Code Name Kindred Spirit: Inside the Chinese Nuclear Espionage Scandal

To this day, we still do not know the extent of China's penetrations of our nuclear weapons complex. But we do know that its espionage efforts have obtained highly sensitive, classified data on our most sophisticated warheads and that it is now beginning to field a new family of long-range nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles based on the technology that comprised the core of our strategic deterrent. Notra Trulock was Director of Intelligence at the U.S. Department of Energy throughout the 1990s. In this spellbinding book, he takes us inside the U.S. nuclear labs. He describes how he came to suspect that Chinese spies were compromising our security and how the trail he followed led to Wen Ho Lee. Trulock tried to warn the President and Congress. When he was ignored, he blew the whistle, creating a domestic crisis for the Clinton administration and forcing it finally to address the security breaches in our nation's nuclear weapons complex. "Code Name KINDRED SPIRIT" takes us directly into the murky world of nuclear espionage. But it is also a daunting story about the fate of the man who brought the bad news. After the scandal broke, Trulock found himself the targeted by the Clintonites who resented him for speaking out. He was smeared as a bigot and a mentally unstable alarmist. When he attempted to tell his side of the story, the FBI tried to silence him by claiming he had revealed classified data. He was demoted and driven out of government, his career and his personal reputation ruined. "Code Name KINDRED SPIRIT" tells the inside story of one of the major spy scandals of recent years. It reads like a Le Carre story told by Franz Kafka.

Publishers Weekly

Between the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the current crisis over Iraq, neoconservative thinkers such as Kristol (editor of the Weekly Standard) worked to keep Saddam Hussein at the center of the U.S. foreign policy agenda. In this slim, well-argued book, Kristol and Kaplan, a senior editor at the New Republic, cogently make the case for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. The rationale behind the Bush administration's preemptive strategy, they write, is that Saddam Hussein is a dictator who threatens both his own people and the world, and therefore must be stopped before he does further harm. The weaknesses in the authors' case are the same as many find in the administration's-such as that the ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda are unclear, which Kristol and Kaplan acknowledge. But, they continue, "we do know that Saddam is a terrorist." Just as importantly, the book criticizes the policy of both the latter years of the first Bush administration and the Clinton years for allowing the Iraq threat to fester. Both governments had their reasons-Bush I's pragmatism and Clinton's focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict-but the world is much worse off, say Kristol and Kaplan. The background for a case for a U.S. strike is articulated well here. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.