Allegations of Chinese spying have filled the news for months. First, a congressional committee headed by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) published a four-volume report claiming rampant Chinese espionage. Then, investigators charged Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee with improperly handling classified material.
Cox's report set off a furor when it was released last spring and likely tainted the public's opinion of Wen Ho Lee. But a group of researchers at Stanford says the report is flawed. The scholars, who work at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, include physicist Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, director emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; Harvard professor Alastair Johnston, a visiting scholar at CISAC; Marco Di Capua, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and Lewis Franklin, an expert on Sino-Soviet missile and space research. Their meticulous 99-page critique, released in December, concludes, "There is no credible evidence presented or instances described of actual theft of U.S. missile technology."
Cox's committee -- which included no nuclear weapons experts -- got both big and small facts wrong, the Stanford group asserts. Information about specific nuclear warheads and design codes is incorrect or out of context. (One section, for example, confuses kilometers and miles.) The Stanford team criticizes Cox's report for citing allegations as fact and for mischaracterizing Chinese nuclear policy as more ominous than it is.
The Stanford experts say the report has hurt U.S.-China relations. The Chinese have curtailed useful contacts and moved closer to their neighbor to the west, says Michael May, the center's co-director and editor of the Stanford critique. "Russia and China are not natural allies," May says, "but we are pushing them together."
Another concern is that the Cox paper has cast a cloud of suspicion on scientists working in the United States who have Asian roots. The Cox report doesn't address Wen Ho Lee's case specifically, but May says its inflammatory rhetoric has hurt the scientist's cause. "Even if Wen Ho Lee is a spy, it doesn't mean we should treat all Chinese as spies," May says. "Yet [some officials] have said almost those words."
