Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  “Taiwan, feeling betrayed by President Carter’s normalization, was also interested in contact with those from the PRC,” Smith told me. While foreign intelligence services weren’t supposed to operate unilaterally in the United States, “we all know that at times they ignored that edict.”

  Like Communist China, Taiwan also coveted American technological know-how. As a CIA officer in Taiwan from 1976 to 1979, Robert Simmons monitored its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. He noticed that many older students whom Taiwan sent to MIT were actually military officers tasked with learning how to build a bomb. “They were sheep-dipped as students,” said Simmons, who later served three terms in Congress.

  * * *

  THE INFLUX OF Chinese students intensified the turf wars between the FBI and CIA. “An immense tension existed between FBI agents and Agency officers because there was an overlap of mission—both were trying to recruit foreigners in the US,” one former CIA officer wrote. “Agency officers were supposed to check with the FBI before doing any operation involving the more important targets such as Soviets, Iranians, and Chinese.”

  Both the FBI and CIA coveted one Chinese graduate student at an Ivy League university. He hated the Chinese government because it had sent his father to a labor camp for ten years during the Cultural Revolution. Hearing from campus sources about a likely prospect, an FBI agent knocked on his door in 1983, showed credentials, and invited him for a beer at a nearby restaurant. They ended up drinking quite a few, and the student readily agreed to cooperate.

  As time went on, he alerted the FBI about students and visiting scholars who were working for Chinese intelligence or had access to sensitive scientific research. He kept the bureau abreast of activities of student groups controlled by the Chinese government. He even cleared up confusions over common Chinese names—for example, whether a certain Wang or Chen was related to a similarly named Politburo member.

  Then the CIA’s local station chief asked for the FBI’s permission to talk to the student. The FBI agreed that a CIA agent could approach him, posing as a representative of a U.S. think tank with China operations that wanted to hire him as a researcher. But his FBI handler set one condition: the CIA could not ask the informant to return to China. It would be too dangerous, and the FBI would lose control over him, because the CIA was in charge of spying overseas.

  The agent promised—but asked anyway. The informant, who had no desire to go back to China, saw through the CIA man’s cover—and was furious with both the agency and the bureau. The FBI agent confronted his CIA counterpart, who apologized.

  The informant “was very upset,” the FBI agent recalled. “It hurt our relationship for a while.”

  The FBI’s courting of Chinese students also caused strains with university administrators. Some deans or registrars—or their staffs—quietly supplied nuggets about a student’s family background, financial status, aspirations, or adjustment issues. Others bristled.

  As supervisor of a counterintelligence squad at the FBI’s Baltimore office in 1984, David Major sent agents to Johns Hopkins University to recruit Chinese students. According to Major, some of the students complained to a dean there about the FBI’s approaches. The dean assured them that they were guests of the United States and Johns Hopkins, and under no obligation to cooperate with the bureau. He instructed them to report any further contact from the FBI to him.

  Major stormed into the dean’s office. He told him that counterintelligence was the FBI’s responsibility, which he would carry out with or without the dean’s support. “I said, ‘We’re not stopping, and you won’t interfere with my job.’”

  * * *

  WITH THE 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, America’s premier intelligence target since World War II, politicians and editorialists advocated increased investment in social services and other domestic priorities. “Peace dividend” became a catchphrase, and Congress slashed funding for the military and spy agencies.

  As counterintelligence suffered, the number of foreign students rose from 386,850 in 1990 to 514,723 a decade later. That divergence worried I. C. Smith, the China expert who served from 1990 to 1995 as the FBI’s section chief for analysis, budget, and training, and represented the bureau on the National Foreign Intelligence Board. He called for restricting both the number of students from China and the Middle East allowed into the United States, and the fields they could pursue.

  “My proposals were made in part due to the FBI being overwhelmed with sheer numbers and in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, the rush, including some ill-advised individuals within the FBI who had no understanding of counterintelligence, to cut back on counterintelligence resources to work such things as street gangs in Washington, D.C.”

  Smith’s plan, though, conflicted with the interests of universities and business. Both sought a global talent pool and a presence in China and the Middle East. Full-tuition-paying foreign students were a growing revenue stream for universities. A cap also ran counter to traditional U.S. policy that exposing as many foreign students as possible to American democracy would in the long run reap allies and influence worldwide.

  “Any proposal to restrict numbers wasn’t going to happen,” Smith continued. “Businesses looked at China as a future source of profits and of course, they had greater influence on Capitol Hill than did the intelligence community in that regard. It’s always the profits!”

  The participation of foreign students in terrorism attacks against the United States seemed to justify Smith’s concern. Eyad Ismoil, a Jordanian, entered the United States on a student visa in 1989. Four years later, he parked a van packed with explosives in the garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, where it blew up and killed six people. Also on a student visa was Hani Hanjour, who flew a plane into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

  Instead of curbing foreign enrollment after 9/11, the U.S. poured dollars and manpower into counterterrorism and counterintelligence. The number of foreign students and professors on campus continued to soar. So did espionage. By 2013, the FBI’s counterintelligence division considered developing a national “Academic Security Awareness Program” to alert students, professors, and administrators to the growing threat.

  “Counterintelligence threats to academia (people and research) have increased and evolved,” according to the proposal by Dean W. Chappell III of the division’s strategic partnership program. Yet “some institutions do not have an ‘open door’ policy for the FBI.” The program should be “accessible to the widest possible audience on an ongoing basis to achieve national impact.”

  Its message to students: “You may find yourself studying a language overseas or working on sensitive research. These activities can make you appealing to a foreign government.”

  To professors: “You may find yourself teaching a language overseas, recruiting foreign students, or conducting research on sensitive technologies. These activities can make you appealing to a foreign government.”

  To administrators: “You may find your institution has the interest of foreign governments due to locations you have outside the US or the research your school does in sensitive and economically valuable technologies.”

  I asked FBI spokeswoman Susan McKee whether the bureau adopted Chappell’s proposal. The Academic Security Awareness Program has moved from the FBI’s counterintelligence division to its Office of Private Sector, which handles outreach initiatives, and is “in flux at this time,” she said.

  * * *

  IN THE INTERNET age, China, Russia, and other countries complement human intelligence gathering at U.S. universities with cyber-spying.

  At first, they primarily exploited academic computer networks as platforms for hacking into American businesses. Because the networks—like campus buildings—were unusually accessible, and because emails from “.edu” addresses were unlikely to draw a second look from university information security staff, they were a perfect launching pad for economic espionage.

>   Increasingly, though, universities have become not just stepping-stones but targets, with scientific research and faculty emails both vulnerable. In 2015, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Virginia announced that Chinese hackers had compromised their networks. The Virginia attackers sought emails of employees who worked on China-related matters. Penn State conducts weapons research for the Navy and ranks third in national security funding among U.S. universities behind Johns Hopkins and Georgia Tech, but its cyber-defenses proved inadequate. The breach of its engineering school’s computers went undetected for more than two years, until the FBI alerted the university. Investigators identified two groups of hackers. One was connected to China, while the origin of the other couldn’t be located.

  Penn State responded by establishing an Office of Information Security. “We had been infiltrated by advanced persistent threat actors operating at a level higher than we were used to,” Provost Nicholas Jones told me. “We needed to step up our game.” Universities are “not only desirable but soft targets. The way we operate, we tend to be very open. We’re places where great work is being done, great discoveries are taking place. A lot of information is of potential interest.”

  Corporations typically have stronger cybersecurity than universities do, says Laura Galante, intelligence threat director for security firm FireEye Inc., which investigated both the Penn State and Virginia break-ins. Universities focus on other information technology priorities, such as making sure that new students’ emails work. While the average intrusion at a business or government office isn’t discovered for 220 days, the lag time at universities is “far higher,” she says.

  A September 2015 handshake agreement between President Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping not to “conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage,” could actually increase the risk for universities. The pact rules out cyberattacks on American businesses but leaves some wiggle room regarding academic research that has potential economic applications but has not yet been licensed to a manufacturer. “You have a much stronger case, sitting in China, who will deny it happened as they always have, to say, ‘No, we were interested for national security purposes, or to understand the future of a certain issue,’” Galante says.

  Like Russia, China phishes for political secrets, often on the eve of military or strategic meetings with other countries, with the goal of gaining an advantage in discussions. Several days before Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government hosted military officers in charge of China’s nuclear arsenal at a conference, a nuclear expert at a Washington, D.C., think tank emailed Kennedy School professor Matthew Bunn. Attaching a PowerPoint file, she wrote that she was sending Bunn in advance her presentation on “Cooperative Threat Reduction”—Bunn’s specialty—and would welcome his comments.

  Bunn clicked on the attachment, triggering a warning from his Macintosh computer. It turned out that his friend hadn’t sent the email—and that other conference guests had received similar messages from the same address, each one tailored to the attendee’s field of expertise. Unlike his Mac, their personal computers didn’t balk at the malware. The FBI later traced the attack to China.

  3

  SPY WITHOUT A COUNTRY

  Beside a busy highway leading out of Stockholm stands Thorildsplans Gymnasium, a three-story yellow brick building divided into five adjoining blocks. Modest in size by U.S. standards, with an enrollment of 1,300, it’s one of the biggest public high schools in Sweden’s capital. Founded in the 1940s, Thorildsplans is mainly a technical school, specializing in fields such as Web design, electrical engineering, architecture, and computer networking, and attracts an economically and ethnically diverse student body. Co-principal Robert Waardahl told me in April 2016 that the school was gearing up for an influx of refugees from Syria and other war-torn countries. “We are the school for everyone,” he said. “That is our motto.” While Thorildsplans competes in basketball and other sports, he added, its teams generally lose. “In our school, it’s good to be a nerd.”

  Like thousands of other high schools and colleges worldwide, Thorildsplans uses an information technology curriculum developed by Cisco Systems Inc. in San Jose, California. It periodically sends students and staff on field trips to Cisco’s headquarters and nearby attractions such as Stanford University and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Many teachers at Thorildsplans leap at this perk, but not Marta Rita Velázquez. The popular teacher of Spanish and English shows no interest in visiting the United States even though she’s an American, born and raised in Puerto Rico, with degrees from Princeton University, Georgetown University Law Center, and Johns Hopkins University.

  “She’s been asked to come to California with the class,” Waardahl said. “She has rejected it. We never asked why.”

  Velázquez can’t go home again. In April 2013, an indictment was unsealed against her in federal district court in Washington, D.C., accusing the former lawyer for the U.S. Agency for International Development of spying for Cuba for fifteen years. Most significantly, as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Velázquez allegedly recruited classmate Ana Belén Montes for Cuban intelligence. They overlapped at SAIS with a professor who worked for the State Department and was also a Cuban spy. Though they don’t appear to have formed a classic espionage “cell,” the presence of three Cuban agents inside one of the top feeder programs to U.S. diplomatic and intelligence services shows just how deeply the Castro regime penetrated American academia.

  Montes would rise to become the premier analyst on Cuba at the Pentagon’s military intelligence arm, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, and the most effective Cuban mole ever to burrow into the federal bureaucracy, feeding classified briefings to the Castro regime while softening U.S. policy toward it. Michelle Van Cleave, who headed U.S. counterintelligence under President George W. Bush, described Montes in 2012 congressional testimony as “one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history.”

  SAIS professor Piero Gleijeses, an expert on U.S.-Cuba relations, knew and liked both Montes and Velázquez. Montes was one of his best students, and Velázquez one of his favorite research assistants. “These are two people who took very serious risks for their beliefs,” he told me.

  Montes was eventually exposed and imprisoned, but Velázquez fled to Sweden, beyond the grasp of U.S. authorities. With the help of a Stockholm-based journalist, I traced her to Thorildsplans. Few of her colleagues and students there are aware of her history, or the charges pending against her. Waardahl said he had heard a “rumor,” but didn’t look into it because it had no bearing on her employment. “She is very friendly, very competent,” he said. “She’s good at what she does, and a good colleague.”

  “This sounds like something out of a spy novel,” Morgan Malm, another English teacher at Thorildsplans, said as he hurried to class. “She’s a friend and colleague and I fail to see how this could have any basis in fact.”

  * * *

  NO FOREIGN GOVERNMENT has divided American public opinion more in the past half century than Cuba’s. Is it a totalitarian regime, with a discredited communist ideology, that persecutes dissidents while destroying its own economy, as Cuban exiles and other critics contend? Or is it a progressive beacon that overthrew a dictator, reformed education and medical care, and aided other populist insurgencies against U.S.-backed tyrants in Latin America and Africa, as supporters, including many on American campuses, have maintained?

  Either way, most experts on espionage agree that Cuba boasts one of the world’s best intelligence services, which is fixated on its main enemy, the United States. Trained by the KGB in the days when Cuba was a satellite of the Soviet Union, Cuban intelligence emulates its Russian mentors in focusing on U.S. universities. Like Russian intelligence, which views the constant shuffling of policy makers between the federal government, think tanks, and
academia as a vulnerability of the U.S. system, Cuba courts professors with high-level connections and students who may be steered into jobs at key federal agencies.

  “The Cuban intelligence services are known to actively target the US academic world for the purposes of recruiting agents, in order to both obtain useful information and conduct influence activities,” the FBI warned in a September 2014 advisory. “A large part of the work and effort of CuIS [Cuban Intelligence Services] departments targeting the United States is devoted to influencing American and Cuban-American academics, to recruiting them if possible, and to converting them into Cuban intelligence agents. Likewise, students from these universities are the subjects of assessment and recruitment because many of them, after completing their studies, are going to hold important posts in private enterprise or the US government.”

  Globalization has deepened U.S. academic ties with China and Russia, but not Cuba. With each country frowning on travel to the other, only 94 Cubans attended American colleges in 2014–15, down from 190 in 2004–05. Unable to rely on homegrown students to collect information in the United States, Cuban intelligence has tapped into the pool of American students and faculty who sympathize with the Castro regime. Cash-strapped Cuba rarely pays agents, preferring ideologically driven volunteers over mercenaries for whom the United States might outbid it.

  Once the students become agents, they stop wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and start applying for U.S. government jobs. “When you recruit a younger guy, nineteen or twenty years old, you suggest, in the future, you cannot talk about socialism,” said Enrique Garcia Díaz, who ran Cuban undercover operations in seven South American countries from 1978 to 1988 before defecting to the United States. “‘Change your mentality. You are not on the left, not on the right.’ Then you suggest, good, join the FBI, CIA, or another U.S. government agency. In five years you will have this guy inside the government, like Ana Montes.”