Timeline of Cox Report Controversy - 1999

1999

January

• On January 3, the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China released their classified report on their findings regarding China's espionage campaign against the United States to government officials in Congress and the White House.

March

• Sometime in March, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Vice President Al Gore learned of China's thefts of America's weapons designs for the first time.

• On March 6, The New York Times published an article entitled "China Stole Nuclear Secrets From Los Alamos, U.S. Officials Say". The article publicly detailed for the first time the government's belief China had stolen classified information on the W-88 nuclear warhead.

• The Energy Department fired nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee on March 8, 1999. FBI Director Louis Freeh recommended Lee be fired 18 months earlier.

May

• On May 25, the United States House of Representatives released the unanimously agreed upon Cox Report (AKA Report of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China) which detailed publicly for the first time China's espionage campaign against the United States. The report was a redacted version of a still-classified report completed almost five months previously. President Clinton and his CIA determined 30 percent of the original report could not be released to the public.

• Excerpt from an interview with National Security Advisor Sandy Berger by Jim Lehrer of PBS May 27, 1999:

Lehrer: The main hit on you, as you know, Mr. Berger, is that you were told (about China's nuclear espionage) in April of 1996 and you didn't tell the president about it until, what, a year or so later, even longer than that?

Berger: I was told in 1996, Jim, of the... at a briefing, of the evolution of China's strategic program, in two cases, one went back to 1979. The one that went that went to... involved in the mid-80's. I found that very troubling. I asked DOE... I acted in response to what I heard. I asked DOE to widen and deepen its investigation, to intensify as they were planning their counterintelligence efforts to brief the Congress ithin several weeks the FBI had opened up a full investigation on the prime suspect. So I took the actions that I believe were appropriate. I get an awful lot of threat information every day. I have to make a judgment as to what I brief the president on and what I don't. In 1997, when this was clearly a pattern and a systemic problem, I thought it was essential for the president to know.

December

In December 1999, four Stanford University professors release a report rebutting the Cox Commission, noting "The language of the report, particularly its Overview, was inflammatory and some allegations did not seem to be well supported....Some important and relevant facts are wrong and a number of conclusions are, in our view, unwarranted." A number of other reports, including one from the National Academy of Sciences, reach similar conclusions.