Free Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China by David Wise Page B

State Department officials, ambassadors to China, and at least two White House national security advisers were questioned, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Council chief, and Robert McFarlane, who held that post under President Ronald Reagan.
    What the FBI wanted to know from Brzezinski and McFarlane was whether any US scientists or officials had been authorized to share nuclear weapons secrets with China. Both said there had been no such authorization. Cleveland and FBI headquarters officials wanted to be sure that there had been no high-level secret or tacit policy granting permission to share scientific information with Beijing; otherwise, if Gwo-bao Min or other scientists were prosecuted for leaking secrets, they would have a ready-made defense.
    The FBI saw another virtue in TIGER SPRINGE . By casting a wide net, it would demonstrate that the bureau's counterintelligence agents were not interested solely in questioning people who were ethnic Chinese.
    One of those interviewed at length by the FBI was George A. Keyworth, a senior scientist at Los Alamos who later served as President Reagan's science adviser from 1981 to 1985. On a trip to China in 1980, Keyworth met with Chinese scientists at a university. For years afterward, he was bedeviled by gossip in the intelligence world that he had revealed classified information about the neutron bomb to the Chinese.
    In an interview with the author, Keyworth said that this had never happened. "Someone asked me a question about deuterium and tritium." The question, he said, was related to laser fusion experiments and the neutron bomb, which releases greater radiation than standard nuclear weapons.
    There was no mystery, Keyworth told the Chinese scientists. The isotopes were so unstable that mere impact would ignite them. "I said, anybody who has finished a couple of years of physics knows it is the simplest way to achieve fusion. Put it in a ball and throw it on the floor and it will go off."
    Some officials believed that the Los Alamos physicist had crossed a line, but they were hardly in a position to dismiss or prosecute him for the supposed infraction. "There were good reasons there was no action on Keyworth," said Ken Schiffer, a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent. "He didn't make the trip in a vacuum. It was informal, he was not tasked. But he was made aware of certain gaps in US intelligence,a new facility that China was using in their weapons program and if he could learn anything about that it would be beneficial."
    Before his trip, CIA officials briefed Keyworth on what to look for in China. Robert Vrooman, the CIA's man at Los Alamos, and later chief of counterintelligence at the laboratory, was his principal contact. "I met with other agency people too, but mostly Bob," Keyworth said. "They wanted to know about a lab down near Chengdu. We thought it was a nuclear weapons facility. I was able to validate it."
    More broadly, the intelligence agencies wanted to know the state of China's nuclear weapons program. Ironically, Keyworth got into hot water when, at a CIA debriefing after his trip, he brought up what he had told the Chinese scientists about putting isotopes in a ball, as an example of how adroitly he had handled their questions. "The whole point was when this came up in my debriefing, I was trying to explain how it was possible to circumvent their questionby giving a basic answer." Keyworth explained all this to the FBI's satisfaction in several interviews with the bureau during the TIGER SPRINGE investigation.
    The Chinese had invited Keyworth to come back the next year to visit their nuclear weapons test site. But in 1981 Reagan appointed him the White House science adviser, and in that sensitive post, it was made clear to Keyworth, he would have to abandon any thought of returning to China.
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    On December 3, 1982, almost two years after Gwo-bao Min was forced out of Livermore, the telephone rang in his house in