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A Clinton order that his successor should welcome
Tuesday, January 16, 2001
President Clinton's last-minute flurry of executive orders and rule-making has infuriated the incoming Republican administration. But in one case, President-elect George W. Bush is likely to thank his predecessor. We're referring to Mr. Clinton's order establishing a new federal counterintelligence board.
The board, assuming it is used properly by the newcomers, will make intelligence embarrassments like the Wen Ho Lee imbroglio less likely to occur and improve this nation's defenses against real spies. Dr. Lee was the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist tagged by top government officials as a spy who might have provided China with the "crown jewels" of American secrets.
He was held in prison much of last year but was freed when the government couldn't produce credible evidence he did anything other than mishandle government weapons data. He eventually pleaded guilty to a single count of downloading restricted government data.
Sen. Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican in charge of Congress' Select Intelligence Committee, said the FBI bungled the Lee investigation because of "inadequate resources, lack of management attention and missed opportunities."
The new "CI-21" board created by Mr. Clinton's order will bring together top CIA, FBI and Defense Department officials to pool information and ensure, apparently for the first time, that the government's right hand knows what the left hand is doing in anti-spy matters. The board, to be chaired by the FBI director, is to establish a comprehensive counterintelligence program, allowing information to be shared across agency domains and broadening the focus to economic crimes instead of merely protecting government secrets.
Whatever else it stands for, the Wen Ho Lee case demonstrated that officials, particularly those in the FBI, lacked the information needed to gauge accurately the extent of a security breach. As a result, they panicked and created the public appearance of an espionage crisis when there was none. We hope the new board will minimize the possibility of such fiascoes in the future.