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Trulock: CIA Director Aided Cover-up of
Clinton-China Scandal
Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com Friday, April 19, 2002 WASHINGTON – CIA Director George Tenet
"pulled the trigger” that silenced a senior CIA official who tried to warn of
the Chinese weapons buildup during the Clinton administration, Notra Trulock,
the former intelligence director in the Energy Department, revealed this week.
Speaking at a meeting in Washington of Accuracy in Media, Trulock also
criticized current White House aides who have rebuffed efforts to alert
President Bush of the role played by Clinton holdover Tenet in assisting the
Clinton administration in the cover-up.
Trulock, himself a victim of punishment for
whistle-blowing on the Chinese spy scandal, told the gathering that Gordon
Oehler, then director of the CIA’s Nuclear Proliferation Center, tried to warn
Congress that the Chinese buildup was far more alarming than the diplomats had
indicated.
"What happened,” Trulock told NewsMax after the
meeting, "is that diplomats were going to China. The Chinese were telling them,
‘Oh, we’re not doing this, and we’re not doing that.’ And the diplomats were
coming home and saying, ‘Well, the Chinese were telling us that they’re getting
out of this [nuclear weapons proliferation] business.’ And Oehler was saying:
‘No, they’re not. Our information to the contrary is [based on intelligence
sources]’”
Silenced
"What the [Clinton] administration finally did was
just order Oehler, ‘Shut up!’ Particularly, stop telling the [Capitol] Hill.”
Oehler’s information concerned proliferation of
weapons technologies in general, and missile and nuclear technologies in
particular.
Oehler thought it was his responsibility to tell
the congressional oversight committees what was going on, "which it was,” added
Trulock.
Trulock himself tried to "tell this stuff in ’97
and ’98, and we just got shut down.”
In Trulock’s case, the FBI raided his home in an
obvious attempt to intimidate him.
Oehler was shafted in a different manner.
"Oehler wouldn’t stop [talking to Congress]. And
[State Department official] Winston Wiley told the NSC [the White House's
National Security Council] that Oehler will not appear on the Hill again.”
Trulock added in the interview with NewsMax that
"Oehler came back from vacation. His desk was cleaned out.” CIA Director Tenet
had shut him down.
Trulock, who replaces the legendary founder of AIM,
Reed Irvine, on the latter’s 80th birthday in September (an announcement made at
the meeting by Irvine) says his spill-the-beans book "Codename: Kindred Spirit -
The Inside Story of the Chinese Nuclear Espionage Scandal” would be released
next month.
Trulock says this volume will blow the lid off the
attempts to hide from the American people how they have been betrayed for years.
Some would argue that the word for what has been happening is "treason.”
Like a Hollywood Thriller
Trulock’s account of Wen Ho Lee’s activities as a
scientist and the FBI's investigation of him reads like a James Bond movie
script. No one is certain which side others are on because so many have been so
badly compromised.
Even some characters themselves may have forgotten
where their ultimate loyalties lie, if indeed such loyalties ever existed in the
dog-eat-dog world of undercover espionage.
Security officials wanted to deny security
clearances to Los Alamos nuclear laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee and his wife,
Sylvia, (also an employee at Los Alamos) and fire them. They had discovered Lee
had kept on an unprotected computer a personal library "exactly the [nuclear
weapons] material the Chinese were seeking,” as Trulock said at the AIM
luncheon.
But the FBI talked Los Alamos officials out of
acting against Lee.
Trulock’s expose will likely discredit Wen Ho Lee’s
self-serving book "My Country vs. Me.”
Lee was paid to report on their contacts with
nuclear scientists from the People’s Republic of China. The CIA, says Trulock,
"played a role in managing and ‘tasking’ the Lees from 1984 on."
Blacked Out
Much of the story was blacked out or "redacted” in
government reports on the case.
President Bush and the Ashcroft Justice Department
show no desire to tackle the scandal, apparently wishing to "move on” and not
tangle with the Clinton smear apparatus, even though that spin machine no longer
commands the White House bully pulpit.
Trulock faults the current regime for not pursuing
the matter.
Oehler’s story of his unceremonious firing for
blowing the whistle on the Chinese weapons buildup was discussed behind close
doors to the intelligence oversight committees of Congress.
"And they didn’t release any of it?” NewsMax.com
wanted to know.
"They released some of it,” answered Trulock, who
soon added, "And I was even there at the last visit he made. And no [member of
either party on the committee] made a big deal about it. All they said was ‘OK,
you’re retiring. Good luck. We appreciate everything you’ve done.”
It appears neither party wants to rock the boat on
the China missile threat or the communist Chinese spying.
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Trulock CIA Director Aided Cover-up of Clinton-China Scandal.url
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