The Scientist and the Spy

by Mara Hvistendahl

  ALSO BY MARA HVISTENDAHL

  Unnatural Selection

  And the City Swallowed Them

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Mara Hvistendahl

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hvistendahl, Mara, author.

  Title: The scientist and the spy : a true story of China, the FBI, and industrial espionage / Mara Hvistendahl.

  Description: 1st Edition. | New York : Riverhead, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019037842 (print) | LCCN 2019037843 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735214286 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735214309 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation. | Business intelligence—United States. | Confidential business information—United States. | Spies—China. | Agricultural industries—United States.

  Classification: LCC HV7561 .H85 2020 (print) | LCC HV7561 (ebook) | DDC 364.16/8—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037842

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037843

  Cover design: Grace Han

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  For Aksel

  Once, when all the maize was planted,

  Hiawatha, wise and thoughtful,

  Spake and said to Minnehaha,

  To his wife, the Laughing Water:

  “You shall bless to-night the cornfields,

  Draw a magic circle round them,

  To protect them from destruction,

  Blast of mildew, blight of insect,

  Wagemin, the thief of cornfields,

  Paimosaid, who steals the maize-ear!”

  —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Part XIII: Blessing the Cornfields,” The Song of Hiawatha

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY MARA HVISTENDAHL

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ON SOURCES AND NAMES

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  FALL 2011

  Deputy Cass Bollman sped toward the farm, the bright morning sun glaring through the window of his patrol car. To the north was the town of Bondurant, Iowa, where newly built houses huddled together on treeless lots, churches dominated street corners, and the marquee outside Dino’s Storage read AVOID ALL NEGATIVE TALK. To the south was a Tetris puzzle of cornfields. God-fearing citizens on one side, vast fields on the other, and two-lane 70th Avenue running like a ruler between the two. A few miles east of town, Bollman steered the patrol car toward the corn.

  The fields were a few weeks from harvest, and the corn stretched over seven feet tall. Central Iowa had blossomed into the lingering, pleasant days that make its winter hibernation bearable. Just a few minutes earlier, Bollman had been about to take a coffee break at the Git ’n’ Go when an alert came over the radio for an incident out by 96th Street. South of here walking westbound there is an Asian male wearing a suit walking through a farm field. He was dropped off. Nature of incident: suspicious.

  Eighteen years in the Polk County Sheriff’s Office had taught Bollman to suspend judgment. Bondurant was a sleepy place. Its dramas centered on grass clippings left in the street and holes dug in lawns by stray farm cats. But still Bollman saw his share of action. The area he patrolled included the outskirts of Des Moines, and in addition to making traffic stops, he had worked murders and negotiated for hostages. Once he pursued a meth-fueled driver in a car chase that ended with the driver’s girlfriend being flung to her death in a grisly crash. Best-case scenario, he thought, the man in the field was simply an unusually well-dressed farmworker whom a neighbor had mistaken for an intruder. Worst-case scenario, the man was burying a body.

  Bollman slowed the patrol car to a stop in a grassy clearing alongside a drainage ditch. About a hundred yards into the field was a thin, neatly dressed man. In the distance, row upon row of stalks lined up like infantry. The corn between the man and the road had been cleared, allowing Bollman a direct line of sight. To his left was a cheery stucco dwelling with a broad veranda and a white picket fence encircling a pasture for grazing horses. Two other deputies arrived around the same time and were on their way out to talk to the man, so Bollman walked over to the house to chat with the farmer who owned the land.

  The farmer worked this land with his brother, planting part of it for their own use and part of it under contract with Monsanto. He told Bollman that he’d been out doing his morning rounds when he spotted the unfamiliar man walking on the Monsanto plot.

  The corn the farmer grew for Monsanto was genetically modified inbred seed that the company used to produce commercial hybrids, which were sold at great profit to farmers for the next year’s planting and eventually turned into food or fuel: perhaps Doritos, perhaps ethanol. The seeds had been spliced with genes that made them resistant to certain pesticides—most likely the Monsanto weed killer Roundup—allowing the farmers who eventually purchased the commercial offspring to freely spray for weeds or insects without killing their crop. The company considered them valuable intellectual property. Monsanto kept the locations of such contract plots secret and enforced this secrecy through aggressive lawsuits. Unlike the fields where farmers grew commercial corn, which sported small guideposts that doubled as advertisements for seed lines (Pioneer 3394, DeKalb 62–55), the Monsanto plot was unmarked. Even the farmer himself knew little about the seed growing on his land.

  For part of the season, that was sufficient protection. Only locals who watched the Monsanto truck arrive to measure growth or spray pesticides knew that certain fields grew proprietary inbred seeds. The inbred seeds were planted in a pattern, with one or two rows of seeds designated as “males” for every four to six rows of “females.” Then, in mid-summer, as the commercial corn in the surroundi
ng fields stood tall, Monsanto sent in machines to detassel the female rows of corn, shearing off their yellow, pollen-laden crowns in a mass spaying, leaving only the male plants intact. Soon after, the males fertilized the females, and then the company mowed down the male rows of corn. The field now looked like a buzz cut with lines shaved into it, making it easy for outsiders to identify. And the man looked like an outsider.

  It was his face that the farmer had noticed first. The man had angular features, with a broad forehead framed by a receding flop of black hair. But more important was the way those features combined in the farmer’s mind to cancel out other details. Bondurant, population 3,860, is 97 percent white. The man was not.

  The man walked with his head down, the farmer reported, as if he were scanning the ground. After considering the man’s race, the farmer thought about his clothes—khakis, dress shoes, a short-sleeve collared shirt. And he’d been dropped off by a gray SUV, which had then driven away. Why the hell did the car leave? The farmer knew that after the detasseling process, a few stray inbred ears—what in the industry were called escapes—often lingered on the ground. Thinking that something suspicious might be at hand, he called his wife, who worked as a police officer one town over, and she called Polk County dispatch, which sent out the alert that blared over Bollman’s radio. At some point in this telephone chain, the stranger’s business-casual outfit became a suit, and his race became his defining attribute.

  As Bollman and the farmer stood outside the farmhouse talking, the gray SUV the farmer had seen dropping the man off zoomed past.

  “Well,” the farmer said. “There it is.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE OTHER DEPUTIES were still talking with the man in the field, so Bollman got back behind the wheel of his patrol car and sped off to pursue the SUV. Flicking on his lights, he soon fell in behind the vehicle. He could see the backs of two heads. The lights worked; a quarter mile or so from the house, the SUV pulled over to the side of the road. The two men remained still as Bollman approached the driver’s window.

  Bollman asked the men for identification. The driver was Robert Mo, a man identified on his license as Hailong Mo. He was forty-two and lived in Boca Raton, Florida. His head was shaved, and he had broad cheeks that tapered to an undefined jaw. His companion was an older man with taut lips that shifted into a nervous grin. He was identified on his Chinese passport as Li Shaoming. The man from the field was named Wang Lei.

  Robert Mo did the talking, and he was utterly polite.

  He explained that his two companions were visiting from China, where they researched agronomy. The men were driving across the Midwest looking at crops.

  That they would come to Iowa made sense. Corn was big business, both for the state and for the world. Corn is in the animal feed that fattens cows and chickens, and in the high-fructose corn syrup that sweetens ketchup, soda, and salad dressing. Over 90 percent of the starch and 56 percent of the sweeteners in the American diet come from corn. Fifty-six is also the percentage of a McDonald’s chicken nugget that is corn. For many years the fungus that produces penicillin was grown in a corn by-product, and many cosmetics contain corn. Altogether, the crop covers ninety-three million acres in the United States, a swath nearly the size of California. And Iowa, which produces more corn than any other state, is the center of the industry.

  Bollman wondered, though, how much could you actually learn by just looking at a field? To Robert Mo he said, “Have you been up to Iowa State and talked to them at the university?”

  It was a fair question. Iowa State was a big land grant university with a strong agriculture program, a sort of mecca for the study of corn. At football games in Ames, it was not unusual to see a man in a corncob costume leading cheers. It also received millions of dollars in grants from Monsanto for endowed professorships, large-scale research projects, and graduate student fellowships, so for people looking to learn about Monsanto seed, it was not a bad choice.

  But Mo’s answer was vague.

  Soon Bollman’s colleagues showed up with Wang Lei in the back of their patrol car. Bollman returned to his vehicle to run a basic background check. It came up clean on all three men.

  He let the men off with a warning. “If you’re going to be on somebody’s property, you need to let them know,” he said.

  Before the men sped off, one of the other deputies recommended speaking with some local farmers with extensive crop knowledge. Maybe one of them could help the Chinese visitors with their agronomy research, he suggested. In Iowa, people were nice almost to a fault, especially when it came to an interest in corn.

  After the men left, Bollman turned to the friendly deputy. “You know, you don’t necessarily need to be telling him that,” he said. “About farms to visit.”

  “Oh, these guys are OK,” his colleague replied.

  “Something doesn’t seem right here,” Bollman insisted. “Why haven’t they gone up to Iowa State?”

  Later that day, the memory of the incident began to bug him. He filed a report, just in case. He filled in the lines at the top of the form, leaving other identifiers blank:

  Type of Suspicious Activity: TRESPASSING IN FARM FIELD

  Name: HAILONG MO

  Race: ASIAN

  TWO

  FALL 2011

  Robert Mo gripped the wheel of the SUV as it barreled away from Bondurant. Wang Lei and Dr. Li were subdued. A run-in with sheriff’s deputies was not what they needed right now. Robert was calm under pressure, and he played the part of a curious professor well. He once was a professor, after all. The Iowa deputy who had stopped his rental car near the field did not seem overly concerned. Robert had even asked, Did we do anything wrong? And the officer had said no: nothing serious.

  But although Robert had so far emerged from such incidents unscathed, he’d had some close calls. A few months before the Monsanto field encounter, a farmer had spotted him and Wang Lei near a field planted with inbred seed belonging to the company DuPont Pioneer. Wang Lei, who had been digging in the field, had bounded into the car, red-faced and heart pumping, as Robert sped away through a ditch, his foot heavy on the gas. Who knew how long his luck would last?

  When Robert took a job with the Beijing agricultural company Dabeinong (DBN) five years earlier, it had seemed like a safe move. As a low-level researcher living in Miami with two unmarketable PhDs, he had struggled to support his growing family. After becoming the company’s international business manager, he pulled in more than $100,000 a year. DBN was then mainly a broker of animal feed, and tasked with pursuing the company’s legitimate business interests in the United States, Robert helped source feed additives, talked to experts in pork transportation, and worked hard on a bid to acquire a feed company in the Netherlands.

  But then his safe job spiraled out of control into something he barely recognized. His duties grew to include tasks that were illegal in the United States, if tacitly encouraged in China. For some time now Robert had complained to Dr. Li that the seed mission was risky.

  Robert’s kids were U.S. citizens who were more Floridian than Chinese, and he couldn’t just flee with his family to China if things got bad. And today he had almost been caught.

  * * *

  • • •

  ROBERT MO WAS BORN on February 20, 1969, in south central China’s Sichuan province. The second of four children, he grew up in a tiny mountain village called Daichi that was about a day’s journey from the provincial capital of Chengdu. Daichi might as well have been at the edge of the Earth, and as the Cultural Revolution wrenched through China in his toddler years, that was mostly an asset. Even as dueling factions of Red Guards commandeered tanks from munitions factories and waged bloody battles in city streets, life in the village for Robert and his siblings was peaceful, its rhythm dictated by the seasons and the harvest.

  Robert’s father, Mo Shifang, was a survey engineer in a c
oal mine who inhabited a world of jagged walls and brackish water. His mother, He Fangxun, was a rural doctor who tended to the miners, treating the maladies caused by the black dust lining their lungs. His parents’ careers exposed them to suffering and death, but at home they were loving and playful with their children. One of Robert’s earliest memories involved the birth of his sister, Mo Yun, when he was three years old. As his mother tended to the baby, his father watched Robert and his two other siblings. Mo Shifang had been a gymnast at the university, and he delighted the kids by flipping into a handstand and walking upside down. His sister’s entrance into the world carried for Robert an aura of magic.

  Cooking oil, rice, and meat were rationed, but living as they did in a fertile swath of the countryside, the family never went hungry. They raised chickens and rabbits and fished in a river, and Robert shot down sparrows with a slingshot and delivered them to a neighbor, who fed the birds to her cats and gave him apples in exchange. On fishing outings he helped his father reel in the catch, which his mother turned into a fragrant stew.

  The relative lack of political strife in Daichi left Robert and his siblings plenty of time to play. As Mo Yun grew into a playmate, Robert fashioned toys out of scraps of metal and wood. Over hours on the school track he mastered the long jump, and in his spare time he played ping-pong and read. He studied Chinese classics and the patriotic “red” literature sanctioned by the state, but he had a special affection for detective books.

  Despite their modest circumstances, Robert was proud of his parents. Near the fields in Daichi was a deep manure pit that the villagers used for fertilizing crops. One day Robert was with his mother when a young boy fell into the pit and started flailing about in the potent stew of rotting compost, feces, and rainwater. Robert watched as she dived into the pit to yank the boy out, then pressed her hands on his trunk, forcing black-green water out of his mouth. Another time, an engineer who worked under Robert’s father’s supervision rode his new bicycle to the vegetable market. While the engineer wasn’t looking, a thief swiped it. His father asked around until he located the thief, then triumphantly retrieved the bicycle. Robert thought with pride that his father was a true crime-busting detective, just like in the spy fiction he read. His parents’ willingness to help others impressed him and, he felt, shaped his own personality. As his mother and father went, so would he.