In the weeks that followed, the surveillance continued. Much of it was fairly standard. An agent in Florida obtained a warrant to slap a magnetic GPS device under the chassis of Robert’s silver Honda CR-V, then tracked him as he drove around Boca Raton, taking note of his frequent visits to Walmart and Costco. Other agents kept tabs on the location of Robert’s cell phone, reviewed his bank records, and watched footage from a camera installed outside of his home.
Then, on April 20, an agent in Miami informed Mark that the tracking device on the CR-V showed it parked in the long-term parking lot at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Three days later, the car was still there, and Robert was nowhere to be found. Mark knew that soon fields across the Midwest would be planted with inbred seed. At exactly the wrong moment, he had lost his suspect.
At the time, the FBI could determine the rough location of a cell phone without a warrant, by using a device that identified the cell phone towers pinged by the person’s phone. But in the rural Midwest such towers were often ten or more miles apart. Mark rushed to secure a warrant that would allow him to access so-called Phase II data developed as part of America’s Enhanced 911 system. This would enable him to access GPS data from T-Mobile that could pinpoint Robert’s cell phone to within a few hundred yards, ensuring that the team didn’t lose their suspect again. In the application, Mark laid out the bureau’s operating theory for the case. “[T]here is probable cause to believe that Mo has developed a network of ‘insider’ contacts at bio-engineered seed companies, e.g. Pioneer Hi-Bred, Monsanto, etc., that provide him and his associates ‘insider’ information where the victim company’s most sensitive bio-engineered seed is being grown in test plots,” he wrote. The FBI, he continued, wanted to “witness first hand Mo’s theft of the seed.” The judge signed the warrant the same day. It was not the last time that surveillance in the case would escalate.
* * *
• • •
SOON AFTER, MARK CAUGHT UP with Robert in the Midwest, and they began a protracted cat-and-mouse chase through the Corn Belt. Even though the FBI could now easily track Robert’s location using GPS, Mark still wanted someone physically following him in case he made an interesting pit stop. Sometimes he directed bureau surveillance teams from his desk in Des Moines. At other moments, Mark tailed Robert himself.
Robert spent whole days driving slowly through rural Illinois and Indiana. Often there were no other cars for miles. Cruising through farm country, Mark sometimes thought of passages he had read in the journals kept by explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. As Lewis and Clark’s expedition ventured west of the Mississippi, the men were amazed at how far they could see in any direction. “The Surrounding Plains is open void of Timber and leavel to a great extent: hence the wind from whatever quarter may blow, drives with unusial force over the naked Plains and against this hill,” Clark wrote. “[T]he Plain to North N. W & N E extends without interruption as far as Can be Seen.” When it came to visibility, not much had changed in the intervening two hundred years.
It was tricky enough for Mark to keep cover on asphalt roads, but even trickier on country routes while stirring up clouds of dust. To add to the challenge, Robert seemed to be trying to foil efforts to follow him. On the interstate, he would drive slowly for periods and then suddenly speed up. On smaller roads, he would head in one direction, then abruptly turn around.
Mark was close behind, though, when Robert walked into the seed dealer Crossroads Ag in Dallas County, Iowa. The dealership stood at the intersection of two rural roads, where it was housed in a hangar-like building covered with green and white aluminum siding. Adirondack chairs emblazoned with the University of Iowa Hawkeyes logo flanked the front door. Inside, a small shop adjoined a cavernous warehouse where the seed was kept. Late April was boom time for Crossroads Ag. In the warehouse, workers were loading trucks with dozens of bags of Pioneer seed at a time.
On that particular day a colleague of Mark’s had what agents called “the eye” on Robert, which meant the most direct view of the suspect. Mark was a block or two away as Robert walked into the warehouse and approached Crossroads Ag’s owner, Joel Thomas. Later, Thomas filled him in on the encounter.
Inside the warehouse, Robert asked for six bags of Pioneer seed, all different varieties. The request signaled to Thomas that he wasn’t an experienced farmer. Most farmers stuck to a single type of seed so that all of their corn would be ready to harvest at once. Thomas was also struck by Robert’s ethnicity and the fact that he was not a native speaker. The farmers Thomas knew didn’t look or talk like him. But he remembered Robert stopping in around planting season the year before, saying that he owned a farm nearby. He figured he might be a hobby farmer from the city.
Like other major seed companies, Pioneer required all customers buying seed to sign a document, called a tech agreement, stating that they understood the seed they were purchasing was DuPont intellectual property. The document forbade farmers from reusing or distributing the seed. Critics saw these contracts as overly restrictive. In a case then winding its way through the courts, Monsanto had used a tech agreement to sue an Indiana farmer for planting soybean seeds he bought from a grain elevator. The seeds contained Monsanto traits and were intended to be sold as commodities, not planted in fields. Thomas could lose his dealer’s license if he didn’t insist on a signed agreement before someone made a purchase. At the moment Robert came into the shop, though, he was too busy to think straight. Deciding that Robert must have signed an agreement on his previous visit, Thomas loaded six bags of seed into the trunk of Robert’s rental car and sent him into the shop, which featured shelves stocked with pet food and garden gnomes. The total came to $1,533.72. Robert paid cash.
The next day, Mark directed an FBI surveillance team from Omaha to follow Robert as he got in the rental car and headed south. He drove for two hours. Finally, he reached a seed store in Pattonsburg, Missouri, where he bought six more bags of seed, again paying cash. Then he drove back to Iowa, the FBI surveillance team following close behind.
A short distance from Crossroads Ag, in the town of Adel, Robert stopped at A&M Mini Storage. Three long sheds, subdivided into small units, stretched across a desolate asphalt lot. The place projected an aura of decay. A sign posted on one shed was missing letters. PICK OUT YOUR UNI, it read. FIND RENTAL FORM AND RE D V R. The manager later said that many of the sheds were transitional garages for the evicted and jilted, for the man who had been kicked out but who could not bear to part with his gas grill.
Robert had more focused intentions, though. The Omaha surveillance team watched from a safe distance as he opened the padlock to unit 48 and unloaded several bags of seed from his trunk. Then he secured the padlock and took off.
FOURTEEN
2016–2017
As time went on, I came to see Robert’s case as a lens that refracted growing hostility between the United States and China. At first, people who used the term “new cold war” were accused of hyperbole. Then the term was everywhere. Scholars and businesspeople of Chinese descent worried about being caught in the middle. Every week brought a new battlefront. Industrial espionage cases were often swept up in this larger fight, and Robert Mo’s case was no exception.
One trope in particular cropped up again and again. This was the idea that China commanded an army of amateur intelligence collectors of which Robert was just one part—or, as Newsweek columnist Jeff Stein put it, that Robert was among the “locusts in a swarm, feasting on American technological secrets.” This swarm of amateurs extended from Chinese scientists to Chinese students studying at U.S. universities, Stein wrote. Many of these students were “sleeper cells,” he added, who would “lie low for years before they’re called into action, usually after they’ve gained employment in high-tech firms.”
I knew many Chinese scientists and students who were not locusts, and I wanted to figure out where this notion originated. I interviewed experts and dug up old papers.
Eventually, I traced the idea to the 1990s, as U.S. intelligence agencies struggled to understand China in the wake of the Cold War. At an intelligence conference in 1996, the year before Mark Betten began working at the FBI, an FBI China analyst named Paul Moore presented what came to be called the thousand grains of sand theory. Essentially, his idea gave the surveillance of Chinese scientists theoretical backing.
In his presentation, Moore explained China’s approach to spying in opposition to the James Bond–like tactics of the United States and Russia. If intelligence collection by the world’s most powerful nations were aimed at determining the composition of the sand on a beach, he said, the Russians would station a submarine in deep waters. Then, in the middle of the night, a commando team would paddle a raft to shore, scoop up a few buckets of sand, and retreat to the submarine. The United States would use sophisticated technology, flying satellites over the beach and scanning the sand with infrared and spectrographic scanners. China, on the other hand, would rely not on technology or covert operations but on its large population. The question of beach composition could be solved by sending ten thousand people—students, scientists, and entrepreneurs—to spend a day in the sun. At the end of the day, this mass of people would head home and shake out their towels. China would end up with a lot of sand.
This has also been called the vacuum cleaner approach: China sucks up small bits of information, as if they are dust, then assembles these seemingly useless bits into a complete whole. Both metaphors owe a debt to yellow peril, the trope of nameless hordes overwhelming U.S. borders, which dates to the nineteenth century but never really vanished from the American discourse. After 1949, the Chinese Communist Revolution lent blatant racism a veneer of ideological heft, and journalists and politicians began referring to the Chinese as “blue ants,” a reference to the blue Mao suits worn by many people. Moore’s version focused on espionage, but the gist was roughly the same. Instead of professional agents, China relies on a dispersed network of nontraditional collectors: a “human wave” of students, scientists, and engineers, or beachgoers, who gather intelligence ad hoc.
To come up with this theory, Moore drew on his understanding of guanxi. This is a notion that is familiar to anyone who has read an introductory business guide to China: A network of favors and obligations governs social relations in the country. It was as if China were to develop a theory of how the CIA functioned based on American individualism.
Chinese intelligence agencies, he proposed, reach out to people of Chinese descent for help with small tasks, appealing not to a love of money or vice but to a presumed allegiance to the motherland. In his view, other nations typically look for people with weaknesses who might be turned into professional spies. The Chinese government, meanwhile, seeks good people—people who are diligent and active in their communities and good at their jobs—who might be persuaded to do a little moonlighting.
A CIA agent might pass a message to a source by leaving it in a secret location, called a dead drop. China’s virtuous spies, Moore argued, would use nontraditional methods, like attending presentations and events that are open to the public, to pursue small pieces of information. The information they gathered would then be sent back to China and somehow collated and redistributed. Exactly how was never explained.
Moore’s theory made little distinction between China’s national security spying—the kind of spying that all nations do—and industrial espionage. Taken to its natural conclusion, the theory meant that the Chinese government commanded a network of amateur spies and that all incidents of trade secrets theft, whether of widgets or weapons, traced back to the Chinese Communist Party. It also suggested that investigations could start and stop with ethnic Chinese suspects. “The reason that it is always ethnic Chinese who seem to be involved in Chinese intelligence matters is that they typically are the only ones China asks for assistance,” Moore wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 1999. “It’s just that simple.”
When I called Paul Moore years later, he stressed that his theory wasn’t a prescription for targeting a specific ethnic group. “The important thing you have to realize about racial profiling in Chinese cases is that it does not work,” he told me. “If you say, ‘Let’s go into this company, and we’ll investigate all of the Chinese employees there, and that will be where we start our investigation,’ you immediately run into a situation where you have an awful lot of Chinese and you’re going to burn through your resources before you get to the end of the problem. So as a shortcut it’s not useful.” He also noted that many of the people who were targeted as spies by China refused to help—that the frustrating thing about dealing with Chinese intelligence operatives was that they “dirtied the nest” by reaching out to people who turned out to be innocent.
He was right that Chinese Communist Party officials viewed ethnic Chinese as critical to China’s rise. “Although overseas Chinese scholars and ethnic Chinese specialists are living abroad, their hearts belong to their families and country,” two science policy experts wrote in a Chinese journal in 2001. The goal, as one Ministry of Personnel official put it, was to “borrow brains” by luring overseas Chinese to help with the project of China’s ascendance. Moore was also correct that many people refused to help. But I thought he was oblivious to how easily his idea could be misused.
For officials and journalists struggling to understand China, the beach metaphor was colorful and easy to grasp. The notion that the country operated in a fundamentally different way from the United States or Russia fit in with stereotypes about Chinese leaders being bumbling and inscrutable. It was a narrative that flattered U.S. interests: Our foe was unsophisticated.
Soon after Moore introduced the thousand grains of sand theory, it was put to the test in the case against Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-born scientist in Los Alamos, New Mexico, who in 1999 was accused of stealing secrets connected to the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The case against Lee had its genesis in the rapid advancement of China’s nuclear weapons program throughout the 1990s. Some in Washington suspected that the only possible explanation was that China had stolen weapons secrets from the United States. Then, in 1995, a defector claiming to have worked on China’s weapons program turned up at the offices of Taiwan’s internal security service. The man carried with him documents indicating China had some knowledge of the United States’ W88 warhead. Deciding that the leak must have come from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Department of Energy investigators went in search of a suspect. The FBI was enlisted to help. The investigation was code-named Kindred Spirit, after China’s assumed tendency to target ethnic Chinese. In an echo of Hoover’s 1967 directive, early plans called for the investigation of all ethnic Chinese researchers who worked in any way on the development of the W88. Investigators soon settled on Lee, a longtime Los Alamos scientist, as their suspect.
Lee had come onto the FBI’s radar before. In the 1980s, he cold-called a Taiwan-born scientist who was under surveillance, offering his help. He also failed to report contact he had with Chinese science officials, and he had downloaded restricted information off a Los Alamos computer. But the claim that he had stolen secrets connected to the W88 was tenuous. Nonetheless, the investigation soon spun out of control in a series of blunders. To justify searching Lee’s home, the FBI submitted an affidavit noting that “People’s Republic of China intelligence operations virtually always target overseas ethnic Chinese with access to intelligence information sought by the PRC.” The U.S. government also subpoenaed UCLA, where Lee’s daughter was enrolled, seeking the names of all students from Taiwan and China.
Before Lee could be formally charged, someone leaked his name to The New York Times, which published an article fingering him as a suspect in March 1999. Republican leaders in Washington had criticized the Clinton administration for being soft on China, and the Lee case appeared to offer a way for officials to prove that they were tough. The mood in Washington reached a fevered pitch. Then, in May, U.S. Air
Force pilots working for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization dropped bombs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
I visited China with my father a few weeks later. I was nineteen and a beginning student of Chinese. United States officials said that the bombing was an accident, but that didn’t deter the angry protesters who attacked McDonald’s and set fire to the home of the U.S. consul general in Chengdu. I remember my father sewing Canadian maple leaf patches on our backpacks. The experience underscored for me the degree to which espionage charges against a single person could inflame tensions between the two countries.
Lee was arrested in December 1999. For the better part of a year, he was held in solitary confinement twenty-three hours a day in a New Mexico jail. Asian-American advocacy groups mobilized. A few called on researchers to boycott the national laboratories by rejecting any job offers. The activists’ cause was strengthened when the case against Lee swiftly unraveled. In September 2000, Lee was acquitted of fifty-eight of the fifty-nine charges against him. He pleaded guilty to a single felony count of mishandling classified information.
The Scientist and the Spy Page 9
