In March, 2003, the FBI arrested a Chinese-American businesswoman and Republican fundraiser, alleging that she had passed a frighteningly broad range of American intelligence secrets to the People's Republic of China (PRC). For two decades, Katrina Leung had been a paid bureau informant, supplying information on Chinese intelligence operations in America. She'd also been sleeping with two senior FBI agents--one of whom was her so-called "handler"--for the better part of those two decades.
Her treachery touched everything: the 1997 campaign finance scandal, the investigation of Wen Ho Lee (the Chinese scientist at Los Alamos who was once suspected of selling nuclear secrets to Beijing), investigations of spies at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and much more. "They lost everything," one hawkish D.C.-based China watcher told me.
The FBI and its congressional overseers have been given no fewer than five dramatic indications that the bureau has serious deficiencies as an intelligence agency: the Ames, Hanssen, and Leung scandals, each of which stemmed from the same basic problem--poor counterintelligence measures, particularly lax compartmentation--and the Bromwich Report and Gilmore Commission, which put elected officials and the public on no uncertain notice that reform was necessary. But to each of these five challenges, the FBI and Congress failed to respond--and in each case, their failure to act enabled further intelligence failures.
This wasn't simple benign neglect. Some of the nation's most tightly-held and vital secrets were turned over to adversary states. That's the kind of failure that usually drives Republicans around the bend, and for good reason. The mere suggestion that this might have occurred in the Democratic Chinese fundraising scandal aroused paroxysms of GOP outrage: from the wildly overheated Cox Commission Report, to limitless hours of talk radio chatter, to Republican Sen. Fred Thompson's hearings, all pursuing a line of allegation--that Red Chinese money had bought favors in the American political system--that proved unfounded.
Now we have an actual Chinese spy--charged, though not convicted--who by all indications was funneling money into U.S. campaigns. Her treachery is an intelligence failure that comes on the heels of others tied to similar shortcomings at the FBI, and one in which vital secrets were given to a power, China, which these same Republicans were saying two years ago posed the greatest threat to the United States. And yet we've not had one hearing. Not one commission. There's been very little coverage in the press, nor is anyone yakking about it on talk radio.
The Republicans didn't create the problems at the FBI. But they've sat on their hands and put politics ahead of the national interest as the scope of the problem and the cost to national security have become increasingly apparent. Not only have they ignored the problem, they have actively sought to shield the FBI from the one reform that almost everyone agrees would make such breaches of national security secrets far less likely. That's not just politics as usual. It's not even garden-variety political hypocrisy. It's a betrayal of the public trust.
Tell me again why aWol's malAdministration is better on national security? I know, the answer is tax cuts! Or maybe we should privatize the FBI... Now there's an idea...
Good thing the media's all over this one, eh?