FBI opens Beijing office. (Insider Report).

On July 4, 1994, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh was in Moscow to sign a cooperation pact between the Bureau and the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the renamed KGB. This year, Attorney General John Ashcroft chose October 24th -- United Nations Day -- to announce the opening of an FBI office in Beijing to cooperate in "counter-terrorism" operations with the Communist Chinese.

"The United States and China agree that the most important... response to terrorism is that we act -- cooperatively and swiftly," Ashcroft declared during a news conference at the U.S. Embassy. Earlier Ashcroft had met with Luo Gan, the Communist Party's senior law-enforcement official, and Justice Minister Zhang Fusen. The attorney general insisted that Chinese officials "uniformly indicate that wherever, whenever, however terrorism can be disrupted, (it) needs to be disrupted."

Beijing has consistently sponsored terrorist states, including Iran and North Korea as well as Afghanistan's Taliban junta. But its chief focus in the "war on terror" is the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), composed of independence-minded Muslim Uighurs in northwest China. Beijing insists -- but has never documented -- that the group has received weapons and assistance from al-Qaeda. In August of this year, the U.S. State Department, in an effort to placate Beijing, added the ETIM to its list of terrorist organizations.