U.S. AND CHINA LISTEN IN ON TRAFFICKERS

In a step toward joint operations to fight international crime, the
United States and China have established a secret electronic
surveillance post along China's border with Burma to eavesdrop on
narcofics traffickers from the Golden Ttiangle, one of the world's
biggest sources of heroin, Chinese and American sources say.

rhe U.S. government has also given China several dozen Humvee vehicles
for narcotics interdiction in mountainous tentain along the Burmese
border. In addition, Chinese sources said, the United States has
established a secret fund that Chinese of ficials can use to run the
surveillance center and fight drug trafficking.

The listening post, staffed by Chinese and U.S. agents near the
Chinese border town of Ruili in southern Yunnan Province, marks a
significant step forward in a U.S. intelligence-sharing relationship
with China that dates back to 1971. It follows on the operation in the
1980s by the CIA and its Chinese counterpart of listening posts in
China's farwestern Xinjiang Autonomous Region to monitor Soviet
nuclear weapons tests.

The Ruili listening post is only the most advanced of a host of
initiatives that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are
launching with China to battle international crime.

After the October 1997 summit meeting in Washington between President
Bill Clinton and President Jiang Zemin of China, a liaison group for
law enforcement agreed last month to draw up a list.of U.S. and
Chinese criminal suspects who are believed to be operating in each
other's country.

The group also is to arrange the exchange of law enforcement personnel
and an agreement to shate evidence and harmonize judicial procedures.
Officials said the group's ultimate goal is the formulation of a legal
cooperation agreement and an extradition treaty.

A March 1998 State Department report on drug trafficking said China
also

had agreed to establish a "real time email link with Washington to
exchange information more rapidly on drug trafficking and
traffickers."

The link and other steps toward cooperation are important, the report
said, because "heroin from the Golden Triangle transits China in
quantities which U.S. government experts believe significantly affect
the United States. Chinese officials note that more than 90 percent of
the heroin that flows through China comes from Burma."

China is not simply a transit country. It has a drug problem of its
own, a sensitive issue for the Cornmunist Party, which rose to power
in the 1940s partly on its ability to deal with China's thenmassive
opium problem. China wiped out drug addiction in the 1950s. With
economic reforms and an opehing up to the outside world in the past 20
years, drugs have returned. Heroin is now readily available in every
city; opium dens have sprouted up in western towns. Ecstasy, known as
the "head shaking medicine," is Popular -in discos in Guangzhou and
Shanghai.

Checked-by: Patrick Henry