CHINA: RED ALERT
The report of the bipartisan Cox committee (see “Compromised,” page 16) is as grim as its advance buildup had made it out to be-in what it says about our national security and what it says about the administration.

Theft has now given the Chinese, and their rogue-state clients, the advantage of 50 years of American research. In early spin, the White House claimed the spying was purely Platonic: No missiles had been developed. In fact, the Chinese are using stolen information to develop a mobile intercontinental ballistic missile, which, Air Force intelligence reported in 1996, “will be a significant threat not only to U.S. forces deployed in the Pacific theater, but to portions of the continental United States”-California, here we come-“and to many of our allies” in the Pacific. “The espionage,” Rep. Chris Cox said, “continues . . . to this very day.”

The administration comes out from the Cox committee looking very effective at two things: hobbling the committee’s work and downplaying its conclusions. The administration subjected the report to months-long security checks and suppressed one third of its information. “Essentially the guts of the report were blacked out,” said Cox. The White House used the tactic, successfully employed during the Whitewater and Lewinsky scandals, of preemptively leaking a summary of the findings in February in order to defang them. President Clinton has also been a fount of jesuitical parsings about whether information was stolen “from labs” (recall his assurance that he was never alone with Paula Jones “in a hotel”). His funny-money and sex scandals served him as training wheels, until he had to lie big time.

Most damnable is the administration’s failure to deal with early signs of espionage. The spying, as the White House never tires of saying, went on under three administrations. But it was discovered in the first term of this one, and the Clintonites saw no evil. Janet Reno refused an FBI request to wiretap Wen Ho Lee, who let his fingers do the walking through our most secret lines of computer code. National Security Council chief Sandy Berger has equivocated about what the president knew, and when. The Justice Department flatly refused to give the Cox com- mit- tee grand-jury testimony regarding leaks of satellite data from Hughes Electronics and Loral Space & Commu- nica- tions-with the result that we may have only half a picture of what has been lost. These failures have provoked bipartisan ire: Republican senator Richard Shelby said Reno should resign and “take her top lieutenants with her”; Democratic senator Robert Torricelli asked “whether or not it’s in the national interest for her to continue.” Reno and Berger should go, for starters.

But the source of all this monstrous carelessness is their boss. Bill Clinton undertook a China policy that was a parody of engagement-all carrots and no sticks, unrealistic about China’s interests and our own. It was foreign policy for a world without superpowers. It benefited fat-cat Democratic friends (Loral’s CEO, Bernard Schwartz, was the single largest Democratic-party donor in 1996); it also benefited the Clinton campaign and the president’s legal-defense team (Webb Hub- bell was tided over in part with Asian money). Which is worse: the possibility that Berger told Clinton at the earliest possible moment that there was spying and that he did nothing, or that Berger held off, knowing that Clinton would want to do nothing? Bill Clinton is not a traitor, nor is he corrupt in the narrow sense of giving up secret X for payment Y. He just wanted to let sleeping dragons lie. They weren’t sleeping, though, and responsible presidents will have to deal with their handiwork.