No doubt about it -- the passage of American nuclear expertise from the Los Alamos Laboratory to the People's Republic of China is a significant event, worthy of close examination by Congress and a proper subject for exhaustive investigative reporting by the media.

Sadly, those whose duty demands such investigation are, in the case of Congress, exploiting the matter to inflict political damage on the Clinton Administration, and, in the case of the press, stampeding to a consensus based on the shallowest of verdicts as to responsibility, so radically oversimplifying the matter as to entirely discredit their judgments.

Some Republican members of Congress are expressing outrage that the Administration "delayed" action or "neglected to inform Congress." The volume and shrillness of the shrieks is a key indication of the weakness of their complaint. For one thing, the two Committees to whom the Administration would have reported (actually, according to National Security advisor Sandy Berger, there were 16 briefings on the issue anyway), Intelligence Oversight in both the House and the Senate, are supposed to exercise direct oversight over the intelligence agencies. In other words, Congress shouldn't have needed the Administration: to the extent that important information affecting national security was held by independent agencies -- and every account of the matter claims just that -- it was the responsibility of the agencies to inform Congress and it was the responsibility of Congress to inquire.

But even more perplexing is the recent timeline. According to media reports, intelligence agencies strongly suspected in the early 1990s that the Chinese had acquired and implemented US designs for their miniaturized warheads because of stepped-up testing by the Chinese in, a suspicion confirmed by the April 1995 acquisition by the USA of a 1988 Chinese document, confirming "eerie similarities" in bomb designs.

Yet, while career civil service investigators gave the Administration a preliminary and not particularly alarming briefing in 1996, it was not until Spring 1997 that the Administration -- and the President -- was fully briefed. So while Congressional Republicans whine about delayed notification BY the Administration, they seem not to care of the two-year delay in notification OF the Administration, a notification, by the way, that Congress as well had every right to expect.

That Spring 1997 briefing came right before a planned summit between President Clinton and Chinese leader President Jiang Zemin.

Dirty Secret #1: Elements of the American intelligence community not only withheld national security information from the President, they finally briefed him at time when the information allowed anti-China elements of that community to pressure the Administration to postpone the summit. Question: Is the American intelligence establishment pursuing its own policies at the expense of the rightful maker of policy, the man who won that right by virtue of 372 Electoral College votes?

The Real Scandal: As Administration spokesman and the President himself point out that the theft occurred during the Reagan Administration and that the subsequent testing occurred mostly while George Bush was President, Administration critics seem to slough that point off, arguing that security at present in the nuclear labs is the problem, and it's a problem that this Administration has done nothing about. But where did that problem come from? You could read all the coverage by Jeff Gerth in the New York Times, Walter Pincus in the Washington Post, read all the transcripts of Fox News anchors Tony Snow and Brit Hume firing hard questions at the Administration and softballs at Congressman Chris Cox and Senator Richard Shelby and not get the answer.

Oh, you can read lifestyle fluff pieces in both the New York Times (by Sandra Blakeslee, March 12) and hints of as much in the Washington Post (by John F. Harris and Vernon Loeb, March 14) about the "culture" of the labs and the atmosphere of academic collegiality rather than strict military security, and you won't get the answer.

No. To get the true answer you have to have listened to C-Span's Washington Journal on Sunday morning, March 14. Skip Brandon, a former FBI Assistant Director for Counter-Intelligence, Security Programs and Counter-Terrorism answered questions from the public.

At the 26-minute mark a woman who had lived in the vicinity of Los Alamos before the 80s called and told Brandon that "security was very good" then, but that The Reagan Administration privatized security. "Didn't that make a great difference?" she concluded.

Brandon's expression froze for a moment before melting into thoughtfulness as he pondered his answer. "Well, I'm out now, so I can say," he thought out loud, "Yes."

Yes, he said. "I think it may have made a difference."

And that's the Dirty Secret #2: not only did the actual theft of secrets occur on President Reagan's watch (which, after all, might have been merely bad fortune for any president), but it probably occurred as a direct result of a program decision by his own administration. Here we have the conservatives' quintessential prescription for government reform -- privatization -- implemented by the iconic Conservative Republican President, the results of which would not be completely apparent for more than ten years and a mainstream media that doesn't mention that policy change once in a blizzard of articles and commentary.

No wonder it took an obscure expert and an anonymous member of the public to expose the truth.