WASHINGTON -- Congressional leaders of both parties sought yesterday to cool the heated rhetoric on China, even as Republicans hinted that the Clinton administration was responsible for leaking secret information about alleged Chinese espionage at a U.S. nuclear weapons laboratory in the 1980s.

The bluster has grown increasingly fiery since last weekend, when reports emerged that a Taiwanese-born scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory allegedly passed crucial secrets to China that helped it develop advanced, miniaturized nuclear warheads that can be clustered on the tips of intercontinental missiles.

The scientist, Wen Ho Lee, was dismissed from Los Alamos on Monday, but no criminal charges have been filed against him.

Although the alleged spying took place during Republican administrations, GOP leaders and presidential candidates accused the Clinton White House of deliberately responding slowly to the espionage reports.

They suggested that the delay was linked to 1996 campaign contributions that were possibly funneled to Clinton's re-election effort by Chinese agents. Allegations of Chinese nuclear espionage in the 1980s surfaced in 1996 and 1997.

Top White House officials, including Vice President Gore, pointed fingers at the Reagan and Bush administrations, which were in power not only when the Los Alamos espionage allegedly occurred, but when a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory allegedly passed secrets that helped the Chinese develop a neutron bomb. They said they have merely been cleaning up the lax security problems they inherited.

Prominent members of Congress yesterday sought to cool the war of words.

"There's a knee-jerk tendency of people to have a political response, and that is going to get us nowhere," cautioned California Republican Rep. Christopher Cox, chairman of the House select committee probing defense technology transfers to China. "We've got to recognize this is as a real problem. It's an ongoing problem. It's today's problem, and it's going to take Democrats and Republicans working together to fix it."

Washington state Rep. Norm Dicks, the leading Democrat on the committee, agreed.

"The tone has been way too partisan. There's plenty of blame to go around," he said. "The point is, we've got to clean up the problem, deal with this issue and not take partisan shots."

At the same time, mistrust continued to linger between the White House and Congress over the burgeoning controversy. GOP aides close to the Cox committee questioned why the committee's findings remained secret until a classified copy was forwarded to the White House, hinting that administration aides leaked the espionage charges to place blame on Republican administrations.

By the time the full, declassified report is released, possibly in two weeks, the controversy will have been spent, sparing the White House still more embarrassment over the sensitive issue of its China policy, they charge.

"I'm absolutely appalled at the leakage of sensitive information that has come out since this committee completed its business," declared Rep. Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. "That is remarkable in itself."

And Republicans raised concerns that the White House was delaying declassification of the 700-page report to root out embarrassing revelations and skew the conclusions.

"We want to make sure whatever is released does not suffer either from the suppression of our findings or from redactions rendering the rest of the report misleading," Cox said.

White House aides were incredulous, noting that the tone of the news stories has been anything but flattering for the administration.

"We are talking about incidents that took place in the '70s and '80s, and incidents that have been widely reported for upwards of 10 years," said National Security Committee spokesman P. J. Crowley, adding, "We share the congressman's concern to protect classified information from being divulged, and we are not responsible for these stories."

The rhetorical heat on the China issue has taken members of both parties by surprise. Republican presidential hopefuls, Patrick J. Buchanan, Robert C. Smith, Lamar Alexander and Steve Forbes, called on national security adviser Samuel R. Berger to resign over the incident, charging him with "dereliction of duty." Buchanan called the allegations "the most serious since the Rosenbergs went to the electric chair in 1953."

Berger told reporters in Guatemala that he had "no intention of resigning."

But reports of Chinese espionage at the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories have been around for at least a decade. A series of reports emerged in 1990 concerning the Chinese neutron bomb, and Democratic aides note that at the time, no one implicated the Bush White House.

Democratic aides on Capitol Hill say the GOP charges against Clinton amount to accusations of treason. In order for the charges to be valid, Republicans would have to argue that the nation's ability to sniff out spies at the national laboratories has deteriorated since Clinton took office, when in fact, an intelligence aide said, those capabilities have been lacking for decades.

But, he said, the most recent espionage charges are serious and should not be downplayed.

While striking a more moderate tone, Goss also hinted that the administration was lax in alerting Congress about the seriousness of the allegations. Berger has said he kept the proper congressional committees fully informed, but Republicans and Democrats questioned that assertion.

While Goss said he had an "inkling" that a security breach had been discovered, he added, "it would be improper to say that the magnitude of the concern was brought to the proper level of attention."

Dicks agreed.

"More should have been said about this earlier," he said.

Pub Date: 3/12/99