen from Livermore. But among the five questions in the letter to Gwo-bao Min from Hanson Huang, and copied onto the index cards Min had in his carryon bag at San Francisco International Airport, was what seemed at first to be a general physics question. On further analysis, however, government scientists concluded that the question could only relate to the neutron bomb, to which Min had access at Livermore.

Since Min had not confessed to passing nuclear weapons secrets to China, the Justice Department had turned down the FBI's repeated requests to arrest him. But the Cox Committee was not under the same restraints as a law enforcement agency. It was thus able to go a step further and assert that China "stole design information" on the neutron bomb from Livermore.

The FBI and the Livermore scientists feared that Min may have given China more than information about the neutron bomb. Another one of the five questions, when later analyzed by government physicists, appeared to relate to a critical secret that enabled the United States to develop a small, miniaturized hydrogen bomb by using two-point detonation of the fission bomb that served as the trigger. Detonating the fission bomb at only two points instead of surrounding it with explosives was the key to a breakthrough by US scientists in developing a smaller, lighter warhead.

Min seemed to suggest, in the conversation overheard by the FBI, that his answers to the questions did not reach Beijing. He had claimed that the cutout or intermediary to whom he gave the "information" got lost and could not find the accommodation address in Hong Kong.

Whether or not that story was credible, Min had other contacts with the Chinese. From the way the five questions were written, it was clear that they were in the nature of follow-up inquiries to data that Min had already discussed in China. Min provided additional information in the second of two meetings in San Francisco with Hanson Huang, who then flew to Washington and in the Chinese embassy wrote up a report on the meetings that was pouched to officials in Beijing.

In 1988 China tested a neutron bomb, according to the Cox Report. China did not announce that at the time, however. A decade later, in July 1999, China confirmed that it had successfully developed a neutron bomb. It made the announcement in a thirty-six-page angry rebuttal to the Cox Report.

The rebuttal was released at a news conference in Beijing in which Zhao Qizheng, a senior official, blasted the Cox Report as misleading and racist. The Cox Report, Zhao said, implies that "Chinese can't be as smart as Americans, so they must have stolen the technology."

Titled "Facts Speak Louder Than Words and Lies Will Collapse on Themselves," the Chinese response attacked the Cox Report as a "concoction" full of "groundless accusations" that were "utterly absurd" and a "vicious slander" that had "aroused the strong indignation of the Chinese people."

The rebuttal made only a brief reference to the neutron bomb. "The neutron bomb seems quite mysterious to ordinary people. In fact, it is a special kind of H-bomb. Since China has already possessed atom bomb and H-bomb technologies, it is quite logical and natural for it to master the neutron bomb technology through its own efforts."

The document did not reveal whether China had tested the neutron bomb, when it had developed the weapon, or whether it had produced or deployed it. But it said that China had overcome technical problems to develop its nuclear weapons and "the neutron bomb technology" by "relying on its own forces, on its large number of talented scientists full of creative spirit."

To emphasize that China had the neutron bomb, the New China News Agency put out a dispatch that same day headlined, "China Masters Neutron Bomb Technology."
The story said Beijing had begun work on the bomb in the 1970s. "China has already mastered the neutron bomb design technology," the story declared.

The Cox Report asserted that in 1996 the intelligence community learned that China "had successfully stolen" more secret information about the neutron bomb
from a US weapons lab. It offered no further details about the second alleged theft or whether the source of the leak had been uncovered by the FBI. But there was a
TOP SECRET
investigation, apparently code-named
SILENT CHORUS
, of the second reported theft.

One published account, cited by the Congressional Research Service, quoted unnamed American officials who speculated that China may have sought more US information about the neutron bomb because the Chinese test in 1988 was not successful.

In January 1999 the classified version of the Cox Report circulated among White House and government officials, and the Clinton administration knew it would have to react when the report became public. In February, George Tenet, then the director of the CIA, appointed Robert D. Walpole, a senior agency manager and former State Department official, to head an interagency task force to conduct a damage assessment on Chinese acquisition of US nuclear weapons secrets.

Despite the uproar over the Cox Report, in the end the damage assessment agreed with a number of the report's central conclusions:

China obtained by espionage classified US nuclear weapons information that probably accelerated its program to develop future nuclear weapons....

China also obtained information on a variety of US weapon design concepts and weaponization features, including those of the neutron bomb.

Like the Cox Report, the damage assessment—or at least the version made public—never mentioned by name the case it was referring to, the case that had begun two decades earlier, code-named
TIGER TRAP
.

Chapter 8

THE WALK-IN

E
ARLY IN
1995, an event took place that jolted American intelligence agencies and touched off years of controversy inside their closed and secret world.

A middle-aged Chinese man appeared at a CIA station in Southeast Asia with a large cache of documents. Among them was a blockbuster, a Chinese government memo, classified
SECRET,
that described, in chilling and specific detail, the miniaturized W-88 thermonuclear warhead that sits atop the ballistic missiles on US Trident submarines. The W-88 is the crown jewel, the most advanced weapon in the nation's arsenal.

The man who brought the documents was a classic walk-in, the designation in the intelligence business for someone who shows up and volunteers information. In this case, the walk-in presented a document that displayed the classified measurements of America's most secret nuclear weapon. He might just as well have walked in with a bomb in a suitcase.

The walk-in, whose identity has never been revealed by US intelligence, was cautious. He did not, in his initial contact, bring the documents. But he told the CIA he had what he described as a duffle bag full of Chinese classified secrets that he wanted to sell. The next time he came, he brought the papers with him. He said he had gotten them out of China by shipping them to himself abroad—by DHL.

The walk-in then told the CIA officers who questioned him at length a story so bizarre that it just might have been true. He said he worked in China's nuclear weapons program and had access to a library storage facility that housed sensitive classified information. The library was in a government institute.

He said he entered the storage area at night, rifled the files, collected the documents, and put them in the duffle bag. But the next problem was how to get the duffle bag out of the building and past security. He hit on an unusual solution. He threw the duffle bag out of a second-story window.

But the duffle bag broke, and papers scattered all over the ground. The man lost his nerve and, fearful of being caught, hid in the storage area and waited for a chance to get away undetected. At one point he heard footsteps approaching, but he was not seen and eventually the footsteps went away.

Relieved, he lit a cigarette. Bad move. Someone came into the room and saw the smoke rising. He was caught. He explained coolly that he had been working late, fallen asleep in the library, and decided to have a smoke. But he was leaving now.

As the walk-in related the story, he then ran downstairs, out of the facility, and found the papers that had scattered when the duffle bag broke. He scrambled and recovered them, stuffing them all back into the bag.

His story might have been dismissed as improbable but for the fact that one of the documents in his possession accurately described the measurements of the W-88. The stark fact, which could not be ignored, was that China had somehow acquired highly secret data about America's most sophisticated nuclear warhead.

The documents were flown to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where teams of translators began poring over the trove. There were so many documents to translate that the CIA had to hire contractors to supplement its own staff.

The effort went on for years. As the documents were translated, the work began of sifting through and analyzing the mass of data.

Initially, the CIA did not share its hoard of documents with the FBI and other US intelligence agencies, under the rationale that the agency first needed to translate and study the material. Not until several months later, in the fall of 1995, was the Department of Energy given the W-88 document, and an interagency group, including the FBI, DOE, and scientists from the national weapons labs, was brought in to assess the documents.

The CIA, it appeared at first glance, had struck gold. Intelligence operators always hope to keep a walk-in as an "agent in place," so that he or she can continue to supply information. A spy who becomes a defector and loses access to more secrets is much less valuable.

Under the CIA's rules, a prospect cannot be recruited as a full-fledged agent until vetted. The CIA station that proposes the recruitment must also receive provisional operational authority from Langley headquarters. Traces were run on the walk-in, and it was determined that he had no previous contact with the CIA and no known connection to the MSS or the MID, the Chinese military intelligence arm of the People's Liberation Army.

CIA headquarters officials then gave provisional operational approval to enroll the walk-in
and keep him on the job as an agency asset. With provisional status, he was one step away from being recruited.

The walk-in was closely questioned on how he had obtained the documents. He claimed that he had access to the library containing the documents because he worked in the Chinese nuclear weapons program, and he stuck to his story about collecting the information in a duffle bag and throwing it out the window. He also said that his official status allowed him to travel. Although he wanted money in return for the documents, at the same time he alleged that his motive was ideological.

Not only did the walk-in provide the key document with astonishing and highly classified details about the W-88, he also turned over data describing five other thermonuclear warheads designed for ballistic missiles in the US arsenal.

The five other warheads were the W-78, for the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM); the W-76, like the W-88 designed for a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) on the Trident sub; the W-87, designed for the Peacekeeper (MX) ICBM; the W-62, for the Minuteman III ICBM; and the W-56, for the Minuteman II ICBM. The first two and the W-88 were designed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; the others were created at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. All were deployed.

In the walk-in's documents the warheads were shown on a matrix, or grid. The warheads were listed down the left side and the headings across the top described the yield, size, and weight of each warhead, along with a drawing of the outer dimensions. The data, the scientists determined, was accurate.

The CIA's analysts concentrated on the W-88 document. The information about the outside dimensions of the other warheads was generally available from public sources. But in the case of the W-88, the walk-in's document gave precise measurements of the components inside the warhead, information that was secret and highly classified.