Reply #25: Goss on China ..from 1999 KCET interview

[SoCalDem]

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/congress/jan-june99/congress_response_5-26.html


REP. PORTER GOSS, (R) Florida: Well, I think that China was spying as many countries do. So they are complicit, and they are continuing to try their espionage and they are continuing to try and pedal influence illegal in this country. But the fact of the matter is our defenses that were let down because we have a primary responsibility to protect our own most important secrets, weapon labs and our nuclear capabilities. We talk about the safety of the children. I can't think of a more applicable place to look than that for the future generations. And obviously, there were serious lapses and corrections are the first thing that need to be taken care of and I think the Speaker is dead on on that.

JIM LEHRER: So you think what should be done about this is mostly something that should be done internally within the U.S. Government, not externally in our relations with China?

REP. PORTER GOSS: Well, I think that the way we conduct our external relations with China is extremely important. And I think that the intelligence role in import-export policies is a factor that needs to be pursued. But I believe the major steps need to be taken domestically in the United States with regard to how we go about our counterintelligence, not only with Department of Energy, but in the other dozen or so agencies involved in the intelligence community that have these secrets and in dealing with the problem of law enforcement and intelligence resources who are tasked against those who are trying to steal our secrets. We obviously have not done as well as we should. There are lots of leftovers out of this report to track down. We've got several espionage cases DOJ is working on right now. There are people asking the question properly, what did the Chinese get for their hundreds of thousands of dollars of political influence money? What were they trying to get? Those are the kinds of things I think we need to know more about and then the remaining questions about Congressional oversight. Were we getting the same kind of candid information out of the administration on this subject as we deserved to have on the Hill? Or were there some problems? And there are some inconsistencies that need to be sorted out there so that our oversight does work so that we can be sure when we tell the American people that things are under control that we know what we're talking about.

JIM LEHRER: Now, Congressman Spratt, you were also on the Select Committee. If you had to cite one thing that you think would be the most important thing that should be done as a result of this report, what would it be?

REP. JOHN SPRATT, (D) South Carolina: We need a counterintelligence program that works. I've been involved with the DOE programs and with the labs for a long time. And every time I went to the labs back in the late 80's, early 90's, I came away with the impression they had a counterintelligence program. I thought they had one. Clearly, they had one with serious lapses in it. We have a bill - we'll be offering it as an amendment to the defense authorization bill on the floor when it comes up soon, which will codify the creation of this office and make sure the director of it is wired directly into the Secretary of Energy and then wired into each of the labs at the highest levels of the lab. But, in addition to that, if this is just a staff function, it won't be sufficient. The notion of security needs to be implicated in the people who work with the most secure things in the whole labs, the weapons designs. There needs to be a program - they have to convince them that this is not the responsibility of counterintelligence alone, it's their responsibility to enforce, carry out and make this program work.

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