Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  The agent showed them three sensors, and Bo arranged to buy them. As he prepared to board a flight back to China, with one sensor hidden in his luggage, he was arrested. Wentong was then arrested in his Iowa State lab in January 2014, five months after marrying one of his lab mates and being honored by the university for “outstanding research accomplishments,” and two weeks before he was to defend his dissertation. In lieu of a doctorate, he was awarded eighteen months in prison and then deported.

  “I feel so unfortunate to get caught up in this situation,” Wentong told the court. “But I am still positive about my future.… It encouraged me so much that a paper coauthored by me was published even in the midst of my incarceration.”

  Unlike Cai, other foreigners earn degrees and find jobs in the United States first, and then steal technology. A study conducted for this book yielded an eye-popping statistic: at least thirty people born or raised in China and charged since 2000 in U.S. courts with economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, and similar offenses attended American colleges or graduate schools, including Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and Cornell. College enables a foreign agent to “develop a history” in the United States, Houghton told me: “You build your bona fides, lose your accent, get a job.”

  * * *

  AT THE TIME of China’s opening, Iranians made up the largest contingent of foreign students in the United States. The CIA took a strong interest in Iran, which was not only a major oil producer, but was ruled by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whom the agency had entrenched in power in a 1953 coup. The agency scoured academia for Iranian informants who could return home and keep an eye on the shah and his enemies.

  Ahmad Jabbari, an Iranian graduate student in economics at Washington University in St. Louis, secretly tape-recorded a series of conversations in 1974 with a CIA agent, to whom a friend of his U.S. host family had introduced him. Inviting Jabbari to his hotel room, the agent offered him an immediate $750 and a monthly stipend to return to Iran and get a job in the government for at least two years. The CIA would then help him become a permanent U.S. resident or naturalized citizen.

  “If you had knowledge of dissidents, that would be of interest,” the agent told him. “Anything you might gather would be interesting.”

  Alternatively, the agent said, Jabbari could spy on other foreign students in the United States, because the CIA wanted to know how they felt about their governments. Jabbari, though, was a campus activist opposed to the shah. He declined both options.

  “I wasn’t the only one,” Jabbari, now a publisher of scholarly articles on Iran and central Asia, said in a 2015 interview. The CIA “was all over the campuses.”

  After the 1979 Islamic revolution toppled the shah, Iranian students no longer flocked to the United States. But their numbers have rebounded dramatically in recent years, from 1,885 in 1999–2000 to 11,338 in 2014–15. Because Iran doesn’t maintain formal diplomatic relations with the United States, it can’t send spies here under foreign-service cover, as other nations do. Instead, a former U.S. official told me, “the way the Iranians collect intel is through their student network.”

  * * *

  IN THE 1970s, only a few dozen students a year trickled into the United States from its Cold War rival, the Soviet Union. Their occupations might have warned President Carter to be leery of welcoming a larger contingent from the other communist superpower, China. Of 400 Soviet exchange students who attended U.S. universities from 1965 to 1975, the FBI identified more than 100 as intelligence officers. The Soviets had also tried to recruit more than 100 American students at universities in the USSR.

  Soviet intelligence had long been notorious for recruiting communist sympathizers at English universities. By cultivating “young radical high-fliers from leading universities before they entered the corridors of power,” the KGB had enlisted its greatest agents, the students and fellows from the University of Cambridge in England known as the “Cambridge Five”: Kim Philby, Donald Duart Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross. “By the early years of the Second World War all of the Five were to succeed in penetrating either the Foreign Office or the intelligence community,” former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin observed. “The volume of high-grade intelligence which they supplied was to become so large that Moscow sometimes had difficulty coping with it.”

  Fresh from his Harvard graduation at the age of eighteen in 1944, physicist Theodore Hall worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which developed the atomic bomb. The “youngest major spy of the twentieth century,” he passed atomic secrets to the Soviets because, he later said, “it was important that there should be no monopoly, which could turn one nation into a menace.”

  The KGB helped choose Soviet students for academic exchanges with the United States “and trained many of them as talent-spotters.” It steered them to universities that were accessible to the USSR’s diplomatic residences in San Francisco, such as Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley; in Washington, D.C. (Georgetown, George Washington); and in New York City (Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, MIT).

  Semyon Markovich Semyonov became the first Soviet agent to enroll at MIT in 1938. “The scientific contacts which he made … helped to lay the basis for the remarkable wartime expansion of S&T collection in the United States,” Mitrokhin wrote.

  KGB officer Oleg Kalugin entered Columbia University’s journalism school in 1958. After graduation, posing as a Radio Moscow correspondent at the United Nations, he attended events at Columbia and reported back to Moscow on them. His report on a speech about U.S.-Soviet relations by Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a Columbia professor and later national security adviser to President Carter, earned kudos from the Communist Party’s Central Committee.

  After that, “I went all across the country, from Harvard to Columbia and the West Coast, listening to what people said and reporting it if I thought it was interesting,” Kalugin told me. He rose to become a KGB general and head of its foreign counterintelligence branch.

  U.S. intelligence monitored the Soviet students. “We had a program to Americanize them,” recalled former FBI supervisory special agent David Major. “The idea was to show them the good things of America. I was the supervisor in Baltimore. We’d take them out on a boat, or have crab cakes and beer.” The agents hid their occupation, typically posing as businessmen.

  The Soviet Union didn’t rely solely on student spies. Scientists sent on goodwill visits and exchange programs by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the State Committee for Science and Technology, and similar government-affiliated organizations sought sensitive information on engineering and applied technology—aircraft control, weapons systems, and the like—at more than sixty U.S. universities in the early 1980s, up from twenty in the late 1970s. Three times as many Soviet-bloc scientists visited MIT as any other university, with Harvard second. The guests also “were involved in spotting and assessing U.S. scientists for potential recruitment as agents.”

  In 1976, one of the FBI’s biggest campus coups foiled Soviet espionage. The KGB had placed Boris Yuzhin in a graduate program in journalism at the University of California’s flagship Berkeley campus and assigned him to befriend scientists and opinion makers. Instead America’s prosperity and political freedom entranced Yuzhin, and the FBI recruited him.

  When the KGB sent him back to California in 1978 as a correspondent for a government news agency, Yuzhin became a valuable FBI informant, using a miniature camera hidden in a cigarette lighter to photograph documents in the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. He “largely taught a new generation at the FBI how the KGB was organized, what it did worldwide, and what it was doing in the U.S.,” former CIA and FBI counterintelligence officer Christopher Lynch wrote. After Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames—Soviet moles in the FBI and CIA, respectively—identified him in 1985 to the KGB as a double agent, Yuzhin was confined to a Siberian prison camp. Released in 1992, he returned to California, where he still lives.

  * * * />
  IN DECEMBER 1978, the first fifty-two Chinese students left Beijing for New York—via Paris, there being no direct flights. By 1979–80, there were 1,000 Chinese students in the United States; by 1984–85, 10,100. They consisted mainly of graduate students who had learned some English in or after college. Few entering freshmen had the requisite language skills, because Chinese high schools at the time offered little English instruction. Although China gave students only about fifty dollars apiece, U.S. universities provided generous scholarships, and some American companies that hoped to enter the Chinese market chipped in.

  Intelligence gathering was part of the students’ mission. U.S.-bound students underwent two weeks of training beforehand at a foreign language institute in Shanghai, one student who enrolled in an Ivy League graduate program in 1982 recalled. They learned the niceties of American etiquette, such as not asking a woman’s age. In addition, in one-on-one meetings, an official from the Chinese foreign affairs ministry instructed them to pass along any important information they came across in the United States to the Chinese government. If they belonged to the Communist Party, they were instructed to omit their membership from their visa applications, which were submitted together to U.S. officials. One trainee was actually an intelligence officer, with academic credentials trumped up to fool his American university.

  In the United States, the Chinese embassy kept tabs on them. So did FBI special agent I. C. Smith, whose beat was Chinese counterintelligence. “Deng Xiaoping knew that allowing students to travel to the United States there would be some who wouldn’t return, but he was willing to take that chance,” Smith told me. “Essentially he overwhelmed us with sheer numbers, all of whom were expected to siphon any and all information that was available. There appeared to be little specific targeting of information, just a vacuum cleaner approach.”

  * * *

  I. C. SMITH HAD BEEN fascinated by China since his boyhood in rural Louisiana. He idolized General Claire Chennault, who had grown up in the same region and headed the U.S. Army Air Forces in China—known as the “Flying Tigers”—during World War II. Smith enlisted in the Navy, serving in the Pacific and visiting Hong Kong. “How can one ride the Star Ferry, experience the hustle and bustle of that dynamic city, and not become enamored of that part of the world?”

  After college and a stint in the Monroe, Louisiana, police department, Smith joined the FBI. He handled criminal matters in St. Louis and political corruption in Washington, D.C., before arranging a transfer to the Chinese squad in 1980. While, to his regret, he didn’t learn China’s language, he familiarized himself with its culture and politics. He took courses at the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. State Department, and the Smithsonian Institution, and reached out to old China hands in government. They recommended readings, shared experiences, and offered advice. “They were invaluable in getting first-hand insights into China, which was difficult due [to] the strain of relations.”

  Elevated to squad supervisor in 1982, Smith led the investigation of Larry Wu-Tai Chin, the most enduring mole in U.S. history. As a translator and analyst for the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Chin spied on the United States for China from 1952 to 1985. He used his access to top-secret documents to betray dozens of the agency’s Chinese informants, resulting in their imprisonment or execution, and to alert his handlers in advance to U.S. policy, such as Nixon’s plan to visit China and establish diplomatic ties.

  Over the years, China paid him more than $1 million, which he laundered by buying Baltimore tenements and gambling at Las Vegas casinos. Reflecting Chin’s dexterity, he was honored by the CIA in 1980 and China’s Ministry of State Security in 1982, which is roughly equivalent to being feted by both Planned Parenthood and Operation Rescue. After a tip from a source—whom Smith code-named “Planesman,” borrowing a term from his Navy days for the controller of a submerged submarine’s buoyancy—that China had penetrated U.S. intelligence, the FBI fingered Chin. He was convicted of espionage in 1986, and two weeks later asphyxiated himself to death in his prison cell.

  “The Chin case was a harbinger of espionage to come,” Sulick wrote. “By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Chinese intelligence collection against the United States would eclipse Russian espionage efforts.”

  In 1984, Smith was promoted to FBI headquarters for one purpose: to develop a response to the deluge of Chinese students. Unlike the KGB, the Chinese disdained traditional tradecraft such as setting up dead drops, writing in invisible ink, or using disguises. The students gathered reams of material. Most was open and unclassified, but it satisfied Chinese authorities.

  “Virtually all of those early students engaged in information gathering, mainly to support the demands of their parent institute,” Smith told me. “They were simply expected to siphon any and all available information and send it back to China. And they did!”

  The bureau began noticing signs of an increase in campus spying, such as a spike in the use of copying paper. As the FBI’s senior resident agent from 1982 to 1984 in Madison, Wisconsin, Harry “Skip” Brandon watched the surge of Chinese graduate students at the University of Wisconsin.

  “Sometimes their Xeroxing bills were very high, almost humorously so,” he told me in January 2016. “We wondered how they shipped all this stuff back.” Unlike Smith, Brandon believed that the Chinese students sought specific documents. Rather than “collecting blindly,” they followed instructions, presumably from the Chinese consulate in Chicago, he said.

  * * *

  WITHIN THE FBI, Smith advocated for recruiting Chinese students. “I took the position then and now that having those students on our soil, while presenting a very real counterintelligence problem, also presented a considerable intelligence and counterintelligence opportunity.… That turned out to be the case.”

  Many students agreed to help because they resented how they and their families had been mistreated during the Cultural Revolution. “The Cultural Revolution was still very much a sore point and it wasn’t something that even the most fervent People’s Republic of China supporters could support.” One evening, a Chinese-American acquaintance arranged for Smith to meet an older Chinese student, in his midfifties. “I sat with the two and listened for a lengthy time as he related, with tears, his mistreatment during the Cultural Revolution, and how he just couldn’t return, how he thought it could happen again.” He became a useful FBI source.

  The Cultural Revolution victimized many of China’s elite political families. Their children, who grew up in the shadow of their parents’ humiliation, came to study in the United States, and often became the FBI’s biggest prizes.

  “It was those golden youth who, among all the students that traveled to the United States, saw the hypocrisy of communism,” Smith said. “For after all, some had suffered during the Cultural Revolution, simply because of who they were … and not what they stood for. Further, it was the golden youth that had shopped in special stores in the PRC, lived in larger homes, had access to chauffeured vehicles, etc.,” and recognized that these luxuries belied the austere lifestyle that Chinese leaders professed to follow. “For us, that presented an opportunity.”

  Like Boris Yuzhin, Chinese students accustomed to communist propaganda about the United States were impressed by its well-stocked capitalist stores. One student, whom Smith took shopping, couldn’t make up his mind which toothpaste and clothes to buy.

  “He knew that they had been lied to, for the PRC under Mao had painted a picture of the U.S. as a wasteland. He had never seen such a vast array of choices and we ended up making choices for him. He had herded sheep during the Cultural Revolution, simply because his father was a ranking cadre of a major city, and his girlfriend had killed herself by drinking rat poison. He had little desire to help with the Four Modernizations.”

  The pitch was discreet. “We would not ask those students who may have foreign intelligence information to betray the PRC, but to enter into discussions that would allow for the b
etterment of relations,” Smith said. “If there was a chance that one of those students would become a source, I advocated not formalizing the arrangement,” especially since the FBI had to run any formal recruitment of a foreign student past the State Department. “As long as the information flowed, who cared how they justified the relationship?”

  It wasn’t hard for the agents to establish contact with the newcomers, either directly or through an intermediary such as a classmate or Chinese-American community member. An agent, typically pretending to work for some cover company or group, might arrange to run into a student by accident—a “bump,” as it’s known in espionage parlance—in a relaxed setting such as a ballgame.

  “Some agents even brought in their families, something I didn’t necessarily endorse, but I did recognize that was important to the Chinese culture. I was willing … to entertain just about anything that would further the effort. It could be risky, but I was willing to take that chance.”

  Initially, the FBI preferred using Chinese-American agents to recruit Chinese students, but Smith soon found that the strategy could backfire. “It was well down the whole effort before a Chinese-American agent had a true success.” Unfamiliar with the assimilation of second-generation Chinese-Americans, a newcomer would wonder whether the recruiter secretly represented Taiwan or even the People’s Republic: “How could a Chinese-American agent truly be loyal to the U.S. when they’re Chinese?”

  In fact, the FBI agent’s biggest challenge sometimes was fending off competitors from friendly espionage services, from Taiwan’s National Security Bureau to the CIA. In the 1970s, worried that the United States would normalize relations with China, Taiwan was developing nuclear weapons. After those fears came true, the National Security Bureau used Taiwanese students and researchers at top universities to recruit students from Communist China, said one former student whose friends were targeted.