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Gertz book: China recruited three CIA officers
Mon Sep 18 2006 08:19:58 ET
A new blockbuster book by WASHINGTON TIMES reporter Bill Gertz exposes how China recruited at least three CIA officers as spies, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.
Gertz writes in 'ENEMIES: HOW AMERICA'S FOES STEAL OUR SECRETS, AND HOW WE LET IT HAPPEN,' that details about the spies were first discovered in 1999 by counterspies who were able to trace some of the money paid by Beijing.
Chinese intelligence paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the spies, and one CIA officer alone got some $600,000 in Chinese money.
Gertz discloses for the first time how spies were recruited by members of an ultra-secret Chinese spying unit known as the First Department of the People’s Liberation Army military intelligence service.
'ENEMIES' streets this week.
The book states that then-CIA Director George Tenet never pressed the mole hunt in the agency, and as a result the spies were never found or prosecuted. The weak response is part of what Gertz calls the U.S. government’s “see-no-evil” approach to Chinese espionage, a policy that has severely damaged U.S. national security.
The Chinese spies were never found and either retired or may still be operating, according to U.S. intelligence officials quoted in the book.
The spy penetrations of CIA are part of a major Chinese program of intelligence operations against the United States, which include the case of Chinese spy Katrina Leung, who seduced two FBI counterintelligence officials, and who gave extremely valuable electronic eavesdropping secrets to China.
Gertz raises the specter that decades of failures in pursuing China spies indicate that China still has spies operating inside the U.S. government.
Another recent spying case in the book shows how two Chinese brothers in Los Angeles stole U.S. military technology that allowed China to track U.S. submarines, and to build its own version of the Navy’s front-line Aegis battle management system, the heart of the U.S. destroyer and cruiser fleet.
“Beijing’s massive intelligence-and influence operation in the United States has been active for some thirty years, and the FBI, the CIA, and other U.S. agencies have been negligent in addressing the China threat,” Gertz writes.
Other key highlights of the book include:
· How the nation’s most senior counterintelligence officials were pressured out of office by bureaucrats opposed to a plan for aggressive counterspying.
· How China discovered U.S. bugs planted on the U.S.-made aircraft of Chinese President Jiang Zemin from a spy thought to be working for the FBI in Los Angeles but who secretly served Beijing.
· How China used the agent, Katrina Leung, to pass disinformation to the highest levels of the U.S. government, including the White House, and fooled U.S. intelligence and policy leaders into adopting naïve and benign policies toward China.
· How two senior FBI Agents, J.J. Smith and Bill Cleveland had long-time sexual relationships with Leung that contributed China’s successful spying penetration.
· How the FBI falsely accused and hounded a dedicated CIA counterintelligence officer Brian Kelley and his family for nearly two years, while the real target of the Russian mole hunt, FBI Agent Robert Hanssen, operated freely and passed secrets to Moscow.
· How Russian military personnel allowed to work at a U.S. command center in the Middle East secretly supplied Saddam Hussein with intelligence on U.S. military operations, and how the U.S. military ignored the case.
· New details of how the KGB handled CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames, contained in a classified report showing how the KGB saved documents provided by Ames and only began exploiting the secrets after Ames was caught in 1993.
· How North Korean intelligence agents kidnapped Japanese schoolgirl Megumi Yakota and took her to North Korea to train agents as part of an covert action program.
· How North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il was so upset by the 2004 puppet comedy film “Team America: World Police,” that he ordered his intelligence agents to assassinate the producers.
· How the legacy of Clinton administration restrictions and missteps on intelligence aided al Qaeda terrorists.
· How the U.S. military unwittingly aided Islamist terrorism during the first Persian Gulf War by inviting Saudi clerics to convert soldiers. One of those soldiers would attack and kill his officers during the second Gulf war in 2003.
· How a Muslim organization in the United States that was certified by the Pentagon to designate chaplains was found to have links to Islamist terrorists.
· New details of how Cuba’s communist government ran one of the most damaging spies, Ana Montes, inside the Defense Intelligence Agency for decades.
· How Montes facilitated Cuban “denial and deception” of the U.S. intelligence that succeeded in misleading the U.S. government about the communist regime’s capabilities and intentions.
· The inside story of how British military intelligence planted a spy inside the terrorist Irish Republican Army, code-named Stakeknife, and demonstrated that planting agents inside terrorists groups is possible, but raises difficult ethical and legal problems.
Gertz also discloses classified and unclassified intelligence documents in the appendix, including:
1 An FBI report showing how Chinese intelligence planned to buy its way into the Republican Party as part of an influence operation.
2 Portions of a CIA report showing how the Russian military hacked into U.S. government computers.
3 A classified Defense Intelligence Agency report on special operations forces that was produced in part by Cuban spy Ana Montes and sought to play down Cuba’s military capability.
4 A classified report showing how Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service worked with agents inside the United States.
5 Plea agreement of former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ronald Montaperto revealing how he supplied top-secret intelligence to Chinese military intelligence.
Science flies you to the Moon. Religion flies you into tall buildings. | |
sounds like a must read and one to add to the spy library.
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Hope he has good footnotes. Would love to look over the primary materials after reading this one.
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