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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The Loral stories resulted in something besides a Pulitzer: the creation of the Cox Committee, named after Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif. Cox was chosen by then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to investigate Chinese espionage in hopes of embarrassing the Clinton administration.
Since its release one year ago, the 900-page Cox Report has been widely ridiculed for being long on conspiracy theory and short on facts. An independent analysis done by a research team at Stanford University's Center for International Security concluded, "There is no credible evidence presented or instances described of actual theft of U.S. missile technology." The Times has never reported on Stanford's findings.
It was all very reminiscent of Whitewater, where an independent counsel was named to investigate the Clintons based almost entirely on the reporting of Gerth and the New York Times. And as with independent counsel Kenneth Starr and the Whitewater investigation, Gerth enjoyed friendly Republican sources inside the Cox probe.
It's likely these sources tipped Gerth off to Notra Trulock, the renegade Department of Energy investigator who had been waging something of a one-man war against Lee and his supposed spy ring. In 1996, Trulock resurrected concern over China's alleged 1988 theft of an advanced warhead design named the W-88, which was developed at Los Alamos. Trulock singled out Lee for suspicion, since he was the only Los Alamos scientist who traveled to China in the '80s.
With his warnings dismissed by the CIA, which reasoned China obtained the W-88 data elsewhere, Trulock was welcomed with open arms by the Cox Committee staffers. And by the New York Times.
"There was a lot of gasoline on the floor and they lit a match," says Vrooman, referring to certain Republicans, Trulock and the New York Times during the political upheaval of early 1999. "The GOP lost [Monica] Lewinsky as an issue and impeachment. Now they were looking at the Chinese fundraising scandal and here comes Notra with this great story."
One former Washington bureau chief at a major daily newspaper recalls the sense of hysteria the March 6, 1999, Times story, along with Republican cries, created in the capital. "I got to Washington in the aftermath of the McCarthy era and I haven't seen anything that matches what's gone on during the last year with China."
While Gerth and his partner, Risen, never identified Trulock as their source for their story, close readers of their articles could, if they assumed the Times reporters were following an old journalism rule of thumb: Always make your sources look good. Here's what Gerth and Risen wrote March 6: "In personal terms, the handling of this case is very much the story of the Energy Department intelligence official who first raised questions about the Los Alamos case, Notra Trulock."
Illustrating the influence of the Times, "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert quickly did his best to turn Trulock into a hero, too, inviting him to appear on his May 23, 1999, show. There, Russert gave Trulock an open forum to spin his conspiracy theories about widespread Chinese espionage at the labs and the Clinton coverup. "I think the potential is on a magnitude equal to the Rosenbergs-Fuchs compromise of the Manhattan Project information," Trulock told Russert.
At the end of the interview Russert turned to his other guest, Cox, and wondered gravely, "Would the country have ever heard of the magnitude of this issue without the work and efforts of Notra Trulock?"
But critics suggest Trulock is prisoner of his own agenda. "He takes a grain of truth and distorts the hell out of it," says Vrooman, who worked with Trulock at Los Alamos for many years.
At Lee's recent bail hearing, attorneys introduced an affidavit from Charles E. Washington, who worked for Trulock as acting director of counterintelligence and is now a senior policy analyst at the Energy Department. Washington, who is black and who told the Los Angeles Times he was once spat on by Trulock, testified that Trulock "acts vindictively and opportunistically, that he improperly uses security issues to punish and discredit others and that he has racist views toward minority groups."
Fed up with Trulock's increasingly outlandish accusations, Warren Rudman, the former Republican senator and chairman of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, struck back. In a scathing letter to Trulock last year, Rudman wrote that he had "misread professional disagreements as personal affronts," and had twisted an obligation to be straightforward into "a license for calumny." This summer the FBI began investigating whether Trulock had disclosed classified information about the government's spy case when he tried to sell a magazine article.
In other words, Trulock, a contributor to the rabidly anti-Clinton chat site Free Republic, was hardly the most reliable source of information. Then again, neither were the Clintons' former business partner and congenital liar Jim McDougal or convicted felon and Arkansas con man David Hale. But Gerth and the Times relied on them both during their lengthy and influential Whitewater investigation. (Once Gerth even called an FBI agent on behalf of Hale, to let the him know Hale felt he was being silenced by Clinton-friendly prosecutors in Little Rock.)
