ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, October 29, 1996 TAG: 9610290045
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: WILLIAM SAFIRE
SOURCE: WILLIAM SAFIRE
IN 1994, A former U.S. naval officer named Nicholas Eftimiades, who now works for our Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote and cleared an article titled ``Chinese Intelligence Operations'' for the Naval Institute Press.
``Case officers make extensive use of commercial covers,'' he reported. ``For example, a vice president of the China Resources Holding Company (Hua Ren Jituan) in Hong Kong is traditionally a military case officer from Guangzhou. This officer coordinates the collection activities of other intelligence personnel operating under Hua Ren cover.''
In 1995, David Harris, ex-chief of strategic planning of Canadian intelligence, confirmed in The Globe and Mail of Toronto that ``U.S. intelligence even says Hong Kong's China Resources Holding Co. traditionally reserves one vice-presidential position for an MID (Military Intelligence Department) intelligence officer.''
What does China's espionage use of a company in Hong Kong have to do with us? Only this: In November 1992, China Resources bought control of the Hongkong Chinese Bank, part of the Lippo empire headed by Indonesia's Riady family.
That put Lippo in business with the Chinese communists. This is the same family that bought a Little Rock bank in the mid-'80s that turned out to be of great help to the Clintons. And this was a family whose patriarch boasted of placing one of his employees - John Huang, who worked at the Hongkong Chinese Bank in the mid-'80s - in a sensitive trade post in the Clinton administration.
The Riadys' Huang has been as missing as Suharto's first name for three weeks, and has recently been untouchable by marshals with subpoenas. The Democratic National Committee, despite public assurances from its chairman, Sen Chris Dodd of Connecticut, is trying not to surface its fund-raising vice chairman to answer reporters' questions until the election is over.
Most media interest in Huang concerns funny foreign fund-raising and laundered contributions, and is brushed off by White House cover-uppers with an airy everybody-does-it. But the line of inquiry that troubles them is what the Riadys' man did at the Department of Commerce when he was principal deputy assistant secretary for international trade.
Merely a low-level flunky, Secretary Mickey Kantor would have us believe. Top-secret clearance meant nothing; the Lippo million-dollar bonus baby was supposedly only a paper-pusher, of no influence on policy, privy to no really sensitive material.
I think that's baloney. ``Huang was high enough to see everything,'' a foreign-trade hand says, ``and low enough not to be seen.''
When a midlevel official at Commerce gets to attend two private meetings in the Oval Office with the president and James Riady, word gets around that this guy has clout. If Huang had such access to the Oval Office, logic suggests he would have access to trade secrets and trade negotiating policy, economic intelligence of great interest to his former employer and its new partner in China.
I have seen no evidence at all to suggest that John Huang is anything other than a loyal American citizen eager to advance himself and his friends through aggressive fund-raising for Democrats - aided, as Newsweek now reveals, by a Clinton political diplomat on Taiwan.
But what Congress, the Justice Department and the White House should want to know is this: The Lippo bank in Los Angeles at which Huang worked signed the FDIC's cease-and-desist order regarding anti-money laundering laws. Was Huang questioned about the FDIC's inquiry before getting a top-secret post?
And given the Defense Intelligence Agency's knowledge of Chinese spying conducted out of a Lippo affiliate, did no spook raise a question about placing Lippo's longtime employee in a position to see our economic secrets? (DIA, worried about offending Clinton, may yank Eftimiades off China operations.)
``Please be advised that the FBI did not conduct an investigation of Mr. Huang,'' faxes the FBI, correcting my assumption that top-secret clearance required its full fieldwork. Only a name check came from the FBI; perhaps the security-unconscious Office of Personnel Management waved Huang through.
We'll find more to the Asian connection than fund-raising - unless Clinton's corruption is abetted by an anything-goes Democratic Congress.
- New York Times News Service
LENGTH: Medium: 80 linesby CNB