In a classified 700-page report, a House panel has specifically highlighted the transactions between two high-tech American companies-- Hughes Electronics Corporation and Loral Space and Communications-- and a foraging Beijing, exchanges the committee said helped improve the China's technical rocketry data that could have assisted its ballistic missile program.``Based on unclassified information, I can tell you today that we have found that national security harm did occur,'' House Committee chairman Christopher Cox said, adding that the panel's investigation ``led to even more serious problems of (Chinese) technology acquisition efforts targeted at the United States.''

Bothcompanies contested the Cox panel report. Loral issued a statement saying the material exchanged with China could be found in standard engineering textbooks.

``We remain convinced that we did not violate the law and did nothing to harm national security,'' the company said. Loral Chairman Bernard Schwartz is a major financial contributor to the Democratic Party.

But in an unusual show of bipartisanship in the currently divisive political atmosphere, the Cox panel voted 9-0 to endorse the secret five-column study and send it up to the Congressional leaders and the administration. Led by the Conservative Cox, the panel has five Republicans and four Democrats.The bipartisan vote is indicative of the serious nature of the episode and its implications for US national security, experts said.

More worrying for the Clinton White House, Cox spoke darkly about the transfers to China going way beyond missile technology. Beijing has made ``serious and sustained'' efforts to target acquisition of US hi-tech over thelast two decades.

``These transfers are not limited to missile satellite technology but cover militarily significant technology,'' Cox said.

Cox also addressed the larger danger of such proliferation, saying the danger of weapons know-how helping China extends beyond that country because of Beijing's record of selling missiles and weapons technology to rogue states. ``It is not just the harm that occurs in the first instance to the United States from the transfer of technology that we concerned ourselves with, but also the derivative harm from the proliferation of that information once it is transferred,'' he said.

While a shorter unclassified version of the top-secret investigation is expected shortly, reports said the Cox panel had made 38 recommendations aimed mostly at tightening American technology export regime. Indications are that the lawmakers will press for greater leverage to the State Department and Pentagon in licensing exports, at the expense of the export-oriented CommerceDepartment.

The Cox committee was set up following disclosures that scientists from Hughes and Loral turned over technology to China that may have significantly improved the reliability of China's ballistic nuclear missiles. The exchanges took place after mishaps in 1995 and 1996, in which two Chinese rockets carrying satellites made by Hughes and Loral respectively exploded. In trying to help China rectify the problem, the two companies are said to have given them information that not only helped China correct its mistake but also improved its ballistic missile program.

US companies use China and its Long March series of rockets to launch their satellites because it is cheaper. But the Congressional investigation, which began with a probe into these two transactions, eventually branched out to the greater question of overall leakage of US high-technology to China, and according to some accounts, its findings are quite stunning.

Some reports spoke of the Panel even having uncovered a pattern by theChinese of stealing nuclear-weapons design technology from US nuclear labs.