Year of the Rat is a sharp polemic that does what Sen. Fred Thompson's hearings failed to do: show Chinese penetration of the American political elite. -- The Wall Street Journal, Michael Ledeen

America's survival in the coming Century in the shadow of China's rapid nuclear and space-based weapons modernization program, built largely with Western technology and know-how, has yet to be fully understood by American policy-makers and the general public. A clarion call to action is clearly documented in the YEAR OF THE RAT, a thoroughly documented and important new book by Congressional investigators and former Defense Department officials, Edward Timperlake and William Triplett. They describe in painstaking detail how members of the American business community and foreign agents of the Chinese military-industrial vanguard have used massive political donations to facilitate the build-up China's first-strike capabilities through influencing White House policies on export controls and other national security safeguards.

While Capitol Hill and the American media was transfixed on the Presiden t's dalliances with young women, Timperlake and Triplett, who have a combined fifty years of service in American national security agencies, collected information from recently declassified U.S. Government documents and traveled to China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, combing through records and documents related to key Donor-Gate personalities. In colorful description, they describe how they used undercover techniques to interview numerous sources with first-hand knowledge of illegal links between the Chinese military- industrial establishment and the Clinton-Gore political campaigns. The tragic consequence is the rapid escalation of China's military into a world-class nuclear, space and information-warfare power.

The influence of the President's Chinese friends on American foreign policy is illustrated by an incident involving the down-and-out "Little Rock restauranteur" Charlie Trie during the March, 1996 crisis involving Chinese communist missiles fired toward Taiwan. Following the deployment of U.S. aircraft carriers to the region, Trie showed up in Washington, delivering $460,000 to the President Clinton's Legal Defense Fund -- and a letter, delivered to the White House, regarding the Taiwan crisis. The provocative letter stated, in part [verbatim], "Any negative outcomes of the U.S. decision in the China issue will affect your administration position, especially in the campaign year... If the U.S. recognizes "one China" policy, don't such conduct will cause a conflict for intervening in China's internal affairs?..."

In response, the Clinton National Security Council drafted a letter to Trie, assuring the communist Chinese that the aircraft carriers were simply a "redeploymnet," and "not intended as a threat to the PRC."

Charlie Trie, as the authors found in Asia, is member of a Chinese Tria d crime gang that has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Trie's money contact in Macau, who wired more than $1 million to Trie's U.S. account, most of which is believed to have ended up in Clinton Defense Fund and Democratic Party campaign coffers, is Ng Lapseng, a Triad mobster and Chinese communist official. In fact, Ng visited the White House and attended a number of Democratic Party fund-raisers in Washington, sitting next to President Clinton at some events.

In some respects, Clinton owes his presidency to his closest Asian frien ds, ethic-Chinese

Indonesian bankers Mokthar and James Riady have billions of dollars in investments in China. In 1992, with the Clinton campaign broke and reeling from the Jennifer Flowers scandal, the Riady's persuaded the Arkansas-based Worthen Bank, of which their Lippo Bank was a part owner, to issue a $3.5 million letter of credit to the Clinton campaign. In addition, James Riady and his wife donated $450,000 that year, making them the largest private donors to the Clinton-Gore campaign.

Who are the Riady's? The authors cite a CIA report to the U.S. Senate , that states, in part: "James and Mochtar Riady have a long-term relationship with a Chinese intelligence agency. The relationship is based on mutual benefit... the Chinese intelligence agency seeks to locate and develop relationships with information collectors particularly those with close association to the U.S. government." Within months of Clinton's election, a Riady executive and Democratic party fund-raiser, John Huang, had a Top Secret security clearance, with access to the most sensitive CIA information on China. Huang was issued the security clearance five months before working for Ron Brown at the Commerce Department. Incredibly, Huang maintained the clearance after he left the Administration to do full time fund-raising at the Democratic National Committee.

Timperlake and Triplett further describe how other influential American and foreign corporate donors to the Democratic Party, some of whom are directly or indirectly linked to Chinese military and intelligence networks, have influenced Clinton-Gore policies that decimated national security export controls -- despite protests by Pentagon arms-control experts. Citing testimony by highly respected American aeronautical experts, the improvement of Chinese missile performance is shown to be a direct product of negligent Administration oversight of joint U.S.-China high technology programs and satellite launches, that have dramatically improved Chinese nuclear missile accuracy and reliability.

The critical premise of the authors has been validated by the recent rel ease of an explicit Pentagon report to the Congress illustrating how the China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) is developing a range of high technology weapons to destroy American satellites and establish "capability to establish control of space and to deny access and use of military and commercial space systems in times of crises or war." Equally troubling, the Chinese are ready to test fire a new generation of mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles that can hit the entire Western area of the United States. According to the U.S. National Air Intelligence Center the new DF-31 missiles give China a major first-strike capability, "that will be difficult to counterattack at any stage of its operation, through terminal flight phases." The rocket-motor of the DF-31 was first tested in July 1998, while President Clinton was visiting Beijing. Although U.S. intelligence was fully aware of incident, citing it as a "political test," the Clinton Administration failed to raise the issue. YEAR OF THE RAT is must-reading to understand why the betrayal of American national security is the most dangerous and tragic legacy of the Clinton-Gore era. -- Al Santoli, Author of Everything We Had and Leading The Way. Editor of the weekly "China Reform Monitor," for the American Foreign Policy Council