Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  Holbrook didn’t respond. Instead, she forwarded the email to Provost Wilcox. “I find it all extremely troubling on a number of levels,” he replied. USF forbade Peng to meet with the VIP.

  That month, Peng told Mercurio that he had a wonderful idea. USF should establish a branch campus in China as a base for spying. After all, many American universities were opening branches overseas and several, including Johns Hopkins, had planted the flag in China. Why not USF?

  Actually, Peng’s suggestion was a delaying tactic, his best yet, the product of hours of racking his brain for ways to escape the FBI’s grip. A branch campus, he knew, would require numerous approvals and be snarled in Chinese red tape. He could put off spying for years.

  Mercurio took the bait. On December 1, she emailed Holbrook again. After acknowledging the “radio silence” with which Holbrook had greeted her previous request, she brought up Peng’s proposal. Peng “recently mentioned the possibility of exploring a USF branch campus in China, a difficult task for U.S. universities,” she wrote. “Of course, it would all hinge on current support from USF, which was promised in several venues this summer.”

  USF administrators were outraged. In their eyes, they had tried to cooperate with the FBI, but establishing a branch campus as a springboard for American spies would be a gross violation of academic values. If discovered, it would destroy the school’s reputation and get other American universities kicked out of China.

  On December 5, Holbrook brushed off Mercurio: “I need to be very clear about the institutional position before I speak with Peng again, and perhaps before you and I confer as well.” After Christmas, she passed the message to Wilcox. “This is the email I received from Dianne Mercurio that upset Judy (and me as well),” she wrote to the provost. “This seems to me to be a very unfortunate situation and I do not think we want to be involved any longer.”

  Wilcox: “And a USF Branch Campus in China, no less! I agree, that personal and institutional integrity suggests that we should not participate. Let’s talk!”

  Holbrook: “Yes, very problematic, What do you think were the promises re: the branch campus??? This should be a priority for discussion.”

  With a push from Peng, Mercurio had gone too far. The FBI’s clout at South Florida was waning—and so was its infatuation with Peng. At a meeting in an airport hotel, FBI agents asked him to take a lie detector test. It was clear that they still suspected he was spying for China. Peng replied that he would be glad to take a polygraph to prove he wasn’t. But when they told him that the questioning would be more comprehensive, he balked, saying it was an invasion of privacy.

  Upset by the request, Peng accused the FBI in the June 4, 2011, St. Petersburg Times article of orchestrating the university investigations of him. Six days later, whether by retribution or coincidence, federal immigration officials resumed their scrutiny of Peng. Although his status was “previous subject, closed case,” a new entry in his file ordered an “extensive search for documentation of contacts in China, expenditures, and financial transactions. Search computers, phones, and electronic media if possible.”

  Much as Chinese intelligence wasted time and money on Glenn Shriver, the FBI had misjudged Peng. Perhaps, despite the bureau’s evolving mission, it still understood mobsters better than it did college professors. Mercurio gave him an ultimatum: if he was still interested in working with the FBI, he had to come to its Tampa office for a tape-recorded conversation. Peng never showed up.

  * * *

  THAT SHOULD HAVE marked the end of Peng’s travails at South Florida. He could have served his suspension and quietly returned to teaching. Except that he couldn’t resist retaliating against the “Little Sea Elephant” who had denounced him. And Mercurio was no longer rushing to his rescue.

  What set him off was a decision by Nankai University, USF’s Confucius Institute partner, to suspend him from teaching in its mid-career business program. Nankai cited the St. Petersburg Times coverage that questioned why USF didn’t fire him. Peng inferred that his ex-flame, Xiaonong Zhang, and her husband had supplied the articles to Chinese authorities.

  In October and November 2011, Nankai leaders found themselves bombarded by angry letters, ostensibly from an ever-growing number—20, 36, 40, and finally 46—of “overseas Chinese.” Depicting Peng as a victim of persecution by South Florida, the FBI, and Nankai, the anonymous authors urged Nankai to reinstate him and suspend Xiaonong Zhang for bringing false complaints against him in revenge for being spurned romantically. Otherwise, they threatened to circulate the missives to “the top leadership of all relevant organs of the Chinese government,” presidents of China’s top twenty universities, all of Nankai’s deans, teachers, and students, and domestic and overseas media.

  “The professor who has made great sacrifices for the motherland and major contributions to Nankai is framed by bad people at Nankai, persecuted by U.S. authorities, and suspended from teaching without reason, while the actual culprit is allowed to continue teaching,” wrote “Thirty-six overseas Chinese of the Greater Tampa Bay area in the United States, who have made major contributions to the Confucius Institute of Nankai University.”

  Nankai officials had little doubt as to the epistles’ true author: Peng. “Although he did not use his own email address, judging from the language, he wrote the letter himself,” Naijia Guan, Nankai’s vice president for international affairs, emailed Kun Shi, who had taken over as director of the USF Confucius Institute. Peng concedes that the prose style is similar to his own but says his supporters wrote the letters. Their pressure led Nankai to lift his suspension after a few months, he says.

  Guan reacted to the epistolary onslaught by canceling Nankai’s partnership in the institute. Peng “extremely affected the friendship of our two universities, and we cannot tolerate such abominable behavior,” she wrote on November 8, 2011, to Holbrook, who remonstrated with her to no avail.

  South Florida administrators were furious at Peng. Once again, they wanted him gone. “Some decisions will be made by USF very soon that will adversely effect [sic] your continued employment there,” Robert McKee, who had represented Al-Arian and was now Peng’s lawyer, cautioned him on November 23.

  The university offered Peng a buyout plus the opportunity to resign rather than be fired. He rejected it. It was “disappointing and somewhat surprising to learn” that Peng had turned down “a very generous settlement proposal,” USF general counsel Prevaux wrote to McKee on November 28. “Consequently the university must now pursue its own course of direct action.”

  USF considered firing Peng for cause, but “it became clear that the case for termination would require the testimony of witnesses in China who could prove difficult to locate, interpreters and multiple document translations,” according to university spokeswoman Wade-Martinez. Instead, after administrative and faculty reviews, Peng received “the most severe progressive discipline administered to any tenured USF faculty member in the last decade.”

  The university suspended him without pay from June 2013 through August 2015 for damaging its relationship with Nankai and Hanban. It also accused him of trying to broker agreements with Hanban, violating a clause in his 2010 settlement that prohibited him from representing himself as a USF employee or negotiating contracts on the university’s behalf while on suspension. Peng’s defense was that he had apprised USF administrators of these discussions and told Hanban he was suspended.

  The grounds for Peng’s second suspension involved no crimes, unlike the alleged expense account and visa scams behind his first, and it could be argued that he was exercising legitimate free speech rights. Nevertheless, without the FBI in his corner, Peng’s penalty was twice as harsh.

  In June 2013, Peng filed a grievance through the faculty union, contending that the university was retaliating against him for refusing to spy on China. It was “by far the most exotic case we’ve ever had,” said Robert Welker, a business law professor and the union’s negotiator.

  That November
, the university offered to shorten Peng’s suspension to one year. Under the proposed settlement Peng would have “no responsibilities for the Confucius Institute or any international exchange program of any kind.” He would also agree that neither he nor USF “had interactions with external agencies that were inappropriate, unlawful, or unethical.” That clause, which Welker said was inserted by the university, would have prevented Peng from criticizing USF’s relationship with the FBI.

  Peng spurned the deal. He preferred to serve out his suspension rather than conceal the FBI’s role and give up hope of participating in international programs. After the university rejected his grievance and an appeal, the statewide faculty union decided against pursuing the case further.

  At an orientation session for new faculty in 2013, USF senior vice provost Dwayne Smith dropped by the union’s table and began discussing Peng’s grievance with Welker and Paul Terry, an education professor and the union president. Smith, who represented the university in grievance discussions, told them that Peng should be careful because the government had enough evidence to put him in prison for twenty years.

  Although his union was fighting the suspension, Terry agreed that Peng had gotten off lightly. Terry was surprised that the university hadn’t fired Peng. Perhaps, he surmised, USF feared that its history of caving in to Mercurio and the FBI would become public if Peng were dismissed. “I kept saying, ‘He might have something on the university.’”

  * * *

  IN AUGUST 2015, Peng’s second suspension ended. He was living alone; his father had been killed in December 2014, at the age of eighty-nine, when a car hit him near the USF campus. In a eulogy, Peng said that his father had instilled in him a passion for world affairs—and the ability to withstand pressure.

  I flew to Tampa for Peng’s return to teaching. Carrying backpacks, laptops, and even the occasional skateboard, about forty students poured into the first meeting of his course on “China Today.” Peng, though, was nowhere to be found. Compensating for his unpaid suspension, he’d booked teaching gigs in China up to the last minute. When thunderstorms delayed his flight from Beijing, he missed his connection in Chicago.

  Instead of Peng, an elderly bald man wearing a flower-print shirt was writing discussion topics on a whiteboard, such as “Oldest Continuous Civilization.” It was Peng’s mentor, Emeritus Professor Harvey Nelsen. He explained to the students that he was filling in for Peng, “who had an event preventing him from getting here.” He added that Peng was “completely sound of mind and body,” as if they doubted it.

  “You’re going to enjoy Professor Peng,” Nelsen continued. “He’s a real kick. All the student evaluations on him were right through the roof, the highest in the department. He’s got this great Chinese accent that takes some getting used to.” Nelsen then launched into an anecdote about a student who told him that Peng was “extraordinary, the only professor I know who got his PhD in prison.”

  “Not prison,” Nelsen had replied. “Princeton.” The student wasn’t far off the mark, I thought, remembering Mercurio’s “I am keeping you out of jail” email.

  Peng made it to Tampa for the first session of “Introduction to Japan,” which he was also teaching that semester. He even had time beforehand to bask in his USF office, from which his suspension had barred him. The narrow, windowless third-floor office overflowed with books in both Chinese and English. Dominating one wall, a Chinese world map depicted China in the center, relegating the United States to the upper right. It reminded me of the famous New Yorker magazine cover “View of the World from 9th Avenue.” Because the earth is round, Peng explained to me, every country can put itself in the middle of its map.

  Even with the travel fiasco, he seemed calmer and more relaxed than I’d ever seen him. We headed to the classroom, where forty-eight students assembled. Precisely at 5 p.m., he asked them, mock seriously, “Are you ready? Should I teach in English, Japanese, or Chinese?”

  He wanted to know how many of them had been to Japan, and a dozen hands went up. He turned to a black student in a baseball cap, who hadn’t raised his hand. “Have you been?”

  “No.”

  “Next time I go, I will bring you,” Peng said, deadpan.

  A female student mentioned that she had just visited China. Peng feigned disbelief. “I was there, I didn’t see you.”

  Peng may have been an incompetent or even unethical administrator, and miscast as a spy, but he proved to be a delightful teacher. Sauntering around the oppressively warm room in his white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, he held the undergraduates’ attention for three hours. He leavened his theme that Japan and the United States are cultural opposites—Japan is homogeneous and collaborative, the U.S. heterogeneous and individualistic—with riffs of humor and repartee, the spoonfuls of sugar that made the educational medicine go down. He made jokes at the students’ expense and his own, played the fool, shared personal experiences, offered exotic rewards for right answers, and in general acted like a cross between a talk-show host and a Borscht Belt comedian.

  Japan, he told them, has a population of 127 million people, primarily on four islands. Which is bigger in landmass, he asked one student, California or Japan?

  “California,” correctly answered the student, whose name was Michael.

  “Should I give him prize?” Peng wondered aloud. “Do you like money?” he asked Michael. With a flourish, he pulled a bill with Mao Zedong’s picture on it out of his pocket. Unfortunately, Michael forfeited the Chinese currency because he couldn’t identify Mao: Peng relayed it to another student who recognized the Chinese leader.

  Instead of Asian money, students who couldn’t answer Peng’s questions had to be content with his standard reassurance: “That’s okay. If you know everything, I lose my job.”

  As Peng described Japan’s vulnerability to natural disasters, including tsunamis, earthquakes, and typhoons, he noticed a student smiling. “Why are you so happy about typhoons?” he asked her. Later, Peng pointed to her as he bantered with another student: “Do you know who is the most happy person in this room? She is.”

  Occasionally, he flashed his accustomed braggadocio. “Have any of you been to Waseda University?” was his segue into boasting that Waseda, where he had studied as a Social Science Research Council fellow, “is one of the two best private universities in Japan,” producing more prime ministers, billionaires, and literature prize-winners than any other. He was “the only one selected” for the fellowship, which was “the most prestigious social science” award, “a big honor for me.”

  Like any experienced comic, Peng knew the value of a running gag. “Have you been to Hong Kong?” he asked a student.

  “No, but I’d like to visit,” she said.

  “Next time I go, I bring you,” Peng said, for the umpteenth time. Then he delivered the punch line, with impeccable timing. “I have a good suitcase.” As his audience tittered, I realized that, unlike most people who deal with the FBI, Peng enjoyed the last laugh.

  11

  NO-SPY ZONE

  After the FBI ended its courtship of Dajin Peng, it sought to erase any trace of the entire affair. Understandably, the bureau didn’t want the public to know about its bungled recruiting of a university professor to spy on China.

  That meant suppressing agent Dianne Mercurio’s 2010 emails to Karen Holbrook, then University of South Florida senior vice president. Citing “national security implications on a large scale,” Mercurio had urged the university to make a “show of support” for Peng before a visiting Chinese delegation and to explore opening a branch in China—presumably as a base for U.S. intelligence.

  Emails to state institutions, such as USF, are normally considered public documents under Florida law. However, in an April 2012 letter to the university’s lawyer, the FBI claimed to own the emails and demanded that USF surrender them.

  “These communications were explicitly marked as being ‘confidential,’ ‘sensitive,’ and ‘for official use only,’” St
even Ibison, then special agent in charge of the bureau’s Tampa office, wrote in a letter cosigned by an FBI lawyer. “All copies of these communications must be returned to the FBI as soon as practicable. This law enforcement sensitive information is the property of the United States government and was loaned to your client on the condition that it remain confidential.” Underscoring its tough tone and implied threat of litigation, the FBI enclosed copies of two legal precedents that it interpreted to support its demand.

  The university withstood the pressure. Abiding by Florida law, it retained custody of the emails—and later supplied them to me, over the FBI’s objections, in response to my public records request.

  I had first asked Ibison about Peng before learning about the demand letter. I didn’t get very far. “I honestly can’t remember any details of that case,” he told me in 2014. He had left the FBI and was in charge of security for Noble Energy Inc. in Houston. “I’ve been out of the business so long. I’m not trying to avoid your questions.” He did remember Mercurio—“Dianne’s a good agent”—and acknowledged that he had approved FBI operations at universities.

  When USF provided me with his letter soon afterward, I phoned Ibison back and pointed out that he had written to the university only two years before. He continued to claim selective amnesia. “You’ve got to understand, there’s five hundred people in the Tampa division,” including about two hundred agents, Ibison said. “I’m not trying to blow smoke. I just honestly don’t recall the letter or the case.”

  During our first conversation, Ibison discussed the relationship between intelligence agencies and academia in general terms. “There is a tension,” he told me. “The bureau always walks that fine line, trying to handle educators a little differently. Obviously, we have a large number of foreign educators, foreign students, coming into our country with a certain amount of information, intelligence, that can be gleaned from them. It wouldn’t be unusual that there are those folks here to gather intelligence on us.