After ordering his release, Judge James A. Parker chastised the Justice Department and the FBI for leading him astray and apologized to Lee for the harsh conditions of his detention. Later, Lee sued the federal government for leaking his name before he was formally charged. In 2006 he received a $1.6 million settlement, which was paid in part by The New York Times. In an essay for Slate, Lowen Liu called Lee “the Patient Zero of the unnerving present and uncertain future of being Chinese in America.”
Despite the bungling of the Wen Ho Lee investigation, the thousand grains of sand framework was soon enshrined in the Intelligence Threat Handbook, a U.S. government publication made available to intelligence agency staff. The Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), the manual claimed, focused 98 percent of its recruitment efforts in the United States on Chinese Americans and overseas Chinese. The Russians, by contrast, supposedly focused no more than a quarter of their recruitment efforts on people of Russian descent. The handbook also asserted that MSS operatives spent time culling People magazine for dirt on important Americans. (It did not explain whether accounts of celebrities’ weight gains and affairs actually resulted in any useful intelligence.)
In the years that followed, the theory drove assessments like Stein’s that many Chinese students in the United States were aspiring spies and that American companies founded by ethnic Chinese—all of them—were primarily fronts. A 2010 report from the private intelligence firm Stratfor stated, for example, that “China has the largest population in the world, at 1.3 billion, which means that it has a vast pool of people from which to recruit for any kind of national endeavor, from domestic road-building projects to international espionage.” In a follow-up report, Stratfor explained, “The Chinese intelligence services rely on ethnic Chinese agents because the services do not generally trust outsiders.” But at the time, there was already abundant evidence that this was false.
Around the time that Mark began investigating Robert Mo, a former CIA analyst named Peter Mattis published a series of articles debunking the thousand grains of sand theory. In reality, he noted, China has a collection of sophisticated intelligence agencies, not an army of centrally commanded amateurs. The Ministry of State Security, the Ministry of Public Security, the People’s Liberation Army, and a host of smaller provincial offshoots all conduct their own operations. A case of national security spying typically originates with one of these agencies. Nor do Chinese intelligence agencies necessarily seek out good people, as Paul Moore proposed. For decades, these agencies have run sources in a textbook manner, by playing on the same vulnerabilities that other intelligence services exploit—enticing them with money and sex and using clandestine tradecraft. In the end, China spies much the way the United States and Russia do.
With industrial espionage, meanwhile, state direction isn’t nearly so clear-cut. An instance of technological theft could come from a state-owned enterprise that is deeply entwined with the Chinese government, or from a private company like DBN with murkier government ties but plenty of other incentives to steal. Then there are hustlers who simply spot an opportunity to make money and move forward without any overt government direction. In a number of Chinese industrial espionage cases, the perpetrators have tried to find buyers for trade secrets only after they stole them.
This distinction was not as subtle as it might seem. When it comes to crafting remedies to technological theft, it matters greatly whether Beijing is directly involved.
More important for people like Wen Ho Lee, Mattis pointed out that neither Chinese intelligence services nor Chinese companies necessarily prefer to rely on intelligence collectors of Chinese ethnicity. Doing so makes sense in some cases, like when the Ministry of State Security keeps tabs on dissidents living overseas. But in others it severely limits the types of information that can be collected.
In fact, non-Chinese defendants have surfaced in both national security spying and industrial espionage cases. In 2009, University of Tennessee professor John Reece Roth was sentenced to four years in prison for violating export control laws by transporting sensitive information about a U.S. Air Force project to China. The next year, a jury found Clark Roberts and Sean Howley guilty of economic espionage after they surreptitiously photographed Goodyear’s tire designs. Wyko Tire, their employer, had a contract with a Chinese manufacturer to make tires for mining and earth-moving equipment. Not long afterward, a court in Austria convicted Dejan Karabasevic, a Serbian engineer at Wisconsin-based American Superconductor Corporation, for helping the Chinese firm Sinovel steal source code for operating wind turbines from his American employer. Karabasevic was a colorful character and in many ways a classic spy, driven by sex and wealth—not by the patriotism or virtue that Moore claimed motivated Chinese operatives. “All girls need money. I need girls. Sinovel needs me,” Karabasevic wrote in one email that surfaced in court.
I met Mattis for coffee one day in central Washington, D.C. We sat outside, in a pedestrian passageway, and between the sirens whirring past and the fact that Mattis had lost his voice, I had to strain to hear him. The conversation felt appropriately clandestine.
The persistence within the FBI of incorrect and blatantly racist theories can damage U.S. intelligence interests, he told me. “Chinese investigations in the bureau have basically skipped over what Chinese intelligence is doing, because they’ve been dealing with a false view of what is Chinese intelligence,” Mattis said.
His alternative portrait of Chinese spying—of a mixture of highly professional intelligence agencies, companies, and profit-minded hustlers—is sometimes called the multilayered theory of espionage. But unlike the thousand grains of sand theory, it doesn’t fit into a pat metaphor. The old thinking has persisted within the intelligence agencies, raising the possibility that counterintelligence agents could overlook perpetrators because they don’t fit the notion of what a Chinese industrial spy should look like, and that they might miss organized Chinese intelligence efforts that pose a more direct national security threat.
A month before our meeting, the news had leaked that Chinese security services had breached the CIA’s network. From 2011 to 2012, as the FBI was chasing Robert across corn country, Chinese operatives had taken out sources across China, imprisoning some and killing others in broad daylight. In one case, a source was shot in a government courtyard as his colleagues looked on in shock. Chinese security services were believed to have penetrated the CIA’s covert communications channel. “We didn’t see that coming,” Mattis told me.
Another failure was the 2014 Office of Personnel Management data breach, when Ministry of State Security hackers stole records for 21.5 million Americans, many of them government employees. The records included Social Security numbers, addresses, dates and places of births, and in some cases fingerprints—making it impossible for secret agents to continue in their work, because they couldn’t change their prints. In essence, the emphasis on students and scientists working as freelance spies was leading U.S. intelligence agencies astray. The focus on amateur intelligence collectors also alienated the very community that the intelligence agencies needed most: the Chinese and Chinese-American scientists and engineers who might be critical to discovering breaches. But ideas rooted in thousand grains of sand theory would continue to pervade FBI thinking on China—and come to shape the fate of Robert Mo.
FIFTEEN
SPRING 2012
Kevin returned to the Monee farm every ten days or so to check on the hybrids. As the seeds germinated and sent up stalks, he evaluated weed pressure and scrutinized the leaves for signs of disease. No one lived in the farmhouse, and most days he was alone. He now communicated with Robert mostly by email.
Robert had neglected to provide him with a critical piece of information about the test seeds: at what density they would be planted in China. Kevin had asked five or six different ways but had not gotten a straight answer. Robert’s evasiveness merely added to a string of other frustrations. Kevin s
till had no contact with DBN’s breeders in China. Why, he wondered, had he been invited out to lunch with the company’s CEO and asked to present his work, only to be kept from communicating with the very people who could help bring his idea to fruition? But the information on seed density was particularly crucial. Without that detail, it was impossible to know if the seeds that survived in Monee would survive in China.
Then one day while at the Monee farm, Kevin was caught in the rain. He hurried up the long gravel drive in search of shelter. Two long parallel depressions, rapidly turning to mud, marked the place where tires had ground the gravel into dirt. He did not have a key to the house, so when he reached the clearing at the end of the drive he took refuge in one of the outbuildings.
The structure had the quality of an archaeological site. It was frozen in midcentury disarray, as if a family had fled the farm in 1956 and no one had occupied it since. In one corner pink and yellow fiberglass insulation had fallen from the walls and ceilings, creating a carpet of cotton candy. Elsewhere a plastic watering can levitated, lodged in a coil of chicken wire. In the middle of the space, surrounded by saplings, weeds, and half-eaten corncobs, was a mossy utility sink. The scene gave the farm a spooky aspect. As rain pounded in through a gaping hole in the roof, it dawned on Kevin that something was not right with DBN’s North America operation.
Early in his career, Kevin had heard tales of “flashlight breeding,” or scientists slinking through fields at night to steal parent varieties out of the ground. In the late 1970s, it was widely believed that several seed lines produced by Holden Foundation Seeds, a company headquartered in Williamsburg, Iowa, were the product of flashlight breeding in Pioneer fields. Despite the rumors, LH38, LH39, and LH40 came to be considered three of the industry’s choicest inbreds, and Holden licensed the seed to companies across the industry—including Garst, where Kevin then worked. He was expected to use the inbreds in his breeding experiments.
In 1981, Pioneer sued. Back then, such disputes were still mainly handled through civil lawsuits, one company versus the other. The lawsuit dragged on for more than a decade, going all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals.
It turned out that Pioneer had a powerful new weapon in its case against Holden: a test that could prove the parentage of a seed line by determining the presence of certain enzymes in the seed, like a paternity test for corn. Called an isozyme electrophoresis test, it involved zapping seed enzymes with an electric current, causing them to separate. When the results came back, they suggested Pioneer stock. The test made flashlight breeding a foolish undertaking. After a fourteen-week trial, Pioneer won $46.7 million in damages.
The companies that had used the three suspicious inbreds, meanwhile, had to scramble to comply with a court order halting the use of any seed lines that had been derived from them. Kevin remembered his supervisor calling him after the case.
“How many LH38 and LH39 crosses do you have?” the supervisor asked.
“Three,” Kevin said. For breeders who made upwards of 150 crosses in a year, this was a remarkably low number. The court decision, he felt, justified his stubbornness.
As the industry consolidated, lawsuits became more common. Kevin remembered a near mutiny at one company where he’d worked after a supervisor tried to introduce new seeds into the company’s product line. The seeds were bred from Pioneer inbreds that had been reverse engineered through chasing the self.
Monsanto and Pioneer might have been archrivals, but Kevin knew they were united in one goal: the protection of their intellectual property. The new tests helped them along in that effort. The procedures reminded Kevin of Barnaby Jones, a detective show from his youth in which a milk-guzzling private investigator solved murders in the lab using forensic evidence and deduction. “The spectrophotometer doesn’t lie,” Barnaby Jones used to say, like a 1970s Sherlock Holmes.
Monsanto, in particular, became notoriously litigious. It sued farmers for growing unlicensed Roundup Ready seed. Then, when one of these farmers went on the speaking circuit to rail against the company, Monsanto published a smear page on its website about him. This sort of legal aggression lay at the heart of the Justice Department’s antitrust investigation of the company. But even as it stamped out competition, Monsanto’s sheer power meant that the company could also wield intellectual property law to its advantage. The Economic Espionage Act strengthened the company’s position by turning trade secrets theft into a federal crime.
Even as Kevin understood that the intellectual property situation in China was different, he would have had trouble imagining that DBN would be so brash as to target the two giants’ inbreds on U.S. soil. And yet, taking shelter in the dilapidated outbuilding, he reflected that something about the Chinese company’s plans seemed off.
How could the company afford to spend so much on GM seeds when the technology hadn’t yet been approved for sale in China? he wondered. Did the research facility that he was taken to see in Beijing even belong to DBN? He remembered now that he had seen nothing that identified the place as a DBN or Kings Nower facility. None of the equipment was labeled as company property. No one in the lab wore a DBN cap or shirt. Kevin began to suspect that perhaps DBN did have big aspirations—just not ones that involved robust seed science.
SIXTEEN
SPRING 2012
After days of tracking Robert as he drove across the Midwest that spring, Mark Betten got a call from an FBI surveillance team in Illinois, alerting him to the fact that Robert had picked up three new companions, all of them different from the men who had accompanied him when he was stopped near the Monsanto field in Iowa seven months earlier. Two were in their thirties, and one was older and balding. Mark consulted with an agent in the Chicago field office, and together they devised a way to figure out who the men were without revealing the existence of the FBI’s investigation: enlist two Chicago Police Department officers to help.
Detectives Angel Lorenzo and Alex Reina took on the assignment. At around 5:00 P.M. one Friday, Lorenzo maneuvered an unmarked car through rush-hour traffic near O’Hare Airport. As Reina sat in the passenger seat on the phone, coordinating plans with FBI agents also on the trail, Lorenzo fell in behind Robert’s rental car, being careful to stay two or three cars back. Watch for a traffic violation, ID the men, and send them on their way—that was the plan. Lorenzo was a twenty-two-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department and a member of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, and he was occasionally asked to make traffic stops of this sort. If there was no violation, he knew, he and Reina were to do nothing. But everyone went home frustrated when that happened.
Robert steered his GMC Yukon due south on North Cumberland Avenue, a four-lane road with good visibility. Alongside the road, businesses of assorted cultural origin rubbed shoulders in strip malls: Lin’s Mandarin, Annetti’s Pizzeria, Havana Hookah Lounge. Robert drove past a Weight Watchers and a barbershop and a few tanning salons, Lorenzo following one or two cars behind. Then the strip malls gave way to St. Joseph the Betrothed Ukrainian Church, an ornate monstrosity decked out with gold-leafed towers.
It was right around the church that Robert ran a red light. The violation was borderline. The light changed ten or so feet before the Yukon reached the crosswalk. But Lorenzo decided it would do. He turned on his lights, exposing his car as a police vehicle, and sped up to catch his target.
Robert pulled over just south of West Montrose Avenue. The road had no shoulder, and the two cars jutted out into traffic, making the evening commute even less bearable for the Chicagoans who happened to be stuck behind them. Diagonal across the intersection was a supermarket with a sign in the window proclaiming HUGE PRICE CUTS. To the right of the cars lay a forest preserve, a refuge of green in the bleak commercial stretch.
As departures from O’Hare rumbled overhead, Reina took the passenger side, and Lorenzo approached Robert in the driver’s seat. Robert protested that the light was yellow when he started
to cross the intersection. The officers played along, agreeing to let him off without a citation—but not before they took down the names of the passengers so they could pass them to the FBI.
The first new suspect in the car was Lin Yong, thirty-six years old. He had meek eyes and a teardrop-shaped birthmark on his forehead. Next was Ye Jian, a thirty-year-old man with a chubby build and flared nostrils. Third, and most curious, was the bald man: Michael Yao,* a fifty-something real estate agent in the Chicago area.
The FBI soon identified Lin Yong and Ye Jian as research managers for Kings Nower. Michael Yao’s role was harder to parse. The portrait posted on his realty page suggested little interest in selling. The picture was out of focus, shot against the backdrop of a door half ajar, and oddly elongated. Yao appeared unsmiling in the center of the frame, his irises gray from a red-eye correction tool. He and his wife also operated a rundown-looking mortgage brokerage that was housed next to a vasectomy clinic, in a string of brown buildings resembling sad ski lodges. But Yao’s role became clearer when the FBI tailed Robert to Monee and discovered that Kings Nower had purchased a forty-acre farm—a plot of land large enough to hold vast cornfields. The address listed on the deed was the office unit next to Yao’s mortgage brokerage.
* * *
• • •
PROPERTY RECORDS INDICATED that Kings Nower had purchased the property from a man named Bill Rab. When Bill and his wife, Ann, got the news that someone was finally interested in his parents’ farm, they had been vacationing in Las Vegas at the pyramid-shaped Luxor Hotel, which Ann Rab called “the pointy place.” The mysterious buyers offered $600,000. For days the Rabs had watched as slot machines doled out winnings to others, and now they felt like they’d hit the jackpot.
The Scientist and the Spy Page 10
