--===China's friendly spies alarm US===-- The ELectronic Telegraph ISSUE _1416_ Sunday _11 April_ 1999 _By David Wastell in Washington_ THE Pentagon is urgently reviewing its contacts with the Chinese military after claims that the People's Liberation Army has used visits to American bases to acquire information which could help to defeat American forces on the battlefield. A plan for 80 different military exchanges this year is being rethought and is certain to be scaled down after Chinese officers used a visit to a United States naval base last year to obtain sensitive information about the weakest point of American aircraft carriers. The Chinese government subsequently approached Russia to purchase torpedoes designed to exploit this weakness by exploding directly beneath the ship at which they are fired. The Pentagon review comes as the Chinese premier Zhu Rongji continues a week-long visit to America. In Washington Mr Zhu was publicly feted by much of the American political and business establishment, and won rapturous applause at a glittering White House dinner by reciting part of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. But his visit was partly overshadowed by, and almost cancelled by Beijing because of, the tense atmosphere generated by allegations of spying on US nuclear research laboratories at Los Alamos, and a continuing row over claims that the Chinese government attempted to channel at least $640,000 (£400,000) to President Clinton's 1996 re-election fund. It has fed into the continuing debate within the US over how the relationship with China should be handled. The military exchange programme began under the Reagan administration as a way of increasing pressure on the Soviet Union. Ron Montaperto, a senior research professor at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, who has been involved in the military relationship with China, said: "It is good that we do this because the dispute over Taiwan means there is the potential for conflict between the US and China. They need to understand both how powerful we are, and that we are serious about wanting a stable relationship, though not necessarily as friends. But the US could have derived more benefit from the programme. I wish we had run it in a more rigorous fashion." There has been growing concern on Capitol Hill over the military exchange programme since a Defence Department document setting out the "game plan" for 1999 was leaked to the press earlier this year. It referred to China as "our strategic partner", a phrase notably absent from President Clinton's welcoming rhetoric last week. The plan included visits to military facilities and conferences with officials of the People's Liberation Army, including observation of the 82nd Airborne Division, America's crack paratroop force, and a visit to a nuclear weapons laboratory. US officers have privately complained that on their reciprocal visits to their Chinese counterparts they are shown far less. Certainly not the crack units of the People's Liberation Army. Last week the political magazine the New Republic described how Chinese officers had questioned their US counterparts over a boozy dinner about the most vulnerable points of an aircraft carrier - the main means of projecting American power in the West Pacific. According to the magazine, which quoted an unnamed defence official at the dinner, an American lieutenant commander who was keen to appear a gracious host proceeded to tell the Chinese about the carrier's Achilles' heel. Its hull is thinnest on the bottom, and that is where munitions are stored. A torpedo which exploded underneath the ship could well penetrate its skin and set off a huge explosion, splitting the vessel in two. Although the information was not strictly classified, it would have required extensive research over 20 years of obscure military journals to uncover it, the magazine said. It also reported that having observed US military exercises at Cape Thunder, Alaska, the Chinese saw the American dependence on satellites and Awacs aircraft and is now seeking means to attack them and otherwise disrupt communications. The Pentagon review follows growing fury on Capitol Hill at continuing disclosures of alleged Chinese espionage at Los Alamos nuclear weapons research laboratories and elsewhere. As Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, put it in a letter to William Cohen, the Defence Secretary: "Communist China is not our friend, and as events of recent weeks have underscored, China most certainly is not our 'strategic partner'." China has heightened tensions by making mock missile attacks, grabbing disputed South China Sea islands and threatening military deployments including missiles near Taiwan. Last month Gen Henry Shelton, Mr Clinton's top military adviser, postponed a week-long visit to China, pleading the possibility of military action in Kosovo as his reason. Mr Cohen has now cancelled a similar trip scheduled for this week. One Pentagon insider said: "There has been a great flurry of activity as it has become clear that some serious rethinking is needed. These things are now going to be scaled back." The Department of Defence is under particular pressure to cancel a visit by a People's Liberation Army delegation to Sandia National Laboratory, one of three nuclear weapons laboratories. Jim Lilley, US ambassador to China under the Bush administration and now a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, said: "The problem is that Americans always talk too much. The Chinese sit there and ask the right questions and the Americans blurt it out."