In Bed With The East Is Red Crowd

On Sept. 13, 1995 - a date that will live in Clinfamy - a midlevel Commerce official with top-secret security clearance named John Huang entered the White House, listing as “visitee” Nancy Hernreich, the president’s secretary.

That subterfuge was to conceal his presence at a 5:15 meeting in the Oval Office with President Clinton and the Lippo Group’s James Riady, the Indonesian banker and financial contributor who had placed his longtime employee, Huang, in position to see U.S. secrets.

During his 18 months of reading secret cable traffic, Huang received 37 personal briefings from a too-trusting CIA officer on the findings of U.S. agents in Asia, at which he could view some 500 pieces of raw intelligence that revealed sources and methods.

In that span, Huang made 261 calls from his Commerce office to Lippo in Los Angeles and Indonesia, 21 calls to Mark Middleton, the Clinton aide who had gone through the revolving door to Lippo. He also made 10 calls and paid a visit to Webster Hubbell, who had been paid $100,000 by Riady as a favor to Clinton just before Hubbell’s indictment.

Unbeknownst to his Commerce colleagues, Huang entered the White House and EOB 67 times. Surreptitiously, he regularly visited a “drop” across the street from Commerce maintained by Lippo ally Stephens Inc., where - often just after CIA briefings - Huang sent and received faxes and packages and made calls he did not want to appear on Commerce records.

At the Sept. 13 Oval Office meeting, Clinton - desperate for TV money - reassigned Huang to the Democratic National Committee, where he could raise funds from those he had serviced. He was the only DNC official ever to be able to keep his security clearance.

These damning facts are from the final draft report of the Senate’s Thompson committee. In rare agreement, the counterintelligence arm of the FBI and counterspies in the CIA approved this statement to be issued by the Senate next week:

“There are indications that Chinese efforts in connection with the 1996 elections were undertaken or orchestrated, at least in part, by People’s Republic of China intelligence agencies.”

That agonizingly worked-over judgment by America’s intelligence establishment is a stunner.

China’s spy network succeeded in penetrating the Clinton White House.

We are not dealing here merely with lobbying conducted covertly, unlawful though such secret activity is. As the language in the report the Senate worked out with the CIA, FBI and NSA makes clear, “the PRC engaged in much more than simply ‘lobbying.”’

We are confronted by evidence of espionage. It was conducted by operatives assigned by Chinese intelligence to collect U.S. trade policy and other official secrets, as well as by agents of influence directed by Beijing to buy changes in U.S. foreign policy.

“A variety of PRC entities were acting to influence U.S. elections,” the unclassified Senate report states. A top-secret appendix containing evidence to back up these conclusions is to be locked away in inaccessible archives for decades.

Such graymail is unacceptable. More news about the spy ring must be forced out. Our first priority is to protect our elections from foreign meddling; Americans have a need to know more right now about what spies corrupted what U.S. politicians with Chinese government money.

That’s why aggressive prosecution of the sexless scandal is needed. After 15 months of letting the trail go cold and agents flee, the Clinton Justice Department was recently impelled by the impending Senate report to hand up its only indictment in the case: Yah Lin (Charlie) Trie of Little Rock, Ark., and Macao.

What other suspected members of the Riady ring go unprosecuted by ditherers at Justice? Al Gore’s Buddhist temple friend is one: “The Committee has learned that Maria Hsia has been an agent of the Chinese government … that Hsia has worked in direct support of a PRC diplomatic post in the U.S.”

The underestimated Thompson investigation should wake us up. The Burton committee will carry it forward. The courts should give the new independent counsel in the Babbitt case the task of bringing all those in the campaign finance scandal to justice.

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