Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  Afraid that the boy would accidentally disclose the forbidden trysts, his mother told Dajin that Xianyu was just a friend, not his father. The confusion left him with a lifelong insecurity. It also taught him an early lesson about intelligence services—and the damage they can inflict on ordinary people.

  “I was very puzzled,” Peng told me. “My father was communicating, through his actions, he was my father. I believed my father, too. That’s why, when I was very young, I suffered a lot. Friends would laugh at me, and I didn’t know how to respond.”

  The puzzle wasn’t solved until he was eight years old. One day, Xianyu brought sweets for him and his grandmother. After Xianyu left, Peng’s grandmother said, “That’s your father.”

  His mother and grandmother doted on the bright, gregarious child, pushing him to excel academically and restore the family’s status. His mother was principal of the Boone School in Wuhan, which had been founded by American missionaries. After Dajin attended it for one semester, she noticed that teachers were going easy on him because he was her son, and she made him transfer to another school, where classmates mocked and bullied the fatherless boy. He tried to ignore them or at least deflect the worst of their verbal and physical blows by retreating into his own world. His favorite hobby was a solitary one: observing the stars and constellations in the night sky. Their grandeur made his own sorrow seem insignificant. Gifted with a spongelike memory, he learned their names by heart.

  His mother did arrange for him to use Boone’s library, where he read voraciously, and to sleep in a school bedroom. From the age of twelve to twenty he often stayed there, enthralled by the maps on its walls of China and the world.

  After his high school graduation, Peng taught middle school while studying on his own, hoping to go to college. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s bloody purge of suspected “revisionists,” the government canceled university entrance exams and limited admission to Communist Party loyalists. It wasn’t until China restored entrance exams in 1977 that Peng, who passed them easily, could enroll in Wuhan University. Even then, the university hesitated, placing his application in a special category because of his father’s disgrace. In 1978, as Deng Xiaoping consolidated power and began liberalizing China, Peng’s parents were allowed to remarry. They had remained devoted to each other despite separation and hardship, and their relationship taught Peng an important lesson: it was possible to outwit and outlast state-sanctioned pressures.

  Peng studied English at Wuhan University. As a reward for his hard work, he was named study monitor, which entitled him to organize academic competitions for his class. He then taught for two years at a financial and economics college in Wuhan. During this period, he began dating Xianai Mi, who had also grown up in Wuhan and studied foreign languages at Wuhan University. They would marry in 1985.

  His wife “adored him in the early stages and took care of him,” says a former Wuhan classmate, Hongshan Li, now a history professor at Kent State University. Once, when Li was visiting their apartment, Mi fetched a basin of water and washed Peng’s feet. “That is something that most wives don’t do in front of people. The whole family worked together to help him become successful. I envied him that he had such a devoted wife.”

  * * *

  IN 1984, PENG enrolled as a graduate student at what was then known as the Institute of International Relations—the same spy school that would later affiliate with Marietta College in Ohio. The institute’s alumni enjoyed preference for employment at the security ministry, and its professors and administrators had connections at the highest levels of China’s government. Peng’s own faculty adviser had been chief of a government section that analyzed the American economy. Chinese leaders, including Mao and Zhou Enlai, consulted him regularly. “Until now, in his eighties, my adviser is still providing advice to the Chinese government on the U.S. economy,” Peng said.

  At the time Peng became his protégé, the adviser had recently returned from a research stint at the World Trade Center in Dallas, Texas, where U.S. intelligence had approached him. “Knowing his importance, the FBI and CIA were trying to recruit him and made very generous offers,” Peng told me. “My adviser rejected their offers because he just wanted to be a scholar, not spying for anyone, not to say for a foreign country. He has also advised me not to work for any intelligence [service]. That influenced me a lot and it was partly why I tried to avoid the FBI whenever possible.”

  Applicants to IIR’s graduate school chose one of two career tracks: either to become teachers at the institute, or researchers at its sister organization, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. Established in 1965, CICIR was—and remains—a bureau of the security ministry. Its deputy director of American research in Peng’s era was Geng Huichang, who has been China’s minister of state security since 2007.

  Peng opted for the CICIR route, but worked there for only a month after earning his master’s degree. In 1986, he left China to continue his education in America. His wife, who would join him in the United States a year later, and his parents came to the Beijing airport to say good-bye. It was the first time he had ever seen his mother cry.

  He was bound for the University of Akron in Ohio, which had awarded him a full scholarship. Soon after he arrived, the FBI interviewed him for the first time. Asked about the Institute of International Relations, Peng told his favorite joke about his alma mater: “Do you know why they always put guards in front of the gate? They don’t want people to know that there are no secrets inside.”

  At Akron, Peng earned another master’s, this time in economics. Then he pursued a doctorate at three universities, climbing the prestige ladder from the University of Cincinnati and the University of Texas at Dallas to one of the world’s premier centers for international relations. In 1989, he was admitted to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

  Relishing his Ivy League status, Peng dove into his dissertation topic: the rise of economic cooperation among Asian Pacific nations. “He was a fine student, and his mastery of Japanese as well as Chinese was very useful in the kind of research he was doing,” said Lynn White, one of his Wilson School professors.

  His family life flourished as well. His sons were born in 1991 and 1994. They grew up bilingual, speaking Chinese at home with Peng’s parents, who had arrived from China in 1990. His mother cooked and babysat while his wife waitressed. Xianai Mi “sacrificed everything for this guy,” says Kate Zhou, a college classmate of Peng, who was also studying at the Wilson School. “The day she delivered her second child, she was still working in the restaurant.”

  Peng also gained a luncheon companion: FBI special agent Nicholas Abaid. Peng dined several times with Abaid at the FBI’s expense. He thought it would be impolitic to refuse, since he was attending Princeton on a scholarship and a student visa through the grace of the United States.

  “We became good friends,” Peng recalled. Abaid asked Peng about other Chinese students and their access to sensitive research. “He complained to me that Chinese students were able to get technology from the U.S. He was very alarmed about this.”

  Based in the FBI’s Trenton office, Nick Abaid worked counterintelligence at Princeton from 1982 to 1999, he told me as we strolled across the largely deserted campus on a hot, humid June afternoon in 2015. Kindly and white-haired, limping slightly from a knee replacement, Abaid knew the university as well as any official tour guide, but from the unique perspective of someone whose main business there was recruiting Chinese students as spies.

  Working from State Department lists of international students, he developed sources among the Princeton staff who tipped him off about the newcomers’ family backgrounds, adjustment issues, needs, and aspirations. “Universities get a bad rap as anti-FBI, anti-CIA,” Abaid said as we walked through the Wilson School, Peng’s old stomping grounds. “If there are ways universities can help us protect the country, they’ll do it.”

  When we dropped by the fa
culty dining room, where Abaid used to meet Princeton’s head of security, he complained that the 1984 Buckley Amendment, which prohibits universities from divulging all but the most basic student records without consent, made his job harder. Then he brightened. “If you approached it properly, and kept it confidential, maybe you could squeeze a little more,” he said. Universities “don’t want to be embarrassed by nefarious activities among their students. So they’re willing to cooperate as long as we don’t get too nosy.”

  We strolled to Nassau Hall, Princeton’s oldest building. George Washington’s troops had used its hallway as a bowling alley, my guide told me. We mounted the original steps to our destination, the office of the dean of foreign students, where Abaid had often visited. He was taken aback to find that it was now the waiting room of the vice provost for institutional equity and diversity.

  Abaid’s low-key, avuncular manner went over well with Chinese students. He helped them to open bank accounts and showed them the Norman Rockwell side of America, inviting them to cookouts and minor-league baseball games. He told them that in the United States, unlike China, they had freedom of choice. They controlled their destinies, and could decide for themselves whether to cooperate with him or not. Often, they did. Of the two hundred Princeton foreign students, mostly Chinese, whom he interviewed during his career, about fifty helped short-term with a specific fact, and about ten became productive longtime informants. “Recruiting assets is what the game is all about,” he said.

  His most important recruit, though, wasn’t Chinese or a student, but a foreign nuclear physicist who came to Princeton as a visiting scholar. The physicist, who held a military officer’s rank, had rebuffed the CIA’s overtures overseas, so the agency asked the FBI to approach him at Princeton.

  Based on information supplied by Princeton about the scientist’s research, personality, and family, the FBI set up an undercover operation. An agent posing as a magazine salesman began to socialize with the scientist, who was a heavy drinker. Since the agent had to keep up, he was usually drunk by the time Abaid debriefed him at the end of the evening.

  The physicist finally said to the agent, “I think you’re CIA.” He denied it. Then the scientist surprised him by saying, “Well, I want to talk to the CIA.”

  “I’m not CIA, but I have a friend in the FBI,” the agent said, maintaining his cover. “Would that be okay?”

  The scientist set one condition for his cooperation: his son had to study at a U.S. university. The FBI and CIA agreed, and smoothed the way, but the youth turned out to be bright enough to be admitted on his own.

  Abaid and other agents interviewed the scientist as many as sixteen hours a day for several weeks, working around his Princeton schedule and meeting in a different building every day to protect his identity. When they ran out of questions, other federal agencies, including the State Department and the Pentagon, provided more. The scientist identified many of the intelligence agents in his country’s diplomatic corps and “gave a very good update” on its military technology.

  “He was extremely helpful,” Abaid said. “He wasn’t a spy himself, but he knew the agents because they briefed him.”

  Eventually the FBI handed him over to the CIA, which sent him home to collect more intelligence. When the FBI agents asked what he would like as a going-away present, he suggested a watch for his wife. They showed him an array of watches in a catalog, but all of them were too small. “My wife has a wrist like an elephant,” the physicist said. They settled on a necklace instead.

  * * *

  PENG WASN’T ONE of Abaid’s triumphs. Wary of U.S. security organizations as well as China’s, he parried the agent’s questions. In 1994, a year before he completed his Princeton doctorate, Peng became an instructor at South Florida. When Abaid asked him to check in with the FBI in Tampa, Peng mustered his courage and refused.

  Accompanied by his parents, wife, and children, Peng left the Ivy League for an up-and-coming state university dotted with palm trees. Founded in 1956, 210 years after Princeton, USF mushroomed into one of the largest public universities in the United States. It has 48,400 undergraduate and graduate students, including 3,300 international students, from more than 130 countries.

  Its main campus in Tampa—it also has branches in St. Petersburg and Sarasota—resembles a corporate office park, with imposing research centers and dormitories separated by well-kept lawns. It prides itself on research and entrepreneurship, and regularly ranks among the top fifteen universities worldwide in the number of U.S. patents granted.

  National security is Tampa’s business. The city is home to the U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command, both hosted by MacDill Air Force Base, and a $14 billion military industry specializing in everything from cybersecurity to veterans’ health rehabilitation. Nine of the top ten U.S. defense contractors, from Raytheon to Honeywell, have plants in the Tampa Bay area.

  As Peng began teaching at USF, revelations of ties between two faculty members and Middle East terrorism strained the university’s relationship with its surrounding community. One was Ramadan Shallah, executive director of World and Islam Studies Enterprise, a campus think tank on Middle Eastern issues. In 1995, Shallah became leader of the Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Damascus, Syria.

  The other was Sami Al-Arian, a tenured computer engineering professor who in 1990–91 founded World and Islam Studies Enterprise. His long-running case would draw national attention and foster a bond between the FBI and the University of South Florida.

  After a 1994 public television documentary accused Al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, of raising money for terrorism, the FBI began investigating him. With a lack of Arabic speakers to translate the tens of thousands of documents seized from Al-Arian’s home as well as wiretapped conversations, the probe became “a seven-year root canal,” says J. A. Koerner, who headed counterintelligence and counterterrorism in the FBI’s Tampa field office at the time.

  The allegations against Al-Arian forced the university to weigh competing values of national security and academic freedom. Withstanding pressure to fire him, USF president Betty Castor, a former Democratic state senator, placed him on paid leave pending the FBI investigation’s outcome. In 1998, after a university-commissioned inquiry found no wrongdoing, she let him resume his academic duties.

  Because much of the evidence against Al-Arian was classified, the FBI couldn’t share it with Castor. “We told her as much as we could, but we couldn’t give her all the jewels we had,” Koerner told me in September 2015. “I felt bad for Betty” when her opponent’s criticism that she was soft on terrorism cost her a U.S. Senate seat in 2004, he added.

  The university’s posture shifted after the September 11, 2001, attacks—and an appearance two weeks later by Al-Arian on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor. Host Bill O’Reilly showed a videotape of Al-Arian shouting “Death to Israel and victory to Islam” in a 1998 speech and said, “If I was the CIA, I’d follow you wherever you went.” USF, O’Reilly speculated, “may be a hotbed of support for Arab militants.” Al-Arian responded that he had meant “death to occupation, death to apartheid, death to oppression” and wasn’t threatening anyone’s life.

  So many complaints and threats poured into the university that it evacuated the computer science building the next afternoon. In December 2001, university trustees ordered Judy Genshaft, who had replaced Castor as president, to dismiss Al-Arian “as quickly as university processes will allow.”

  Genshaft didn’t balk. A former administrator at Ohio State University and the State University of New York, she was a newcomer to Florida, but the state’s predominantly Republican political establishment and the businessmen on the university’s board regarded her as reliable. Although she doesn’t belong to a political party, Genshaft “was known as a Republican when she got here,” said a former USF administrator. “She got the job because she let people know she’s a Republican.” She’s a director of a family-owned Ohio meatpacking business
that was founded by her father and is run by her brother, Neil Genshaft. He has donated thousands of dollars to Republican candidates, including George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and congressmen James Renacci and Kirk Schuring.

  Legal grounds for firing Al-Arian, though, were wanting. On a Saturday morning in November 2002, the university agreed in principle to pay him almost $1 million to resign, despite the likely public uproar over enriching an alleged terrorist. The next Monday, the university called off the deal.

  Robert McKee, then Al-Arian’s lawyer, told me that he suspects that the FBI had a hand in the about-face. His theory is that the bureau learned about the impending settlement from a wiretapped conversation and alerted the university that Al-Arian would soon be indicted, giving USF grounds to fire him. Indeed, FBI agents would later tell Peng that university officials were grateful to the bureau for sparing them the embarrassment and expense of buying out Al-Arian.

  However, Al-Arian said in a 2007 radio interview that Richard Beard, the chairman of USF’s board of trustees, had nixed the settlement “because of the anticipated political fallout.” Beard then confirmed that he had objected: “I saw it as a payoff.” Also, retired FBI agent Kerry Myers, who oversaw the criminal side of the investigation, told me that he never spoke to USF about the indictment in advance. “I’d be shocked if anyone had gone to USF and done that without my knowledge.”

  Al-Arian and seven others were arrested and indicted in February 2003 on charges of racketeering and conspiracy to commit murder. In December 2005, a jury acquitted him on eight of seventeen counts and deadlocked on nine others. The next February, he pleaded guilty on one count of conspiracy to aid Palestinian Islamic Jihad and was sentenced to fifty-seven months in prison. After further legal battles, he was deported to Turkey in 2015.