[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 81 (Friday, June 23, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H5080-H5081]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     THE CLINTON-GORE SECURITY GAP

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, the American people are viewing the Los 
Alamos tragedy, this latest tragedy of the losing of two hard drives in 
one of our most secure places in that nuclear weapons development 
institute, and having those hard drives lost for a long period of time, 
and it is still unclear exactly how long they have been lost, having 
them suddenly reappear behind a copy machine in a place that had been 
previously searched, and America debates what we should do with respect 
to this crisis; who should be fired, what reorganization should be 
made.
  I think what we need to do now is to focus not just on this 
particular incident, but on four major occurrences that have taken 
place in the last 8 years that constitute in my estimation what I call 
the Clinton-Gore security gap.
  Let me talk about the first of those things.
  First, Dr. Wen Ho Lee was focused on in August of 1997 after we 
discovered that plans for the W-88 nuclear warhead had been stolen, and 
it appeared to be in the possession of the Communist Chinese. Dr. Wen 
Ho Lee, we focused on him and determined that he was a suspect in the 
theft of nuclear secrets. This was a very serious thing.
  At that time, in August of 1997, the head of the FBI, Louis Freeh, 
met with the Clinton-Gore Department of Energy head, the Secretary of 
Energy, then Mr. Pena, and the head of the FBI said, essentially, 
``This guy appears to be a spy of nuclear secrets. Right now he is 
sitting there with total access to America's most critical nuclear 
secrets. Get him out of there. Get him out of there.'' He said that in 
August of 1997.

                              {time}  1500

  A few weeks earlier, he had met with Mr. Pena, Under Secretary of 
Energy, Elizabeth Moler, and according to Mr. Trulock, who was the head 
of security, told her the same thing, get this guy out of there, he may 
be a spy and may be accessing this very critical material. Seventeen 
months later, somebody looked around at Los Alamos, after the Cox 
Commission had started to investigate and said, hey, the suspected 
nuclear spy, is he still in the nuclear weapons vault with access to 
our most important secrets; and somebody else slapped their forehead 
and said, yes, I guess he is still there.
  In the series of hearings that we had on this incident, there was 
lots of finger pointing. Elizabeth Moler said Mr. Trulock was supposed 
to fire him. Mr. Trulock said that she was very definitely told to get 
this guy out of there and that he told her how to go about doing it. 
And yet the Clinton-Gore administration allowed a suspected nuclear 
secrets spy to stay in place for 17 months after the head of the FBI 
personally met with the Secretary of Energy and said these are the 
circumstances, get him out of there.
  Secondly, Mr. Speaker, we saw one of America's corporations, Loral 
Corporation, transfer missile technology to China in 1996. They allowed 
their scientists to engage with the Communist Chinese scientists and 
tell them what was wrong with their missiles, the Long March missile, 
because a lot of them were failing. Now, that is important, because 
that same Long March missile, besides carrying satellites, also carries 
nuclear warheads, some of which are aimed at American cities. And the 
Loral Corporation, in fact, according to the Cox Committee, did help 
Communist China make their missiles more reliable. A very serious 
thing.
  Yet a few months after that, against the recommendation of his own 
Justice Department, and after he had received $600,000 in campaign 
contributions from Bernard Schwartz, who was the President and CEO of 
Loral, President Clinton gave them another waiver to launch yet another 
satellite in Communist China.
  Also, Mr. Speaker, the Clinton-Gore administration allowed 191 
supercomputers between 1987 and 1998 to go to Communist China. Now, 
that is dangerous because they can use those supercomputers in making 
and designing nuclear warheads in their nuclear weapons complex. So 
they have an obligation, the Clinton-Gore administration had an 
obligation, under the law that we have, to go over and check on

[[Page H5081]]

those computers and make sure they are not being used in the nuclear 
weapons complex. They have that right. Of the 191 supercomputers that 
were transferred to China in that 1-year period, they only checked on 
one supercomputer to make sure it was not being used to design nuclear 
weapons.
  And lastly, Mr. Speaker, we have this case where these hard drives 
were taken out of this vault, and it has now been testified to that the 
vault custodian, the person who is supposed to identify that very small 
group of people who are allowed to come in, that vault custodian would 
sometimes leave for 2-hour time periods. This is the Clinton-Gore 
security gap. We have to close it with a clean sweep.

                          ____________________