Scientist Told He Can't Publish Memoir on Intelligence Work
Steve Coll Washington Post Service
WASHINGTON — A retired American nuclear weapons scientist and intelligence analyst who made extensive, authorized trips to secret Chinese nuclear arms facilities in the 1990s is locked in a dispute with the U.S. government over whether he can publish a 500-page memoir detailing his and other little-known contacts between U.S. and Chinese nuclear scientists during the period.
Thursday, May 17, 2001The scientist's work reveals the extent to which the United States and China have used scientific exchanges to keep tabs on each other's nuclear programs, while his battle with the government illustrates complex free speech issues. The retired scientist, Danny Stillman, made nine trips to China between 1990 and 1999. He visited nearly all its secret nuclear weapons facilities and held extensive, authorized discussions with Chinese scientists and generals. Mr. Stillman said he collected the names of more than 2,000 Chinese scientists working at the facilities, recorded detailed histories of the Chinese program from top scientists, inspected nuclear weapons labs and bomb-testing sites, interviewed Chinese weapons designers and photographed nuclear facilities.
Then, each time he returned home, Mr. Stillman passed along the information to U.S. intelligence debriefers. Mr. Stillman, 67, worked for 28 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico before retiring in late 1993. He submitted his manuscript, "Inside China's Nuclear Weapons Program," to the Defense Department and the Department of Energy 17 months ago for pre-publication clearance, as required by a secrecy agreement he signed at Los Alamos.
But both agencies have so far denied Mr. Stillman permission to publish, citing a Pentagon memorandum that says the memoir could "reasonably be expected to damage the security concerns of the United States" and "could also damage American foreign relations with China."
Mr. Stillman has retained a lawyer and intends to file a lawsuit to reverse that finding.
His disclosures could provide a new context for allegations that China used contacts with U.S. scientists during the 1990s to steal nuclear secrets by showing that China also provided unprecedented access to its own nuclear program to visiting U.S. intelligence officials and scientists.
Mr. Stillman said in an interview that he believed the Chinese nuclear program made its important advances without resorting to espionage. While the Chinese looked for ways to steal secrets during their contacts with him and other U.S. scientists, he said, they also were "looking to brag about what they had done" on their own, while "trying to bring their program out into the open." China invited Mr. Stillman to its closed nuclear facilities while seeking to rebuild ties disrupted by American outrage over the massacre of Chinese students around Tiananmen Square in 1989.
At the time, Beijing was signaling a desire to enter arms control agreements such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Chinese scientists wanted to exchange information about how to maintain their nuclear stockpile after testing ended. They also repeatedly pressed Mr. Stillman to transmit requests to U.S. officials for safety locks that would make it harder for Chinese bombs to be detonated without authorization. "They wanted me to bring information to the U.S. government," Mr. Stillman said. "If you want to weigh what we got versus what we might have said - well, we got a whole lot." Colleagues familiar with Mr. Stillman's work concur. "I think we learned a lot," said Robert Daniel, who traveled to China with Mr. Stillman in 1991, when Mr. Daniel was an assistant energy secretary in charge of intelligence programs. "And I would emphasize, we didn't give anything away. "Danny's approach was disarmingly simple: You just go to China, find the guys who designed the bombs and ask them questions," said Robert Vrooman, former director of counterintelligence at Los Alamos.
But skeptics of the scientific exchanges argue that, on balance, the United States has given up much more than it received, in part because the U.S. nuclear program is ahead of China's. "There's just absolutely no way to do these exchanges without showing your hand in a way that there's security problems," said Gary Schmitt, a former White House and Capitol Hill intelligence analyst who is executive director of Project for the New American Century.
Mr. Stillman and his lawyer argue that the best way to resolve such debates is to allow publication of his memoir. But it isn't clear whether or when the U.S. government will do that. Last year, after conducting an initial manuscript review, the Department of Energy proposed a few changes to remove what it said was sensitive information about nuclear weapons. Mr. Stillman agreed to the changes, but soon learned the Defense Intelligence Agency, backed by the CIA, had decided that none of his manuscript could be released. A Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday that the Defense Intelligence Agency's recommendations were not final. A Deparment of Energy spokesman also said its review was "ongoing."
Mark Zaid, Mr. Stillman's lawyer, said the government's rulings had been overly broad because Mr. Stillman merely recorded in the book what he saw and heard during visits made at the invitation of Chinese officials, and in some cases was traveling as a private citizen after his retirement. Mr. Stillman went to work at Los Alamos in 1965. In 1978, he was promoted to run the lab's Division of International Technology.
As part of this work, Mr. Stillman met with visiting Chinese scientists whenever possible. Even after retiring from the lab in October 1993, Mr. Stillman continued to travel to Chinese facilities. Before each trip, he obtained permission to travel from the Department of Energy. Each time he returned, a U.S. intelligence debriefer came to his Los Alamos office for an interview, and Mr. Stillman said he voluntarily provided detailed diaries about everything he had seen and heard in China.
Mr. Stillman said Chinese scientists offered details that seemed to contradict a select congressional committee headed by Representative Christopher Cox, Republican of California. The committee alleged in 1999 that China had stolen U.S. secrets that helped it to miniaturize nuclear weapons for use on intercontinental missiles.
Mr. Stillman said Chinese physicists told him that they had begun research on miniaturization during the 1970s, but could not complete it because they lacked the computing power to carry out massive calculations. When the Chinese physicists got access to supercomputers, they pulled out their old research, ran the numbers and designed the new devices.
Mr. Cox said Tuesday that Chinese scientists provided a mixture of accurate insights and disinformation to their U.S. colleagues.
From his first visit, the Chinese asked Mr. Stillman to press U.S. officials for help with nuclear bomb locks known as permissive action links. The Chinese said that splits in their military during the Tiananmen crisis brought home the danger of unauthorized control of nuclear weapons.Ultimately, however, U.S. authorities declined to help, and by the mid-1990s China had turned to Russia for the technology.
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