Bill Gertz on “Enemies”

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 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.’ Unfortunately, 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.

Bill, what can you tell me about this story that ran in the Telegraph, UK Telegraph on the 26th, three days ago: “China has secretly fired powerful laser weapons designed to disable American spy satellites by blinding the sensitive surveillance devices. The hitherto unreported attacks been kept secret by the Bush administration out of fear that it would damage attempts to co-opt China in diplomatic offensives against North Korea and Iran.” What…? This hasn’t even appeared in the US Drive-By Media that I’ve seen. It’s in the UK Telegraph. They’re firing lasers at our satellites. We’re not doing anything about it because we need them with North Korea and Iran. Where’d they get this kind of sophisticated equipment?

GERTZ: Well, there’s no question that laser weapons are one of the key niche arms that the Chinese are developing. They call them “assassin’s mace weapons.” They include laser-blinding satellite weapons, and, by the way, I reported on this last year.

RUSH: Oh, sorry about that.

GERTZ: (Laughing.) That’s okay. But it didn’t get a lot of attention at the time. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest in China affairs in the other press, but definitely this is the kind of thing they’re developing for use against the United States. It includes lasers. It includes computer network attack. It also included exotic, electromagnetic pulse weapons which includes the bursts caused by a nuclear attack that basically can disable all kinds of electronics.

RUSH: It fries the whole system.

GERTZ: Yes.

RUSH: It fries the whole grid. All right, National Intelligence Estimate. I was reading an Investor’s Business Daily editorial from yesterday, and I found this fascinating fact, and they were writing this in response to Hillary Clinton saying that if her husband had been given this kind of information that Bush was given on his October 6th daily brief, why, her administration would have did something about it — her husband’s administration. Listen to this: “According to the 9/11 Commission report, ‘There was no National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism between 1995 and 9/11/01. There was no comprehensive review of what the intelligence community knew and what it did not know and what it meant.'” So for six years, there was not even an NIE estimate on terrorism! For all this talk about how Clinton was “obsessed” with bin Laden and how they were doing everything they could… What is this NIE; how long has it been around, and why does anybody pay attention to it? Is it government agencies; is it outside contractors, or a combination of the two? Who are these people?

GERTZ: Yes. The national intelligence estimates are produced by something called the National Intelligence Council. And these are supposed to be the consensus view of all 15 intelligence agencies. But in most cases, they basically state the obvious. It’s no secret that Iraq is the center of the international war on terrorism and the fact that jihadists are rallying to that —

RUSH: Right.

GERTZ: — is no big secret. In fact, a week before this NIE was disclosed selectively in the New York Times, the House intelligence committee produced a public report which said essentially the same thing. This is clear the Democrats playing politics with intelligence. They did it right before the 2004 election when they disclosed that somehow the Bush administration had let high explosives escape from Iraq.

RUSH: Yeah, yeah. That was the New York Times again. Well, this thing has been out since April, and members of Congress saw it, and yet it’s been held for release before the election, to affect the election. But you’re absolutely right. When you read this thing it’s, ‘On the one hand X, on the other hand, Y. On the one hand, if we leave Iraq, it is going to be bad. If we stay in Iraq, it’s going to be bad. The Islamists are going to keep coming after us whether we’re here or anywhere.’ It sounds like it’s a CYA document, Bill.

GERTZ: Exactly. And the problem with these estimates is that we don’t have good intelligence on terrorism. If we did, we’d have good estimates. But if there’s nothing to analyze you’re going to come out with two-handed assessments. As I say in my book, one CIA official summed up the CIA’s problems in two words: ‘No spies,’ and if you don’t have spies inside of these terrorist groups, you’re not going to find out what they’re doing. You know, we know the first generation of Al-Qaeda’s leadership. Do we know who the top leaders of Al-Qaeda are now? No, we don’t.

RUSH: Only when they put their pictures on the Internet for us.

GERTZ: Yes. (Laughing.)

RUSH: Bill, I have to run. I’m down to precious few broadcast seconds, but thanks again for your time. It’s always a pleasure to have you here. You’re doing not only great work; you’re doing the Lord’s work, and all the best in getting the information in your book out there. I appreciate your time here again. The book is entitled, “Enemies.” Have you got a lot of other interviews you’re going to be doing? You probably won’t need any after this one, Bill. (Laughing.)

GERTZ: Yeah. (Laughing.) I’ll be doing quite a few.

RUSH: Good luck to you, and stay in touch on this. Folks, this book is — I’m afraid of the impact it’s going to have on you because it’s so shocking and surprising, and nobody suspects this kind of stuff is going on. ‘Ah, we’re a trading partner with China!’

Enemies, Bill Gertz.