The Manchurian presidency

Understanding the security disaster that has befallen the United States requires an understanding that the leakage of America's secrets proceeded along two parallel tracks. One track was espionage, the other was a political-economic track through the legal commercial activities of the United States government -- in particular through its political oversight of these commercial activities, which in past administrations had included formal controls of sensitive technologies that the Clinton team systematically dismantled. Political contributors to the Clinton-Gore campaigns played key roles in promoting the dismantling process.

A central figure in the economic track of Chinese activities was the vice president and Far-East area manager for the Worthen Bank, a Chinese-born American named John Huang, who was a friend of Bill from Little Rock days. Triplett and Timperlake make a strong case that it was through the personal intervention of Hillary Clinton that in 1994 Huang was made a top official in the Commerce Department, where he had access to all the information an agent would need to strip America of the supercomputer technologies vital to the development of advanced weapons systems. Huang also inexplicably retained his top security clearance in the Commerce Department when he left the government.

The decision to leave the government for a position at the Democratic National Committee was made for Huang at a meeting in the Oval Office attended by the president, Huang, Riady, Riady partner and former Rose law firm head Giroir and presidential aide Bruce Lindsey.

This meeting took place three days after the president had decided on a strategy to rescue his failing political fortunes, which had reached a nadir following the Democrats' historic defeat in the congressional elections of 1994 and Newt Gingrich's ascension to the speakership of the House. It was the first Republican majority in the House in 48 years.

Designed by the president's new political advisor, Dick Morris, the strategy involved a massive television advertising campaign, directed against Gingrich and the Republican House. The campaign has been directly credited with turning the political tide and ensuring the reelection in 1996 of the Clinton team. The chief fund-raiser for this campaign was John Huang.

It should be evident from these facts (and they could easily be amplified with many more) that the alliance Clinton has made with the Riadys and their China network is the pivot of his political career, and the absolute key to his survival. It has had consequences for American politics and security so vast that no brief summary can begin to describe them.

In 1996, to pick an illustrative example, the Long Beach (Calif.) City Council granted a lease on the demobilized Long Beach Naval Station to a Chinese company named COSCO, which is little more than the naval arm of the Chinese communist army and is a major arms supplier to dictators and terrorists. Its cargoes have included rocket fuel for Pakistan, helping to destabilize the Indian peninsula; and nuclear components for Iran, a volatile factor in the Middle East. In 1996 a COSCO ship was seized in Oakland, Calif., by U.S. Customs agents who discovered a cargo of 2,000 assault weapons intended for sale to Los Angeles street gangs.

Why would the Long Beach City Council approve a lease to such a company, particularly if the relevant oversight officials in Washington had alerted them to the nature of the COSCO enterprise? Because the relevant oversight officials in Washington did not alert Long Beach to the danger posed by COSCO. On the contrary, they encouraged the deal.

In the 1996 campaign, Johnny Chung -- another middleman for the China network and for COSCO in particular -- gave $366,000 to the Democratic Party. It was subsequently returned after the campaign finance scandal surfaced and it was clear that it had come illegally from foreign sources. Among the sources was a Chinese intelligence officer, Lt. Col. Liu Chaoying, the daughter of China's highest ranking military officer. On the eve of the 1996 elections, a White House official named Dorothy Robyn made a conference call to the Long Beach City Council and applied direct pressure on them to push the deal with COSCO through. Robyn told the Council that the "national interest would best be served if the [COSCO] plan proceeds." The chief competitor for the lease, whose application was denied by White House pressure, was the U.S. Marine Corps.

Nine months before the COSCO lease was sealed, a crisis had developed in the Taiwan Strait. Elections were being held in Taiwan and the communist regime, which claims sovereignty over Taiwan, was launching intermediate range ballistic missiles with blank warheads in the direction of the island, an act of blatant intimidation. The Clinton administration had interposed two aircraft carriers from the 7th Fleet ostensibly to remind the communists that Taiwan was an American ally. At that moment, an old Little Rock friend of Clinton's appeared in Washington with a $460,000 donation to the legal defense trust that Clinton had set up to defray his expenses in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.

The friend also brought a message from one of China's top officials that if the United States interfered in this matter, a missile attack against Los Angeles would become a possibility. The friend also brought his own broken-English personal message: "Any negative outcomes of the U.S. decision in the China issue will affect your administration position especially in the campaign year."

The messenger was Charlie Trie, owner of the Fu Lin restaurant in Little Rock. Trie was also a member of the Four Seas triad, a billion-dollar Asian crime syndicate allied to Chinese military and intelligence agencies. Clinton's written reply to Trie's blackmail was addressed "Dear Charlie" and assured him and his communist bosses in Beijing that the interposition of the aircraft carriers was "not intended as a threat to the People's Republic of China," but as "a signal to both Taiwan and the PRC that the United States was concerned about maintaining stability in the ... region."

The network of businessmen, agents and gangsters that links Clinton to China's communist dictatorship is interwoven with every element of the greatest security disaster in American history. It is as though the Rosenbergs had been in the White House, except that the Rosenbergs were little people and naive, and consequently the damage they were capable of accomplishing was incomparably less. It could even be said on behalf of the Rosenbergs that they did not do it for themselves, but out of loyalty to an ideal, however pathetic and misguided.

President Clinton has no such loyalties -- neither to his family, nor his party, nor his country. As is evident from the disclosures that have already come to light, the damage he has done is without precedent and will dwarf even the legacy of national embarrassment that he earned for himself in the Lewinsky affair. The wounds he has inflicted on this nation, and every individual within it, with consequences unknown for future generations, cannot be said to have been inflicted for ideological reasons or even out of some perverse dedication to a principle of evil. The destructiveness of President Clinton has emerged out of a need that is far more banal -- to advance the cause of one ruthlessly self-absorbed man.

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