Iran/Contra, Wen Ho Lee and Reagan's Nuclear Secrets for China

Iran-Contra & Wen Ho Lee

By Robert Parry

Over the last few years, Republicans have trumpeted suspicions that Democratic fund-raising abuses in 1996 somehow helped communist China steal nuclear secrets jeopardizing U.S. national security. Leading conservatives accused President Clinton and Vice President Gore of “appeasement” and possibly treason.

The extreme Republican rhetoric, which rose in the months after President Clinton survived impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky case in 1999, set the stage for the harsh nine-month imprisonment of Los Alamos nuclear physicist Wen Ho Lee, who was released on Sept. 13 after a plea bargain and an extraordinary apology from a federal judge.

Yet, ignored amid the dark suspicions about the Clinton-Gore administration and the embarrassing collapse of the Lee case was another startling set of facts pointing in a very different direction: to illegal U.S.-Chinese intelligence collaboration implicating the Reagan-Bush administration.

Little-noticed evidence from the Iran-contra files reveals that it was the Reagan-Bush administration that opened the door to sharing sensitive national security secrets with communist China in the 1980s. This clandestine relationship evolved from China’s agreement to supply sophisticated weapons to the Nicaraguan contras beginning in 1984, a deal with the White House that entrusted China with one of the U.S. government’s most sensitive intelligence secrets, the existence of Oliver North’s contra supply network. In the years after that secretly brokered deal, the Republican administration permitted trips in which U.S. nuclear scientists, including physicist Wen Ho Lee, visited China in scientific exchange programs. Those visits corresponded with China’s rapid development of sophisticated nuclear weapons, culminating in the apparent compromise of sensitive U.S. nuclear secrets by 1988.


http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/091800a.html

- Read this article and discover that it was the Reagan/Bush administration that passed on Nuclear secrets to China.

Wen Ho Lee was sent to China during the REAGAN Administration. And these a-holes charged him under Clinton (or just after)? No wonder the friggin case was thrown out.........

I swear, this is the most dishonest bunch of a-holes that ever walked the earth.

After this, can anybody actually be blamed for being a conspiracy theorist ?

...The GOPers simply 'revised' history and the happy corporate media went along with it. Americans would have demanded the impeachment of Reagan AND later on Bush if they had known the truth about their secret government within our government.

- And worse...Reagan made a deal WITH China to sell weapons to his contras in EXCHANGE for these favors that gave them access to our nuclear secrets.

doesn't it? I always figured the plane landed because it was supposed to land..and that China got all the info they were supposed to get...and then the plane came back home. An international incident staged to pass to China any remainder owed from Iran Contra...or for any of the new deals between the Bush family and China

I knew about (Wen Ho Lee, etc,) already. I'm a big fan of Robert Parry. It's because of what I knew that I have always doubted the American spy plane being forced down story...and the soap opera style will he (bush) or won't he apologise.

... there are about 2 dozen stories there, but none seems to be the one you mention ... where have I gone wrong here??? please help, because I surely would like to read the full story ... (for example, that web page has the VERY INTERESTING "Firewall" story which is VERY enlightening about the Iran-Contra cover-up begun in the Reagan admin. and completed in the Bush 41 admin. with his (misused)pardons)

...I changed it to go directly to the article.

Another excerpt:

China’s Missile Shipment

An examination of the Reagan-Bush time frame – and particularly the Iran-contra files – reveal how Chinese military intelligence ingratiated itself with the U.S. government. In 1984, the Reagan-Bush administration was desperately seeking a source of anti-aircraft missiles that could be smuggled to the Nicaraguan contras, a CIA-backed operation that was seeking to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

By late 1984, the U.S. Congress had prohibited additional U.S. military support for the contras, who had developed an unsavory reputation for rampaging through Nicaraguan villages, raping, torturing and murdering as they went. One contra director acknowledged the practice of staging public executions of Nicaraguan government functionaries.

Despite this congressional contra-aid ban, the White House was determined to secure surface-to-air missiles that the contras could use to shoot down Soviet-made attack helicopters that had become an effective weapon in the Nicaraguan government’s arsenal. Operatives working secretly with Oliver North, a Marine officer assigned to the National Security Council staff, settled on China as a source for SA-7 missiles.

In testimony at his 1989 Iran-contra trial, North called the securing of these weapons a “very sensitive delivery.” For the Chinese missile deal, North said he received help from the CIA in arranging false end-user certificates from the right-wing government of Guatemala. North testified that he “had made arrangements with the Guatemalan government, using the people director Casey had given me.”