Indicted ex-White House aide Lewis Libby played a key role in an earlier case of slanting U.S. intelligence for political gain -- four years before the Iraq War when he was legal adviser to a House investigation into how communist China got U.S. nuclear secrets.

Reference:  Consortiumnews.com

I wanted to title this Wow, Just Wow, but that was taken.  There are still many Clinton bashers out there who simply can't forgive him for selling out to the Chinese.  I doubt these Kool Aid drinking Bush apologists will be disabused by the fact that Scooter Libby, then counsel for the GOP led investigation of "China Gate," cooked the official timeline of the spy scandal, but they should be.

This story has everthing, even Ollie North.  The principle misdirection was pegging the theft of our W-88 miniturized nuclear warhead on the Clinton administration, when it actually occured between 1984 and 1993, the Reagan-Bush years.

By 1984, Ronald Reagan’s White House had decided to share sensitive national security secrets with the Chinese communists as it drew Beijing into the inner circle of illicit arms shipments to the Nicaraguan contra rebels.

Reagan’s White House turned to the Chinese for surface-to-air missiles for the contras because the U.S. Congress had banned military assistance to the rebel force and the contras were suffering heavy losses from attack helicopters deployed by Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.

Some of the private U.S. operatives working with White House aide Oliver North settled on China as a source for SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles. In testimony at his 1989 Iran-Contra trial, North called the securing of these weapons a “very sensitive delivery.”

For the Chinese missile deal in 1984, North said he received help from the CIA in arranging false end-user certificates from the right-wing government of Guatemala. North testified that he “had made arrangements with the Guatemalan government, using the people [CIA] Director [William] Casey had given me.”

You remember Casey, didn't he conveniently suffer a lobotomy brain embulism just before the Iran/Contra hearings really got going.

North said the Chinese communists saw the collaboration as a way to develop “better relations with the United States.” Knowing about the illicit shipments to the contras also put Beijing in position to leverage U.S. policy in the future.

It was in this climate of cooperation that other secrets, including how to make miniaturized hydrogen bombs, allegedly reached communist China.

Though the evidence of North’s secret contacts with Chinese intelligence had been public knowledge since the late 1980s, the “Chinagate” report in 1999 made no reference to this secret collaboration between Reagan’s White House and China.

The US Congress didn't know what was going on, and it didn't even seem like POTUS did, with "plausible deniability" and all, but the Chinese knew we were shipping missles and other weapons to the Contras illegally.  Unbelievable.

Oh, and that whole Wen Ho Lee thing, happened in the 80's, and the Chinese tested their brand new nuke while Bush Sr. was still president in September of 1992.

“It’s like they were driving a Model T and went around the corner and suddenly had a Corvette,” said Robert M. Hanson, a Los Alamos intelligence analyst, in early 1995, the Times reported.

Bow From The Waist To:  The Smirking Chimp