By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 26, 1998; Page A09

A decade ago, officials of a tiny Pentagon agency called the Defense Technology Security Administration could get appointments with Defense Secretary Casper W. Weinberger or even President Ronald Reagan within hours if they sensed an emergency. Monitoring foreign purchases of U.S. computers and other high-tech machinery, their job was to to bottle up sales to the Eastern Bloc and other adversaries.

Today, according to testimony before a Senate committee, that same agency is largely marginalized in interagency debates about the overseas commerce in U.S. technology in an administration eager to promote exports.

Republicans in Congress cite the weakening of the agency, known as DTSA, as Exhibit A in their effort to demonstrate that the Clinton administration emphasizes foreign sales at the expense of national security concerns in its space deals with China and in high-tech commerce with other nations such as India and Pakistan.

"The system is rigged in favor of commercial interests over national security interests," said Sen. Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.), who held a hearing of his Governmental Affairs Committee yesterday to examine what he considers the silencing of DTSA. The agency's superiors in the Defense Department, he charged, are "intent on downgrading, humiliating and ostracizing the key people in the front line of national security matters."

Clinton administration officials dispute that. During the Cold War, high-tech export controls were clear-cut, they said. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the loss of an enemy as threatening as the Soviet Union, DTSA's function has changed, creating resentment among some employees devoted to its original mission.

DTSA has been in the news because it concluded that Loral Space & Communications Ltd. engineers may have damaged U.S. national security in 1996 by faxing the Chinese a technical report about the causes of a Chinese rocket crash that destroyed a Loral satellite. The Justice Department is investigating that case.

Thompson's panel heard testimony yesterday from a 12-year veteran of DTSA, senior analyst Peter Leitner, who presented charts, graphs and harsh words to make his case that the Clinton administration has arranged "the premature death of DOD's credible role as the guardian of U.S. technology security." The committee gave him a subpoena to testify to extend him protection in case superiors punish him, committee sources said.

The Clinton administration has "neutered" DTSA's 140 employees through a variety of means, Leitner said: by naming Pentagon leaders who disagree with DTSA's central mission, by giving DTSA analysts only minutes or hours to decipher the complexities of the 21,000 proposed high-tech transfers it reviews each year, by reducing DTSA's dealings with intelligence agencies knowledgeable about foreign adversaries and by establishing interagency procedures skewed toward sale of U.S. technology.

"What passes for an export control system has been hijacked by longtime ideological opponents of the very concept of export controls," Leitner testified. "DTSA management placed staffers with little to no experience or technical aptitude in key positions representing DOD in interagency meetings."

He charged that leaders of the Defense Department and other agencies have all but ignored questions raised by DTSA analysts about numerous proposed sales of U.S. technology items that could be devoted to military purposes by potential adversaries. He cited supercomputers that can simulate nuclear blasts and warhead flight paths, parts for jet engines, advanced industrial machinery that can be used to make cruise missiles, lasers that can blind American pilots and the like.

Administration officials said that Leitner, a longtime critic of Pentagon superiors, and Thompson are oversimplifying a complicated situation. In some regards, the dispute reflects the opposing perspectives on trade and security that are dominating Republican-led hearings into the Clinton China policy.

DTSA analysts "continue to be watchdogs," said Franklin C. Miller, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction. Miller added that DTSA director David S. Tarbell often successfully argues for significant conditions on foreign sales that critics such as Leitner dismiss as irrelevant.

"The Cold War's over, and there's a lot more technology available around the world than there was 10 years ago," Miller said. "You have to change with the times."

A senior administration official said that Defense Department leaders did not abdicate in disputes involving export controls. "There's ferocious fighting between State, the Pentagon and Commerce," he said. "DOD still takes a hard-line view in interagency meetings, but [DTSA members] may see them as wimpy."

"China's just not the threat Russia was," the senior official said, explaining why the Clinton administration tilts toward sales rather than trade bans. "Computers with the power that designed U.S. nuclear weapons in the 1950s can now be bought at Radio Shack. It's like trying to control hammers."

DTSA traces its birth to 1981, when French President Francois Mitterrand told Reagan that a French spy in the Soviet Union had reported on Moscow's aggressive pursuit of western technologies.

The spy, codenamed "Farewell," was discovered and executed by the Soviets, but Reagan set up DTSA to guard against sales of U.S. machinery that could flow through middlemen or third countries to the Soviet Union and its allies.

The Bush administration took several steps that made it more difficult for opponents of high-tech sales to make their case. William J. Perry, named defense secretary by President Clinton, had long raised questions about export controls both in his previous stints in government and as an international investment banker, and he recruited numerous aides who shared his views.

Leitner said the largest blow to DTSA will come in October, when the agency is scheduled to be transferred from the Pentagon's prestigious policy division to a new office controlled by DTSA's detractors, military acquisition officials who favor foreign sales as a way to help American contractors and control costs.