                                ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Saturday, December 21, 1996            TAG: 9612230065
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL   PAGE: A-1  EDITION: METRO 
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The New York Times

COFFEE WITH A GUN LORD CLINTON MET KNOWN TRADER

The White House said Friday that no one knew who Wang Jun was when he passed through the gates last February to meet President Clinton at a coffee set up by the Democratic National Committee. But he is well-known to almost everyone else in Washington involved in monitoring China, including federal law enforcement agents.

That is because the company he heads was, at the time, the focus of a federal undercover operation that ultimately netted $4 million in semiautomatic weapons that were headed for West Coast street gangs.

Wang is not just an ordinary Chinese businessman, and definitely not a small-time arms dealer. He is chairman of Poly Technologies, which intelligence officials say is owned and run by the People's Liberation Army.

The company's top officials are largely drawn from the families of China's leadership; by some accounts Poly Technologies has billions of dollars in annual turnover. Wang is also chairman of the state-run investment and trading company, Citic, which is Poly Technologies' nominal parent and which serves as the Chinese government's biggest investment group.

``The question isn't how this guy got into the White House unnoticed,'' a U.S. official familiar with China's industrial structure said Friday. ``The question is how he got in the country without everyone's alarm bells going off.''

Wang's trip to the United States raises a series of questions that Clinton administration officials said they could not yet answer.

The first is whether Wang, who presumably obtained a legitimate visa to the United States, was traveling in the country without the knowledge of U.S. law enforcement or intelligence officials.

One official familiar with the West Coast case, which involved the seizure in May of 2,000 fully automatic AK-47 assault rifles produced by China's state-run munitions companies, said it did not appear that Wang was under surveillance in connection with the case.

``He is a legitimate businessman with operations in the United States, and there was nothing at the time to disqualify him,'' another senior administration official said in response to questions about the visa.

And another official noted that the ``watch list'' of foreigners that embassies consult before issuing visas is designed to filter out suspected terrorists and known criminals.

``Wang himself was not a suspect'' in the undercover case, another official said, although his company clearly was. The Chinese government denied in May that any state-run companies were involved in the arms transactions, and Poly Technologies called the arms charges ``sheer fabrication.''

Clinton said Friday that it was ``clearly inappropriate'' that he met with Wang, and that he ordered ``better screening provisions that are tighter, to minimize this.''

Of the meeting with Wang, the president said: ``I remember literally nothing about it. I'm not sure that the gentleman ever said anything at this coffee that - I asked my staff to let me see the records of it when the story broke,'' in The Washington Post.

``And there were disparate people from different walks of life, from all over the country there.''

LENGTH: Medium:   64 lines

by CNB