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RUSH: It's a pleasure to welcome back to the EIB
Network Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz. His latest book is "Enemies."
Bill, this book is chilling. This book is frightening. All the things that
are going on with the terrorist detainee bill, the attempt to win the war
on terror -- and if your book is accurate, if you're right about this,
we've got people inside our own government sabotaging and revealing
secrets. Is it worse than it was during the Cold War?
GERTZ: It's pretty bad. In fact, it's become much more
politicized in recent years, and the book really highlights the damage
caused by spies and the kind of self-inflicted damage that some of our
security and intelligence agencies have caused by mishandling of a these
cases.
RUSH: All right. With which country are most of our secrets being
dispensed to these days. Is it China?
GERTZ: Yeah. Without doubt the Chinese are at the top of the list. From
an intelligence standpoint, the Chinese are killing us. They're stealing
secrets to the point where we don't know what's going on inside the
communist politburo in Beijing.
They're also stealing our defense secrets, including submarine secrets,
missile secrets, secrets about our Aegis
battle management ships, and also they're doing influence operations --
RUSH: Now, wait, wait, wait, wait. You say "stealing." I mean
somebody is giving them this stuff, correct?
GERTZ: Well, actually the one case I highlight, it was a spy in Los Angeles named Tai Mak was a defense contractor and got in on the ground floor of a lot of this
developmental technology. Because he was a contractor, a lot of this
technology wasn't classified. It should have been classified, and he was
able to pass that information to China. Not only did the Chinese get the
information, but they were quickly able to incorporate it into their
ships. They've already deployed two of their own version of the Aegis
guided missile destroyer.
RUSH: Well, within the last five years -- particularly less focus on the
last three and a half to four -- once it became clear that we were going
to go into Iraq, during all the negotiations at the Security Council and
so forth, I recall reading leaks in the Washington Post and the New York
Times that had to come from people in our government (state department,
CIA, or wherever) about the war plans and generals there saying, "It
won't work. We have no business going there." Is it happening like
that in this kind of spying that you're talking about? Do we have leakers
in the government who are actually conversing with the ChiComs both over
there in their own country and agents here or is it all literally just
being stolen because we're not classifying enough stuff?
GERTZ: It's kind of a combination of the two. One of
the cases I highlight is a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst
name Ron Montaperto,
who basically gave up top secret and secret intelligence to the Chinese
military intelligence. And, you know, he basically got off because he had
friends in high places, but he gave information that really damaged us.
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait. (Laughing.) He got away with it because he
had friends in high places?
GERTZ: Yeah, it's absolutely astounding.
RUSH: Like where?
GERTZ:
It's an astounding story. I went to the sentencing hearing for Montaperto
three weeks ago. He got three months in prison, and one of reasons he did
was because a senior US intelligence official who was his friend -- the
guy's name is Lonnie Henley;
he's the deputy national intelligence officer for east Asia, the same
body that makes the NIEs, and he -- wrote a letter to the judge saying
that poor Montaperto was misguided. He only made a mistake, and he wasn't
trained, and the Chinese intelligence officers took advantage of us. It's
just an astounding display of official cover-up for a spy case.
RUSH: Traitorous activity. Is that how this best be described?
GERTZ: Well, Lonnie Henley right now is under investigation but I'm not
confident that they're not going to just cover that up as well. That's
the guy that wrote the letter to the judge.
RUSH: Well, it sounds like nobody's concerned about this other than you.
GERTZ: Well, I've definitely blown the whistle in the book. And I think,
like I say, there's two parts of that story. And my point is, if spies
can get into the government so easily, what about terrorists? And that's
happening as well. I have a number of cases where Al-Qaeda people and
Islamist extremists have gotten inside the government, gotten access to
our secrets, and in a couple of cases have been able to use those secrets
to help train and help Al-Qaeda conduct terrorist attacks.
RUSH: Now, what is your reaction -- knowing this, what's your reaction --
when you see the Democrats, the Democrat Party attempting to shut down
the foreign surveillance program, their actions on the military tribunal
bill, trying to kill the Patriot Act. In all of your career of military
and intel agency reporting, have you seen anything like this before?
GERTZ: Unbelievable. You know, the Democrats have traditionally been
anti-intelligence, and it's reflected in most of their policies. If you
go back to the Clinton era, you know, it was John Deutsch, the CIA
director that imposed the most damaging rules on our human intelligence
gathering. He basically told our CIA officers abroad, "You're not
allowed to talk or recruit anybody who has an unsavory background."
Well, if you do that, the chances of recruiting anybody near a terrorist
group or even a foreign spy are going to be very difficult.
RUSH: Bill, a lot of people -- average Americans busy going about their
day may catch a newscast here and there, tune into the show now and then
-- are obviously focused on the war on terror and the Middle East. Here
comes your book with news about China. I think most people understand
that the Chinese are a communist country, but they think we have good
economic relations with them and that those economic relations will
eventually someday open up that system much as it did in the Soviet Union
and was partly responsible for bringing about their demise. I don't think
people look at the Chinese as a cutthroat enemy of ours, yet those who
study it know that they're in bed with Iran; they're in bed with Hugo
Chavez of Venezuela. What is the Chinese objective here?
GERTZ: The Chinese have a very sophisticated strategy
of undermining the United States. They don't like the idea that the
United States is the sole superpower. They want to push the United States
out of Asia, and they want to be the dominant power, not just in
Asia, but in the whole world -- and this strategy is not well known.
RUSH:
Well, but dominant power in what manner? Do they want to convert as many
nations to communism as possible, or what do they want?
GERTZ: Well, yes, they do not want a democratic system. They don't like
the fact that we have a free and open society, and they understand that
they want this monopoly of the Communist Party. They want to extend that
-- and a lot of nations are signing up to that because the communists
have figured out that the Marxist economic system in China didn't work,
but they haven't abandoned the Marxist-Leninist political system.
So they've got a fundamental contradiction there, which is very dangerous
because it could lead to some miscalculation, whether it's over Taiwan or
some other issue.
RUSH: Another question that people have when they hear stories such as
those in your book: Does the president, White House, the administration
have any recourse here? This kind of thing stuns people. They don't
understand why Americans would trade secrets, sabotage and act
traitorously toward their own country, and how can it be gotten away
with? Does the president know? Is he fully aware of all of this? Your
book contain information...
GERTZ: Yes. Yes. Here's what happened. The Bush administration, a couple
of the heroes in my book are Michelle van
Cleave and Ken deGraffenreid, good
conservatives, served in the Reagan administration, and they headed
something called the Office of the National Counterintelligence
Executive. They drew up a new strategy, and the strategy said: Look, we
can't just sit back and wait for spies to come after us and then uncover
them and wring our hands when we realize how much damage they cause. They
said we need an offensive strategy. We need to go on the offensive, go
after the intelligence services, and stop them before they get in the
government -- and do the same thing to terrorist group. Well, the
strategy was approved by the president but it was sidelined by
bureaucrats opposed to counterintelligence. And believe me there
is fierce resistance, not just in the FBI or the CIA, but in the office
of the director of national intelligence itself.
RUSH: Negroponte's office?
GERTZ: Yes.
RUSH: Now, is this an attempt to sabotage America, or is this holdovers
from previous administrations just wanting to sabotage the Bush
presidency?
GERTZ: Well, I think, you know, I would highlight what Rumsfeld was
talking about recently, that a lot of the liberal left Democrats ascribe
to the Blame-America-first Syndrome. And that is really the dominant
guiding ideology behind the Democratic Party, and I think that carries
over when it comes to intelligence and counterintelligence, also when it
comes to the war on terrorism. You get the sense that the Democrats want
us to lose the war on terrorism.RUSH: Yeah. Everybody does -- and when you call them
out on that, they act mock embarrassed, outraged, and anger. The sum
total of this is that the ChiComs are upset that we are the world's lone
superpower, and a lot of liberals in America are upset about the same
thing. Their view is that our superpower status -- Madeleine Albright has
said this -- destabilizes the world, and makes people hate us, and of
course liberals are a bunch of hand wringers that want everybody to love
us and think they have the ability to make that happen with the force and
the power of their personality. I think it's a hard reality for people to
accept, Bill, which is why -- and we're talking to Bill Gertz here,
folks, whose latest book is Enemies that details shocking things about
the leaks and the spying going on against us in our intelligence
community and the cooperation our own intel community is giving these
people. It's why people need to read your book. It came out of nowhere,
Bill.
GERTZ: Yeah. Like I say, this is an important exposé because everything
right now is focused on the war on terrorism. I'm telling people,
"Look, you've gotta be ready because down the road is China. Russia
is going south on us, and --"
RUSH: Yeah, but are they going to attack us? See, people will not believe
it. Are they going to have a military attack against us? Will the Chinese
actually do that, or do they just want to get in the position of being
able to threaten to do so successfully?
GERTZ: No. The Chinese, their strategy is to undermine
us from within. It's the old Sun Tzu
strategy, that "the acme of skill is defeating your enemy without
firing a shot." The problem is that the elites in our country don't
recognize that the Chinese are our enemy, and they view us as their
main enemy, and they're actually --
RUSH: No, they're a big trading partner to a lot of people, how can they
be an enemy?
GERTZ: Yeah, that's the argument. "If we just trade with China
somehow it will become a benign power." Un fortunately it's not
working. It's becoming kind of a giant fascist state with a
military-dominated, nuclear-armed communist dictatorship.
RUSH: What kind of reaction are you finding from people, unlike me and
others who are interested in your book? What kind of reaction to it are
you getting out there?
GERTZ: Interesting. One intel official told me that someone circulated an
e-mail inside one of the military intelligence agencies with a one-word
comment: "Ouch."
RUSH: (Laughing.) Hey, I've gotta take a break and I want to ask you
about this NIE business; have you got a couple more minutes?
GERTZ: Sure.
RUSH: Bill Gertz from the Washington Times. His latest book is "Enemies."
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We're back on Open Line Friday with Bill Gertz of the Washington
Times. We are talking to him about his latest book, Enemies,
which is a chilling account of all of the Chinese spies that are stealing
and securing secrets, sometimes with the assistance of Americans in the
intelligence community.
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