Notra Trulock, the whistle-blowing former chief of counterintelligence at the Energy Department, says he’s not prepared to use the word "treason" – yet.
However, when he reads "The Year of the Rat" and the confession of James Riady, the Indonesian with strong ties to the Chinese government who is a generous donor of illegal funds to both Clinton presidential campaigns, it is clear "that intelligence, foreign and defense policies" were made to "produce answers that fit with the foreign policy that ... Riady and others were buying."
Trulock, who played a significant role in exposing Chinese spying in U.S. nuclear laboratories, spoke before a luncheon Tuesday sponsored by Accuracy in Media (AIM).
"We first came across evidence of espionage in 1995," he told the group. Four years later, "practically nothing [had] been done about it."
True, there has been a presidential directive mandating that the Department of Energy take certain steps to fix its security vulnerabilities. "And I can tell you today that, beyond shuffling paper, which is what these guys do extremely well, nothing has been done."
All this despite the fact that "we were continuing to get intelligence reports that indicated that espionage was ongoing."
Then came the famous Cox committee congressional report. Trulock, who was one of the witnesses before the Cox committee, says he saw a copy of the report intended for publication in early 1999, which was "nothing but blank page after blank page after blank page."
That was when the Clinton administration was fighting tooth and nail to prevent the Cox report "from ever coming out."
Trulock says he was blocked twice from going up to Capitol Hill to testify about the situation. He had appeared only once "even though, by law, you’re supposed to be up there informing them of every [security problem]."
After his 1996 testimony, Trulock was told by his supervisor not to go back because the Republicans "were only interested in hurting President Clinton on his China policy."
"Well, yes, they were. That’s true. But we were still obligated to do that," especially when Trulock had been asked by Congress to testify.
With the recent plea bargain by Riady, the Energy Department whistle-blower thinks "a lot of things begin to fall in place." Whether that additional information adds up to the "T" word remains to be seen, in Trulock’s judgment.
When the New York Times ran a series of articles on the lax security and revealed much of the information that Trulock was prevented from giving to Congress, it made him a hero, an honor he modestly declined, knowing full well that when the media make you a hero, the next step is you become the villain. Appearing on "60 Minutes" recently, Trulock acknowledged being the source for much of the information in the Times.
Speaking of the power of the media, while the Chinagate scandal was a hot story in the spring of 1999, by September it had "practically dropped off the face of the Earth."
"The point is the administration wanted this story to go away," he told the group. "And they made it go away."
Of course, it did not help that the nightly network newscasts, where about 70 percent of Americans get their information on world events, gave the scandal scant coverage. The same news anchors who saturated the airwaves with Watergate, and who beat the Iran-Contra case to death long after the public had lost interest in it, blew off the Chinagate scandal that may someday result in nuclear missiles killing or threatening to kill millions of Americans.
The way the administration got the story off Page One (the print media did give it some big play in one-day accounts of the problem) was by personalizing the story. When that happens, "now you have a face, and then you begin attacking the individual himself," which gets down to "the politics of personal destruction," an example of which was taking place across town at the John Ashcroft hearings at the very moment Trulock was discussing his own case.
It was in July 2000 that FBI agents visited Trulock’s home and, without a search warrant, went into his bedroom and started his desktop computer, downloading the contents of its hard drive to a disk. They asked him accusatory questions about classified information. He replied truthfully that he had none.
And then what happened?
"I will tell you that I have [not] had, nor has my lawyer had, any communication with the FBI since July. … I never got a letter of intent … a target letter. It just sort of drags on."
Bottom line is his security clearances are gone, meaning all the work he did for 30 years is irrelevant because he needs clearances to work.
Later, the energy official told Washington Times national security reporter Bill Gertz that he had been "screwed, blued and tattooed."
He had been given the Clinton treatment: Destroy anyone who tells the truth about what’s going on in the administration. Except this was not about hanky-panky with a White House intern. This was about a serious threat to every man, woman and child in the United States.
From being a hero, Trulock found himself being described by the Washington media wolf pack as "inexperienced," "a hack," "a plumber masquerading as a heart surgeon," "arrogant," "ambitious," "opportunistic," "vicious," "biased" and "a conspiracy theorist who misconstrued work-a-day delay and bureaucratic confusion for [something] diabolical." That last description came from the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
That was for starters. Then he was called a "racist," a "bigot," "anti-Chinese" and a "xenophobe," and was accused of assaulting his employees.
"Where did this [incredible stuff] come from?" Trulock said he had wondered.
Trulock went on to elaborate on the scenario painted by a hostile media, which was portraying his case in such a way as to indicate that "I am one very powerful guy. I drove the president. I drove the Congress. I drove the director of the FBI. I singlehandedly destroyed the Department of Energy."
"The politics of personal destruction does not work unless the media not just cooperates, but leads the charge."
Trulock says he was warned by "a fairly high official of the Washington Post company that the reporter working on his story was a friend of Bill’s." Sources later told NewsMax.com that the reporter in question was Walter Pincus, who has been at the Post seemingly forever.
Would Trulock do it again if he had the chance? The answer is no. "The personal cost, the professional cost is just too high."
The former DOE official now works for Paul Weyrich at the Free Congress Foundation.
He hopes that with John Ashcroft as attorney general and (it is hoped) a new FBI director, "things will begin to turn around."
There is conflicting information as to whether President-elect Bush intends to replace Louis Freeh as director of the FBI. Reed Irvine, AIM’s chairman, cites the Trulock case, among others, as good reason for the incoming administration to find a way to give him the boot before his 10-year term expires in 2003.
This much is indelibly on the record. When Trulock and Deputy Energy Secretary Elizabeth A. Moler appeared before Congress to tell conflicting stories about the scandal, they were both asked if they’d be willing to take a lie-detector test. Trulock agreed. Moler refused. No amount of Clintonesque spin or media gloss-over can erase that fact.
But not to worry. Our leader has assured America’s couch potatoes that there are "no missiles aimed at our children," as if missiles could somehow target the children and not the adults. Critics have cited this as a classic example of Bill Clinton’s disingenuous contempt for the intelligence of the people who elected him.
Military and security experts shudder in contemplating the mess Bush will have to clean up.
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