13 August 2000. Link to Campbell/Lashmar response.

22 July 2000. Link directly to the Campbell/Lashmar article.

12 July 2000
Source: Jeffrey Richelson <jtrichelson@dellnet.com>. Tel: (703) 684-8274; Fax: (703) 684-0879

July 12, 2000

By Jeffrey Richelson

Last Sunday, July 2, the Independent on Sunday carried a story written by Duncan Campbell and Paul Lashmar, with the title "The New Cold War: How America Spies On US For Its Oldest Friend -- The Dollar." The entire article deals with the Clinton administration's policy of aggressively supporting U.S. business overseas and, in the view of the authors, implicit or explicit intelligence assistance to that policy.

One part of their article states that:

Three Sigint (signals intelligence) reports obtained by IoS are economic in nature. One details messages between Banque Nationale de Paris offices in France and Delhi, concerned with loans to build an atomic power station near Madras. A second gives details of OPEC negotiations, including French diplomatic messages.

A 1997 report details phone calls and faxes between Pakistani officials in Islamabad and Beijing, and laments that the Chinese-based official was told to send future messages by the diplomatic pouch. The report warns that if this order was obeyed, it would "severely limit our ability to monitor." All the reports were classified "TOP SECRET UMBRA," indicating that highly-sensitive monitoring techniques were used to get the information.

A closer examination of these paragraphs reveals them to be misleading in at least two ways -- the claim that the reports were all "obtained by IoS" as well as their relevance to the issue the authors are discussing.

The first report the authors refer to is almost certainly a redacted National Security Agency COMINT report on "Capital Projects Planned in India," that has been on the National Security Archive's web cite since January (at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB23/06-02.htm). That report contains a section titled "Atomic Energy Project" which discusses the role of the BNP in helping to finance the Madras project. It is also notable that the authors do not give the date of the report. The date of the report on the Archive web site is August 31, 1972 -- making it irrelevant to the the issue of economic espionage in the Clinton administration. Nor do the authors consider that the U.S. would be concerned with atomic reactor development in India as a result of her concern that such reactors might be used in developing an Indian nuclear arsenal. Indeed, George Perkovich, in India's Nuclear Bomb" (p. 249), describes the Madras Atomic Power Station, which was not completed until 1982, as an "unsafeguarded plant [that] could produce plutonium for explosive purposes as well as for the nascent breeder reactor program."

The third report is actually a September 14, 1996 CIA memorandum, titled "China and Pakistan Discuss US Demarche on Nuclear Assistance," which was reproduced in Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz's 1999 book, Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security, on pages 266-267. The final section of the memo contains the language quoted in the Campbell and Lashmar article. The authors fail to quote the entire sentence, which reads "If implemented this order will severely limit our ability to monitor Chinese-Pakistani nuclear and, to a lesser extent, ballistic missile cooperation." (emphasis added). As that sentence indicates, and review of the rest of the memo makes clear, the focus is on nuclear weapons-related commerce between Pakistan and China. To characterize the message simply as "economic in nature" is highly misleading.