Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  Two trends have converged to create the surge in academic spying. The first is the growing intimacy between U.S. intelligence and academia, driven partly by patriotic fervor and terrorism fears in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Deterred by student protests and faculty hostility during the Vietnam era, the CIA, FBI, and other security agencies have returned in force, forging a tenuous alliance of spies and scholars.

  “September 11 led to a quiet reengagement of a lot of the academy with the national security community,” says Austin Long, who teaches security policy at Columbia University.

  Second, and perhaps even more important, is the globalization of higher education. Globalization has built friendships and understanding between hostile countries, and improved the quality of teaching and research. It has also fostered foreign spying at American universities and their branches overseas, as well as a corresponding spike in U.S. efforts to recruit international students and professors. Academic migration to and from the United States has soared, with both directions offering opportunities for espionage. More U.S. students and faculty are heading overseas. The number of Americans studying abroad has doubled since 2001 to 313,415 in 2014–15. The sun never sets on American universities. There are more than 160 American-style universities in eighty countries, from Italy to Kurdistan. Most are branch campuses of U.S. institutions, or foreign-run schools seeking U.S. accreditation. More than half have opened since 2000.

  Often located in politically sensitive regions such as the Middle East and China, these branches provide targets for foreign intelligence agencies and likely listening posts for our own. Foreign intelligence services, especially China’s, seek to recruit young Americans abroad and place them in key U.S. government positions. If they are fluent in the right languages, U.S. intelligence may also tap them.

  The CIA and FBI “think nothing of finding a linguistically appropriate young American, whom they know has a wanderlust and has decided to spend two or three semesters overseas, and asking them to gather intelligence,” a former federal official told me. The FBI even urged the University of South Florida to open a China branch, where Peng could be assigned as a cover for his spying.

  At the same time, foreign students and professors have been pouring into the United States, though the election of Donald Trump as president on an anti-immigrant platform could stanch the flow, especially from Iran and other Muslim countries. There were almost one million (974,926) international students at U.S. universities in 2014–15, more than six times the 1974–75 total (154,580) and more than double that in 1994–95 (452,635). The number of foreign-born scientists and engineers working at U.S. colleges and universities rose by 44 percent, from 360,000 in 2003 to 517,000 in 2013. While most international students, researchers, and professors come to the United States for legitimate reasons, universities are an “ideal place” for foreign intelligence “to find recruits, propose and nurture ideas, learn and even steal research data, or place trainees,” the FBI reported in 2011.

  The FBI and CIA set their sights on international students, professors, and visiting scholars in the United States, assessing them as potential threats or “assets”—espionage lingo for spies managed by CIA officers. In a 2012 poll of staff at U.S. universities who work with international students, 31 percent, or almost one-third, reported that the FBI had visited students within the past year. (The poll didn’t ask about the CIA.) It’s likely that the FBI approached more students without the staff’s knowledge.

  “When it comes to counter-intelligence,” Milonovich, the FBI liaison to academia, wrote to a group of university presidents in May 2014, “the FBI is interested in 3 primary areas: 1) students, both foreign and domestic, 2) faculty, both foreign and domestic and 3) research and development.”

  With so many foreigners on campus, U.S. intelligence prioritizes them based on such factors as country of origin, field of study, access to sensitive research, family background, and whether their home government is paying their tuition. If an academic has access to a country that’s both hostile and hard to penetrate, U.S. intelligence can be very persistent. Take the case of an Iranian-born scientist who travels frequently to his native land. “He was first contacted by the FBI with the excuse that they wanted to know his opinion about what was happening in Iran,” says a friend of his. “He met with the FBI agent. Then, after a few email exchanges, he was told by the FBI agent that the CIA was interested in recruiting him. He turned them down.

  “Sometime later the same FBI agent asked the scientist to reconsider his decision, but he rejected the CIA offer again. Several months later he was invited to a security conference, which was known to be populated by CIA agents.” The conference was “about Iran and how young Iranians, particularly young scientists, become foot soldiers for the Iranian hard-liners, and help them with all sorts of things, including Iran’s nuclear program.” The scientist “turned down the invitation. Several months later, he was asked to meet with the representative of a British company, and was told that ‘the British Consulate in San Francisco’ had suggested the meeting. But it turned out that the company did not exist, so that was probably another attempt for recruitment. The meeting did not take place.”

  Although the CIA is noted for its feats and failures abroad, its National Resources Division operates clandestinely in the United States, primarily recruiting foreign nationals. Henry Crumpton, who headed the division from 2003 to 2005, said that it relied on a network of “campus cooperators” numbering in the “low hundreds” to identify prospects.

  “We have cooperative contacts at the universities,” Crumpton told me. “I would meet with them sometimes. These are American citizens, for the most part, or persons legally here, cooperating because they think it’s the right thing to do.”

  CIA officers must acknowledge their intelligence affiliation when recruiting U.S. citizens and permanent residents, but not foreigners. Working from “lists of foreign students studying at US universities,” one former CIA officer used “a plethora of commercial aliases” to make appointments with them, according to his memoir, written under the pseudonym Ishmael Jones. “I’d meet them to see if they had access to any secrets of interest to the US and if they did, advance the relationship and then recruit them.… Typically I sought out graduate students from rogue states whose educations were being paid for by their governments and were studying something useful to the rogue state—such as nuclear science.”

  Some CIA officers on clandestine missions pretend to be professors. While they aren’t supposed to represent themselves falsely as employees of a specific U.S. university, the policy leaves room for hazier cover. “I’m an associate professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin” is forbidden, but “I’m a professor doing research for a book on Middle Eastern politics” is allowed. Such distinctions may blur in the field. “I don’t know of any restriction on posing as a pointy-headed college professor, and I have done so,” Jones told me.

  Based on his campaign rhetoric and national security appointments, President Trump’s policies are likely to spur more domestic and foreign spying in academia. Less shackled by civil liberties and privacy restraints, the CIA and NSA may step up recruiting and surveillance of foreign students and professors. Scrapping the Iranian nuclear agreement could prompt Iran to build a bomb—and the CIA to resume staging academic conferences aimed at luring key scientists to defect. Trump’s promised trade war with China may embolden its government to siphon off more technologies developed at American universities, while his appeasement of Russia could encourage Vladimir Putin to infiltrate more spies through Ivy League gates. China, Russia, and Iran may also seek academic informants on the arms buildup vowed in Trump’s December 2016 tweet that “the United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability.”

  As of this writing, Trump’s proposals for restricting entry to the U.S. from Iran and several other predominantly Muslim countries are in flux. It is unclear if they will withstand lega
l challenge, and which categories of newcomers will be included. If students and professors are exempted, then their nations’ intelligence services would rely more than ever on academic spying. If not, fewer agents under academic cover might reach American campuses. In either case, Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric is likely to make it harder for the CIA and FBI to recruit Middle Eastern students in the U.S. and send them home as operatives.

  * * *

  WHILE MANY PROFESSORS work hard, their official duties aren’t especially protracted. They teach ten to fifteen hours a week, hold office hours twice a week, and have summers off. That leaves plenty of unstructured time for writing, research, preparing lectures, grading papers, serving on university committees, consulting, traveling internationally to academic conferences—and moonlighting for U.S. intelligence.

  Their assistance comes in many forms and levels of engagement. When they return from places of interest, they may be debriefed by the CIA, or volunteer a nugget. “Occasionally, I will report something of my own volition if I’ve had a particularly interesting conversation with a high government official,” says Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye, a former National Intelligence Council chairman. “I might say, ‘I saw the foreign minister. Their official position is this. Over drinks, he said the opposite.’”

  Although CIA policy prohibits using journalists, clergy, and Peace Corps volunteers except under extraordinary circumstances, students and professors are fair game. Two globe-trotting professors were among the agency’s “most energetic and incompetent” recent agents, according to Ishmael Jones. They invited a young scientist from a “country with a nascent nuclear program” to the United States and ushered him on a private tour of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s cutting-edge laboratories, inadvertently disrupting another CIA officer’s efforts to recruit him.

  On a separate occasion, the faculty duo used CIA funds to create “a scientific conference specifically designed” to entice a nuclear scientist from a hostile nation, and arranged a scholarship for him to an American university. Rather than help the CIA, though, he “used his university connections and scholarship to gather additional scientific information for his country’s nuclear program.”

  A professor at one top-tier East Coast university enjoys wearing his eight-hundred-dollar Victorinox Swiss Army watch to dinner parties. It’s the ultimate conversation piece: a bribe from a Russian spy.

  As a student, he had considered a CIA career, but the agency wasn’t hiring. He’d gone into academia instead, making his name as a foreign policy expert, and still occasionally wondering if he had a talent for espionage.

  Then, in 2010, he got an unexpected chance. He was moderating a campus discussion on arms control. Afterward, a Russian diplomat approached him and one of the panelists, gave them his card, and invited them to lunch.

  Because they held security clearances, the professor and his colleague were obliged to run this overture past the FBI. A contact at FBI counterintelligence soon called the professor and said that the diplomat was believed to be a foreign intelligence officer.

  “I guess I won’t meet him for lunch,” the professor said.

  “That’s one option,” the FBI agent said. “We’d prefer you to meet him.” The bureau wanted to use the professor as a double agent to learn about “Russian collection priorities, tradecraft, and things like that,” he told me. “Just knowing what the other side is really interested in is very valuable.”

  Over the next two years, the Russian and the FBI each treated the professor to ten lunches. He would dine with the Russian spy at Mexican restaurants, French bistros, and steakhouses: never the same place twice, because his host was worried about countersurveillance. The Russian always paid cash: hundred-dollar bills, straight from an operational fund. Afterward the professor would call the FBI agents, who would take him to lunch a few days later and debrief him.

  The spy was in his late thirties, muscular and swarthy, with a high forehead and deep-set eyes reminiscent of Russian president and former KGB officer Vladimir Putin. He offered to help the professor find a Russian publisher for his scholarly articles and books, saying he had connections in Moscow publishing circles because his father had worked for the Soviet news service—a frequent cover, his listener knew, for KGB agents. The spy also plied the professor with gifts of increasing value, first a fine bottle of Posolskaya vodka—which was especially appropriate coming from a spy under diplomatic cover because posolskaya means “ambassador” in Russian—and then the Swiss watch.

  “Do you want the watch?” the professor asked the FBI agents. “Don’t you want to check for bugs?”

  No need, they told him; it was unlikely to be bugged. He could keep it.

  Initially, the spy elicited the professor’s views on the sort of topics often discussed in the faculty lounge or a current events seminar, such as U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Gradually, his questions over lunch became more pointed. How well did the professor know a certain U.S. general, and what did they talk about? Avoiding specifics, the professor did his best to act cagey, but intrigued.

  “You want to play smart and dumb,” the professor later explained to me. “You want to seem a little more oblivious than you are. It’s a courtship. You can’t seem too eager to betray your country.”

  At last, the Russian proposed a trade: cash for information. The amount of the payment would depend on the quality of the information. To prevent exposure, he said, the professor should buy a laptop that he would never connect to the Internet, write on it, and supply the file to the Russian on a flash drive. The spy would then insert the drive into a secure computer in the nearest Russian diplomatic facility, and send a cable to Moscow.

  The FBI instructed the professor to play along without providing any classified secrets. He wrote an authoritative-sounding discussion of the Afghanistan war on his own laptop and gave the flash drive to the Russian.

  At their next lunch, the spy handed over two thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. He also made clear to his recruit that publicly available information, no matter how well analyzed, would not suffice.

  “We appreciate it, but we didn’t think it was that sensitive,” he told the professor. “We can pay you more if you give us more.”

  Familiar with the revolving door in the United States between academe and government, he encouraged the professor to seek a job in the State Department or Pentagon—where, both men understood without saying, Russia would pay dearly for an inside source.

  The professor turned the money over to the FBI. Soon afterward, the Russian rotated back to Moscow. He assured the professor that his replacement would be in touch, but no message came. Possibly the professor’s banal analysis had persuaded Russian intelligence that he knew nothing of value. Or they guessed that the FBI was running him. Either way, his foray into espionage was over. While he had discovered “nothing earth-shattering,” the professor concluded, he had benefited national security, and scratched his intelligence itch.

  PART 1

  FOREIGN ESPIONAGE AT AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES

  1

  CLOAK OF INVISIBILITY

  Brandishing a light saber, and sporting a dark cloak and hood that concealed his eyes but not his grin, Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi pranced about the stage of Window of the World Caesar’s Palace in Shenzhen, China, on the evening of January 30, 2016. So did Jedi warriors, imperial stormtroopers, and other Star Wars characters. Pulsating spotlights and jets of smoke alternately illuminated and clouded the spectacle as a cheering audience of seven hundred waved yellow, green, and purple sabers.

  Titled “Battle of Future—A New Dawn,” the Star Wars parody highlighted an extravaganza that also featured live music, sensual dances, people’s faces (poked through a screen) atop puppet bodies, and a tribute to China’s military. It marked the sixth anniversary of Kuang-Chi Institute of Advanced Technology and Kuang-Chi Science Ltd., which aim to conceive and commercialize breakthroughs in the fast-growing field of metamaterials. Ruopeng Liu,
the Obi-Wan Kenobi, is the founder and head of these ventures; the other Jedis, their executives; the performers and audience, their workers. Several members of the audience won prizes epitomizing the fearless, innovative spirit that Liu preaches: trips to the North Pole, the South Pole, and Near Space.

  Still in his costume but now sans saber, Liu clutched an enormous bouquet of flowers in his left hand and a microphone in his right, and glorified his accomplishments in song. “No matter how thrilling it is outside, I behave with perfect composure,” he crooned in Chinese. “You can’t say how hard the trip is, it’s fortunate we kept a cool head.” Then he segued into the chorus from the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.”

  Chubby-cheeked and endearingly boyish at the age of thirty-two, Liu had a lot to celebrate. His majority stake in Kuang-Chi Science, which is traded on the Hong Kong stock exchange, made him a billionaire with a business empire extending to the United States, Norway, Canada, and New Zealand. Chinese media dubbed him the “Elon Musk of China,” equating him as a visionary with the iconic founder of electric car maker Tesla. By the end of 2015, his fledgling institute had sought an astounding total of 3,289 patents, and received 1,783. China’s government showered him with honors and responsibilities for technology policy, and President Xi Jinping, as well as many prominent ministers and party officials, toured Liu’s enterprises in Shenzhen.

  Yet Liu’s wealth and fame are a mask, like his costume at the anniversary gala, or the invisibility cloak that he helped design as a Duke graduate student in electrical engineering, under renowned professor David R. Smith. They hide an unsettling reality that has never been made public: he owes much of his success to what one might call a higher education form of economic espionage. Liu exploited an unwary professor, lax collaboration guidelines, and Duke’s open, global culture by funneling Pentagon-funded research to China. He arranged for Chinese researchers to visit Smith’s lab and reproduce its equipment, and passed them data and ideas developed by unwitting colleagues at Duke. He secretly started a Chinese website based on research at Duke, and deceived Smith into committing to work part-time in China. His activities compromised the United States’ edge in an emerging technology that could someday conceal a fighter jet, tank, or drone, affecting the outcome of a war or covert operation. Once Liu returned to China, a grateful government invested millions in his start-up ventures.