My line of work didn’t help. Western journalists enjoyed freedoms that were rarely afforded to our Chinese counterparts, but we were nonetheless viewed with wariness. Local officials were often hypercontrolling, even with stories that had a positive spin. At moments, average citizens could also be suspicious. A friend’s mother in Shanghai once cautioned him that I could be a spy. I found that sentiment funny when I was a twenty-five-year-old freelancer with a degree in literature; who would possibly want me as a secret agent? I wondered. But as time went on and I strove to be taken seriously as a journalist, it bothered me. My articles probably took on a more negative tone because of this. Being treated with suspicion, I came to realize, could breed animosity where there had been none.
As I learned more about the case of Robert Mo, I realized that I needed to understand how race and ethnicity had shaped FBI investigations involving Chinese scientists over the decades. I spoke with former FBI agents and with Asian-American activists who advocated for people accused of crimes. It was clear from the start that there was a lot of bad intelligence on China. During the Cold War, the United States was almost singularly focused on the Soviet Union. After 9/11, radical Islamist terrorism became the hot area to study. China analysis, by comparison, was meager. But piecing together how that analysis had evolved over time was tricky. The FBI gave one story. Its critics gave another. Then one day an email arrived in my inbox from a woman named Ling Woo Liu.
Liu had worked for an advocacy group called Advancing Justice—Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco. An article I’d written had reminded her of something that happened to a close family friend, a Chinese-American engineer who worked for defense contractors. The friend, she wrote, “was fired from his job and effectively blacklisted from his industry after visiting his family in Jiangsu province in the early 1970s. For years, he tried to find an answer regarding his wrongful termination. He was not successful.”
I set up a call with Liu. In 1973, she told me, Harry Sheng was working as a mechanical engineer for Spartan Corporation, a defense contractor in Jackson, Michigan, when his mother got sick back in Jiangsu. Richard Nixon had just made the historic visit to China that led to normalized relations with the United States, so Sheng took advantage of the thaw to travel to the mainland to visit her. When he returned to Michigan, his company mysteriously transferred him to a drafting position, and he was separately interviewed by agents from the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. In 1975, Sheng was fired from his job at Spartan, and two offers he had received from other defense firms were suddenly rescinded. He never worked in his field again.
Sheng and his wife scraped by. His wife began nannying for Liu and her sisters—a job that lasted fifteen years. The girls did not learn why Sheng had stopped working at age fifty until decades later, after his death. Then, while sorting through his belongings, the sisters found a packet of papers containing six years’ worth of letters from Sheng to Michigan lawmakers seeking answers about why he was fired. “I contributed my best knowledge to the U.S. defense work,” Sheng wrote in a 1975 letter to his U.S. representative, Milton Robert Carr. “I will continue to fight until the truth comes out.” As far as Liu knows, that never happened. She learned the truth only after obtaining her uncle’s FBI file and other documents through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests: Her uncle had been investigated for vaguely delineated ties to China.
Liu sent me the files. It was hard to know what to make of them, because the FBI had redacted large sections of text. I could see why she was concerned, though. The parts that were legible didn’t appear to suggest any wrongdoing. “SHENG stated he loves America and the freedom provided by this country for its citizens and that he considers himself to be a loyal, patriotic American,” read the report of an FBI agent who interviewed him outside his home in 1972. “SHENG displayed a friendly, cooperative attitude during the interview. . . . Review of the files regarding subject . . . reveals no significant data or security risk on the part of the subject which would justify his being interviewed a third time.” And the top of each document bore a curious label: “IS-CH: Chinese Communist Contacts with Scientists in the U.S.”
“Have you heard of this program?” Liu asked me. I hadn’t. She wanted to know who else had been monitored or investigated under it. I filed my own FOIA request for any documents connected to the program, then moved on to other work.
Two years passed. After I had all but given up on the request, the FBI released a partial batch of documents. The picture painted by the documents was incomplete and, like Sheng’s file, marred by redactions. But the documents did prove the existence of a classified program, begun in the late 1960s under FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and lasting into at least the mid-1970s, to track Chinese scientists working in the United States.
* * *
• • •
THE STORY OF THE FBI’S Chinese scientist program dates to the 1950s Red Scare, when the FBI investigated Chinese-born rocket scientist Tsien Hsue-Shen (later known as Qian Xuesen) for being an alleged member of the U.S. Communist Party. Tsien was a talented researcher at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he worked with Hungarian-American mathematician Theodore von Kármán on classified government projects. At Caltech, he helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he befriended several left-wing scholars who were members of the U.S. Communist Party. New research suggests that for a time Tsien himself was a member of the party, though apparently not as active as some of his friends. His ethnicity—he was described in his FBI file as “yellow”—might have heightened investigators’ suspicions. In 1950, the year after Mao rose to power in China, FBI agents questioned Tsien, and the U.S. military revoked his security clearance.
With his loyalty to America under scrutiny and his job prospects diminished, Tsien tried to leave for China with his family. The new government in Beijing had begun openly courting overseas scientists, in some cases putting pressure on their relatives to invite them back to contribute to the motherland, and Tsien, who was a U.S. permanent resident, knew he would be welcomed there. But U.S. immigration agents prevented him from returning to China after one of the movers he had hired told investigators that his possessions included documents labeled SECRET and CONFIDENTIAL. After inspecting the papers, investigators disagreed on whether they contained critical secrets. But they knew that Tsien had valuable information in his mind. They ordered his arrest.
The next five years were tumultuous. Tsien was released and allowed to return to teaching at Caltech, but he remained under near-constant FBI surveillance. In September 1955, after a Chinese diplomat raised Tsien’s case in high-level talks in Switzerland, the United States allowed him to leave for China in exchange for the Chinese government returning Americans captured during the Korean War. In Beijing, leaders greeted him as a hero and put him to work on critical weapons and space research. In 1967, with Tsien’s assistance, China stunned the world by testing a nuclear-tipped missile.
I was once taken to see Tsien’s apartment in Beijing. It was in a low-rise concrete building in a leafy courtyard—a setup that looks humble now, but that back in the 1960s was reserved for only the most esteemed experts. Inside, Tsien’s son, Qian Yonggang, gestured to a living room decorated with blond-wood accents. “Many Chinese leaders have sat here,” he told me in Mandarin. He showed me the chipped paint on the walls, and his father’s small study, and the twin bed where Tsien had spent his final days, emphasizing that his father was a simple man to the end. The apartment had only one bedroom, so I asked Qian Yonggang where he and his sister had slept growing up. He mumbled that the family had been given a second apartment in the building—a marker of their privilege at the time.
Back in the United States, Tsien’s first cousin, Tsien Hsue-Chu, cautiously instructed his children to act as American as possible. “I grew up speaking not a lick of Chinese and eating hot dogs at baseball games,” his granddaughter, Sarah Tsien Zetterli, told me. Within na
tional security circles, meanwhile, Tsien’s case became proof that overzealous investigations could seriously backfire. Dan Kimball, who was secretary of the Navy in the early 1950s, said of the decision to allow Tsien to leave the United States, “It was the stupidest thing we ever did.” But to J. Edgar Hoover, China’s nuclear ambitions justified further investigations of Chinese scientists in the United States. Hoover penned an article in Nation’s Business titled “How Red China Spies.” He wrote of the danger posed by “persons who have strong ties to the Orient,” particularly “students and scientists with living relatives behind the Bamboo Curtain.”
The documents that I received through my Freedom of Information Act request showed that in 1967, after the test of China’s nuclear-tipped missile, the FBI launched an internal effort aimed at surveilling Chinese scientists and students. On June 28 of that year, the director’s office dashed off a memorandum to FBI field offices directing them to closely monitor researchers of Chinese descent. “While it is known that numerous Western-trained scientists, particularly Chinese from U.S., have returned to China and have the training and ability to accomplish a nuclear program,” the memo read, “the Chicoms must keep up to date on technological advances in the West in order to create the finished product. We have long suspected that Chicom collection of needed information is accomplished through contacts with ethnic Chinese scientists and technicians in this country.” The letter ordered agents to cull names of ethnically Chinese researchers including, implicitly, U.S. citizens from the membership records of scientific organizations. The name of each target was to be written on a card, and the cards then assembled into an index—a Rolodex of an estimated four thousand ethnically Chinese scientists under surveillance. The memo bore the same code that appeared in Harry Sheng’s file: IS-CH.
In fact, many ethnic Chinese students at U.S. universities at the time had come from Taiwan and Hong Kong, meaning that they were likely not die-hard socialists. Nonetheless, the New York field office soon opened an estimated two hundred files on ethnic Chinese students in technical fields. San Francisco opened as many as seventy-five files. Cincinnati and Seattle responded as well. In their haste to follow orders, some offices pursued shaky leads. The Cincinnati field office worked off the membership list of a Chinese scientific organization from seventeen years earlier. The special agent in charge of the New York office noted in a response to the director’s office that starting with alumni and scientific organizations was inefficient, because in the New York area alone there were some two thousand ethnic Chinese students. He suggested contacting defense contractors and asking security officers to compile lists of ethnically Chinese employees—which may explain why Harry Sheng was singled out in Michigan. The file of Tsien Hsue-Shen was reopened, even though he was now in China. The FBI tracked people with even a tenuous connection to Tsien, including relatives of his friends.
After China and the United States restored relations in 1972, the FBI’s surveillance of Chinese scientists and students persisted. As Chinese-American scientists like Harry Sheng returned to visit long-lost friends and relatives, the bureau kept close tabs on them.
Interviewing scientists following their trips to China was logical. United States leaders were so desperate for insight into what was happening in China that travelers were a natural source of information. But the interviews might have ended up alienating potential allies at a time when they were being actively courted by the Chinese government. Chen Ning Yang, a Nobel-winning physicist who visited his ailing father in 1971 and was unexpectedly invited to dine with Premier Zhou Enlai, told reporters that he was questioned by the FBI with “some hostility” upon his return to the United States. Several decades later, Yang did relocate to China, where he became honorary director of Tsinghua University in Beijing and renounced his American citizenship. Whether the FBI had reason to question his loyalty, or whether the questioning instead pushed him toward China, is unclear.
The FBI file of Chih-Kung Jen, a physicist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory who traveled to China in the early 1970s, includes several references to efforts to ascertain his “loyalty” to the United States. The bureau monitored the phone numbers that he called and the duration of those conversations. In his memoir, Jen recalled that FBI and NSA agents tried to persuade him to spy on friends back in China, at one point cutting him a blank check in an apparent effort to buy his cooperation. (Jen never cashed it.)
Other scientists were tracked as they went about their lives in America. In an attempt to dig up dirt on Chang-Lin Tien, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley who later became the university’s chancellor, the FBI followed him to art openings, combed credit bureau records and university directories across the country, and called hotels he had booked to make sure he checked in.
During the Cold War era, the FBI also ran overzealous investigations of scientists suspected of having Soviet sympathies. But these were broader inquiries that encompassed non-Russians, like the theoretical physicist and Manhattan Project contributor Richard Feynman. In the case of the Chinese scientist program, subjects came under suspicion primarily because of their ethnicity. The FBI’s targets included subjects who were ethnically Chinese but had only loose ties to the mainland. One person monitored under the program was an MIT professor from Indonesia.
The program continued into at least the late 1970s. Not everybody took the questioning in stride. Tien’s file included a note that read: “He expressed his belief that the FBI was continuing to harass Chinese academicians like himself just as was done during the 1950s.”
Reading these files, I wondered to what extent misguided investigations had persisted. Answering that question would involve unraveling decades of espionage theories.
TEN
FALL 2011
Within a few months of the Polk County sheriff’s deputy stopping Robert Mo near the Monsanto field, the FBI’s investigation grew to include field offices in Miami and Chicago. The effort was code-named Purple Maze, and Mark Betten oversaw it from Des Moines, with help from Economic Espionage Unit management in D.C. The case had taken on new urgency. In November 2011, the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, which advises the president on intelligence matters related to national security, published a report to Congress calling out Chinese actors as “the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage.”
To FBI investigators, Robert became Muddy Hooves—a name selected by the Miami field office that preserved his initials while also evoking an image of a creature digging in the dirt. Mark formed an impression of him as competent and serious. The Chinese scientist’s primary weakness, the issue that propelled him to work for DBN, was his desire to support his wife and two kids. Much of the time he lived the life of a suburban dad. He played tennis, made frequent trips to Walmart and Costco, and fished, using the skills he had picked up as a boy in the mountains of Sichuan. FBI agents dutifully followed him as he stocked up on groceries and cast his fishing line into placid waters. But then, when on assignment for DBN in the Midwest, Robert was diligent, often working fifteen- or sixteen-hour days.
It was those marathon days that most concerned Mark. The appearance of Robert in two Iowa fields raised the question: Of all the cornfields in America, how did the DBN employees know where to look for inbred corn? Both the Monsanto plot where Deputy Bollman had stopped the men and the Pioneer plot where the men were found digging were unmarked. And they had trespassed onto the Pioneer field in the spring, before the corn had germinated, when inbred and commercial hybrid fields were nearly identical. The Monsanto field was in the middle of nowhere, miles from a major road. It wasn’t as if Robert Mo had taken a quick detour while cruising along Interstate 35. Someone must have told him where to find it.
One clue involved Stine, the small seed company outside Des Moines whose executives had recently traveled to China. A young, Chinese-born former employee named Lily Cheng
* had set up the trip and arranged the meeting with DBN. A source told Mark that she and Robert appeared to know each other well.
While no longer on staff at Stine, Cheng worked as a consultant for the company, a position from which she led the company’s China strategy. She had emigrated from China in her twenties, and she had a cherubic smile, along with an assured confidence that had earned her a profile in a local magazine as an up-and-coming business leader.
Like Robert, Cheng was not a polished political operative. Just five years before Mark came across her name, she had been a bright-eyed foreign student in Europe, overwhelmed at the experience of being unexpectedly bumped up to business class on a flight from Hong Kong. “After I sat down, I started to study the strange buttons, but when I pressed them they did not react,” she wrote on an online forum for Chinese students. “I was dying of shame. I was too embarrassed to call a flight attendant and reveal that it was my first time sitting in business class.” But by the time Mark looked into her, Cheng had matured. She was married to a successful American businessman, and she sat on the boards of several Des Moines organizations.
Mark learned that Cheng kept in touch with Robert after the trip to China. Not long after they were found in the field outside Bondurant, Robert Mo, Wang Lei, and Dr. Li drove to Stine’s headquarters in Adel to meet with her. Mark tailed the group as Cheng showed them around and then took them out for lunch at a nearby Shanghainese restaurant. At least superficially, the relationship was legal. Cheng consulted for both American and Chinese clients, and she was in the process of brokering an agreement for DBN and Kings Nower to license some of Stine’s hybrids for export to China. But Mark believed that as an insider with a deep connection to Stine, she might have access to some of the experimental inbreds that the company had under development.
The Scientist and the Spy Page 7
