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KON4M 99
July 1999
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Beast of the Month - July 1999
Wang Jun, Chinese Kapitalist Kingpin
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
General Ji Shengde, Chief of Chinese military intelligence, to Democratic fund raiser Johnny Chung, before giving him $300,000 to funnel to the Democratic Party and President Clinton.
During the reign of terror by Janet Reno at the DOJ, the FBI has requested over 2,000 wire taps.
Only one has been rejected.
The rejection came when the FBI requested a tap on the phone of Wen Ho Lee, or a search warrant for his house. They also denied a 1996 effort to examine Lee's office computer. Lee was fired this March, accused of transferring sensitive computer data to an unclassified network, where it was then transferred to China.
There are two good ways to interpret these facts:
A) Mr. Lee is innocent of the charges against him, and Ms. Reno, fed up and outraged at the terrible violations of civil liberties that this investigation would be among, finally put her foot down and declared "Enough is enough!"
B) Mr. Lee is guilty, and Ms. Reno and the DOJ were applying cover for a spy operation that was known about and approved by those high up in the federal government, perhaps thanks to compromise due to financial support.
Given the history of Ms. Reno, which seems like a more logical explanation of the facts?
For all the hype and sensationalism behind the Cox Report and the investigation of the Chinese spy scandal, there is undoubtedly more than some truth to it, no matter what Klintonian apologists may insist. Yes, there may be a unnecessary drumming up of the Chinese bogeyman going on, and some of the accusations leveled in the Cox report can likely lead to a dangerous witchhunt against people of Chinese descent, but the curious case of Mr. Wen Ho Lee is as blatant of a smoking gun you'll find for proof of any conspiracy. Indeed, when all is said and done, the Chinese spy scandal may live up to the hype as being the greatest spy scandal since the Russians stole the atomic bomb from the United States (well-timed considering recent public revelations of Cold War Soviet spying operations.)
Mr. Lee is a minor player in the scandal, however, which perhaps is why he is the one name being thrown around with impunity by the korporate media. He is not even on the level of Johnny Chung, Charlie Trie, and John Huang, the three most notorious fundraisers for the Klinton administration with links to China (as extensively detailed in the book Year of the Rat.) Of particular interest is the involvement of Huang, who had been senior U.S. representative to Indonesian billionaire James Riady, before being appointed to the Commerce Department. Riady, owner of the Chinese and Indonesian giant Lippo Group, was given unlimited access to the White House for his funds late in the 1992 election, which helped Slick Willie get into office. How much the favors to Riady was normal payback to a big business supporter and how much of it was part of the spy scandal is an open question. Given that the Lippo Group's joint ventures in China are nearly all in conjunction with the Chinese government, thus making Riady a King Rat within the Chinese connection, the distinction is a minor one. In any case, Huang's trade position in the Commerce Department offered him access to classified intelligence on China, and he met with Chinese Embassy officials in Washington at least nine times.
The story of Johnny Chung is even more blatant: in 1996, a $300,000 donation was funneled to him by Liu Chao Ying, the daughter of China's retired senior military officer and a lieutenant colonel in the People's Liberation Army. Liu is also VP of the Hong Kong subsidiary of China Aerospace Corporation, an organization that manages China's missile and space industry. According to the Cox Report, the money was meant to help position Liu to acquire U.S. computer, missile and satellite technologies. The actual source of the donation was General Ji Shengde, Chief of Chinese military intelligence. Chung would visit the White House more than 50 times.
Still, even Liu and General Ji are dwarfed by Wang Jun (The Konformist Beast of the Month) as major players in the Chinese spy scandal. The more one looks at Wang, the more he looks like the Chinese version of a shagadelic Dr. Evil, an Ernst Blofeld (or to those hip to the Gemstone Files, an Aristotle Onassis) who uses a mammoth business empire for world domination. Longtime investigator Sherman Skolnick has even fingered him as head of the Te-Wu, the Chinese Secret Police apparatus that is over 2,500 years old. Considering the power and influence Wang holds, that may not be an exaggeration.
Wang Jun is son of the late Chinese President Wang Zhen. He is connected to more than $600,000 in illegal campaign contributions to the Democrats, according to the Cox Report. He is also chairman of the China International Trade and Investment Company (CITIC), as well as president of Polytechnologies Corporation.
Polytechnologies is China's major international arms-trading broker and the largest corporate structures owned by the People's Liberation Army (PLA.) Among the allegations against Polytechnologies is that the firm sold cruise missiles to Iran, traded weapons for heroin in Burma and brokered a number of other deals with "rogue" nations. After a June 1996 sting operation in the San Francisco Bay Area, Polytechnologies was indicted for trying to smuggle 2,000 Chinese AK-47 assault rifles into the United States, business that one would expect to not be approved by proponents of gun control. The street value of the weapons was $2 million to $4 million, and law enforcement agencies have repeatedly targeted Polytechnologies for similar smuggling activity in Los Angeles, Miami and other cities.
Oh, Do Behave!!
The ship carrying the arms was the PLA-owned and operated COSCO, the China Ocean Shipping Co. Investigators believe that the shipper has also delivered nuclear-weapon components to Pakistan and chemical and biological weapons to North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Syria. COSCO would later apply for a permit to build a cargo terminal at California's decommissioned Long Beach Naval Station. Local officials, eager to expand commercial port activity, jumped at the opportunity and prepared to invest $200 million in developing a 145-acre site. Had they received the permit, COSCO's neighbor would have been the Sea Launch Company, an international consortium developing an advanced deep-ocean rocket launch and assembly system for the Pentagon. (In late April, the COSCO proposal was turned down for environmental reasons and pleas to preserve the heritage of the former military base.) As it turns out, Johnny Chung once introduced a COSCO representative to Clinton.
Yeah, baby, yeah!!!
While U.S. law enforcement agencies were reviewing allegations against Polytechnologies (and a few months before the sting operation), Wang sipped coffee with President Klinton in February 1996 at the White House. He met the next day with Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown, who would soon after die in a mysterious plane crash. Even President Clinton has since admitted Wang's White House visit was "clearly inappropriate."
Meanwhile, CITIC, Wang's other PLA-owned commercial juggernaut, is a $23 billion financial powerhouse. CITIC has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in the U.S. bond market, which some experts claim has been partially funneled to military-run businesses, going to PLA firms and helping establish credit operations for China's international weapons sales. As it turns out, just hours before visiting with President Klinton, he had a business meeting with Ernest Green, who had just contributed $50,000 to the DNC. Green is a managing director with the Lehman Brothers investment bank in Washington, and was looking to develop business with CITIC. He was also a good friend of President Klinton.
Given these facts, the Cox Report managed to point out the obvious in its pages: "Princelings such as Wang and Liu present a unique technology transfer threat because their multiple connections enable them to move freely around the world and among the different bureaucracies in the People's Republic of China. They are therefore in a position to pull together the many resources necessary to carry out sophisticated and coordinated technology acquisition efforts."
Despite the evidence of political malfeasance, don't expect Klinton and Janet Reno to launch a serious criminal prosecution of the Chinese spy scandal, as their hands are clearly quite dirty in the mess. And don't expect the Republicans to launch one either, as shenanigans involve their party as well, extending to the Reagan-Bush years (albeit not as blatant.) Furthermore, in case you're wondering where "Independent" Counsel Ken Starr is on this issue, it turns out that he reportedly has as a private law client none other than Wang Jun himself.
Of course, with all this talk about Chinese spy networks, the whole scandal sounds somewhat exotic, a tale of treason and international intrigue. Perhaps it is a little less foreign than that. Two of the top donors to the two political parties are Hughes Electronics and Loral Space & Communications Ltd. Soon after major donations were made by the defense industrial giants to the DNC, they both were given waivers allowing them to sell their products to China. The United States had imposed sanctions against China in 1993 for selling M-11 missile components but lifted them the following year at the urging of the late Ron Brown and aggressive lobbying of C. Michael Armstrong, Hughes chairman. In 1995, Klinton named Mr. Armstrong to the influential Export Council, where he worked hard against trade controls designed to protect national security, producing a lengthy paper arguing against imposing sanctions on foreign trading partners that engaged in illicit weapons sales. Bernard L. Schwartz, chairman of Loral, also lobbied hard to ease restrictions on satellite sales to China. Later, China took advantage of what is termed as "security lapses" to obtain information on satellites launched in China through Hughes and Loral.
Incredibly (but perhaps unsurprisingly), with the spy scandal giving China vital information on computer, missile and satellite technologies, there is a big push in Washington to spend more on newer computers, missiles and satellites to keep ahead. The main beneficiaries of such a push would be none other than Hughes and Loral themselves.
Given all this, maybe this isn't the case of some alien menace threatening the American way of life. In fact, it looks more like an old, predictable pattern of the Pentagon and the Military Industrial Komplex (MIKkie for short) financing and building enemies for their own benefit. After all, if there is no threat in the world to peace and security, how can the establishment justify exorbitant American expenditures on defense? If a threat doesn't exist, we will create one.
All that said, maybe Wang Jun isn't merely a super-agent working for China: he appears just as much in league with the American MIKkie mouse club. Or maybe, like a Dr. Evil, or a Blofeld, or even like a Onassis (or like countless other big-time players), he is just working for himself, at the disposal of whoever can get him ahead at the moment. Shagadelic, baby.
That's the biggest shame of the "discovery" of the Chinese spy scandal: all it is likely to do is increase public paranoia, and demand more money to the Pentagon to battle the manufactured threat. Indeed, for all the debate behind the scandal, it has only heightened jingoistic values, when a more logical analysis would lead to the realization that institutions like Polytechnologies, CITIC, Hughes and Loral have more in common than the countries they're supposedly representing. Rather than thinking of China and the United States as an "Us versus Them," perhaps it would be better to think of the giant commercial firms as the them screwing all the rest of us, Americans, Chinese and the people of all other nations. Unfortunately, there is no money to be made in such logic.
In any case, we salute Wang Jun as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Wang!!!
Sources:
Thanks to Jim Martin of Flatland Books ( http://www.flatlandbooks.com ) and Clayton Douglas of The Free American ( http://www.freeamerican.com ) for information on the Chinese spy scandal.
Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security, Bill Gertz
Year of the Rat, Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett II
The Cox Report
"Why the Cox Report Went Nowhere"
Christopher Hitchens, Salon ( http://www.salonmagazine.com ) June 28, 1999
"The Chinese Secret Police In The United States"
Sherman H. Skolnick (skolnick@mailhost.chi.ameritech.net), June 19, 1999
Courtesy of Sightings ( http://www.sightings.com )
"Mr. Wang Goes to Washington: Mixing Business with Weapons"
David Phinney, ABCNEWS.com ( http://www.abcnews.com )
"The Slow Boat From China"
David Phinney, ABCNEWS.com ( http://www.abcnews.com )
"The Great Stonewall of China"
Justin Valente, Political Insights ( http://www.valant.com ) April 30, 1999
"China's 'Princelings' Sought US Technology"
John Whitesides, Reuters (May 25, 1999)
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