The Scientist and the Spy

by Mara Hvistendahl

  They had managed to get to the male inbreds at a key moment, just after machines mowed down the rows, leaving a sprinkling of escapes on the ground. Nearly a year had passed since Robert Mo, Dr. Li, and Wang Lei were stopped by a sheriff’s deputy outside Bondurant under similar conditions. Here, at least, the forlorn location provided some cover. Earlville consisted of a run-down gas station, an ancient grain silo, and a few blocks of houses with chipped siding.

  Nonetheless, Lin Yong was nervous. Several months earlier, he and Ye Jian had been pulled over and asked to provide ID while driving through Chicago with Robert. After they finished tagging the ears, they climbed back in the car. As the sun arced toward the horizon, Lin Yong worried that all of his labor that year was for nothing. The collection effort was moving faster now that Robert refused to join them—his colleagues agreed that he tended to slow things down—but still Lin Yong guessed that half of the male samples they had collected this season were duplicates, varieties that had been swiped on earlier trips. He worried that they would need to return to the Midwest again next year and repeat their corn tour. The whole operation was turning into a lengthy and pointlessly risky endeavor.

  Ye Jian wasn’t helping his mood. “You can forget about ever coming to the U.S. again, assuming things go wrong,” he said.

  “If it’s just not being able to come to the U.S. again—” Lin Yong started.

  “That’s no biggie.”

  “That’s no biggie? I don’t think it’s that simple. I actually—the law in the U.S.—I studied law! These are actually very serious offenses,” he said.

  Ye Jian agreed that what they were doing was a serious crime. “They could treat us as spies,” he said.

  “That is what we’ve been doing!” Lin Yong exclaimed. He listed the potential charges. “Trespassing on other people’s private property—that’s one. Second, theft or larceny, and third, violation of IP law. All criminal offenses. Not just blocking us from visiting. Dr. Li, he—”

  “Hasn’t he considered this?” Ye Jian asked.

  “He knows,” Lin Yong said.

  Chinese leaders, Lin Yong knew, had little patience for the way Western diplomats crowed about intellectual property rights. Officials in Beijing liked to point out how far China had come in protecting intellectual property by pointing to a few highly publicized arrests. At other moments leaders would bring up the history of technological theft. Had China charged the West for borrowing gunpowder and the printing press? The shift in the U.S. stance over time, from enthusiasm for stealing technology to ambivalence toward spying on others to moral outrage, met with cynicism in Beijing. Leaders alleged that the United States was simply trying to prevent China from emerging as a world power.

  But like Dr. Li, Lin Yong also knew that in the eyes of U.S. law enforcement, none of that mattered. Tensions were running high. Earlier that year, the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek had read HEY CHINA! STOP STEALING OUR STUFF. Industrial espionage was now among the most critical issues in the U.S.-China technology relationship. A month before Lin Yong and Ye Jian started their tour of the Midwest, National Security Agency director Keith Alexander had called intellectual property theft “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”

  Lin Yong soon grew distraught. “My family just has no clue what I am doing here,” he lamented. “My old man asked me, ‘What are you guys doing staying in the U.S. for so long?’ What can I say? Can’t say anything.”

  “Can’t say anything that will make your family worry about you,” Ye Jian agreed.

  “Right! He also said, ‘When you are in the U.S., you can’t even communicate well for such a long time. What are you going to do?’”

  Ye Jian laughed.

  “Yeah,” Lin Yong continued. “When I think about it, what he said makes sense.” He went on for a while before concluding: “Nowadays, the U.S. is very hostile to China on this matter. If this time they opt to—”

  Ye Jian sighed audibly.

  “If they max the punishment,” Lin Yong continued, “then we are done. I can’t think of this. Whenever I think of this, I just can’t do anything.”

  Half an hour later, though, Lin Yong was still thinking about it. “Going into others’ fields. IP theft. Any one term is very severe.”

  Ye Jian laughed again. “Others think we are spies sent from China.”

  “We are surely considered as such,” Lin Yong said. He did not laugh.

  NINETEEN

  SUMMER 2012

  The agents who showed up on Kevin’s doorstep on that blazing July day made one follow-up visit. When Kevin met with the FBI a third time, the two were replaced by a supervisory agent from Chicago. The new agent was a woman. She told Kevin that they had profiled him ahead of the first encounter and guessed that he would respond better to a man, but that the bureau now felt that maybe that assumption was wrong. Kevin could guess how he looked on paper: Midwestern male from downstate Illinois, raised on a farm. He would respond well to someone who knew something about seed breeding, male or female, he thought. Fortunately, the new agent did.

  Now that he no longer had to explain the most basic details about corn breeding, his relationship with the FBI brought a degree of much-needed certainty to his life. For months, he had wondered what his status was at DBN, and whether the company valued his knowledge. The FBI, by contrast, was fairly clear with him, at least when it came to laying out his role as an informant.

  He was not asked to wear a wire, but he was expected to notify the new agent in Chicago every time he communicated with anyone at DBN. Should he forget to tip her off, he figured, the FBI was monitoring all of his communications anyway.

  Even without a wire, maintaining an air of nonchalance was difficult for Kevin. In more normal times it was his brutal honesty that got him in trouble. Now it seemed that a related trait—his poor command of deception—might do him in. He didn’t fear repercussions from DBN if he was found out; Robert wasn’t a thug. But he knew that a slip-up could botch the FBI’s investigation.

  Kevin tried to follow the FBI agent’s advice and pursue business as usual. While checking on his hybrids at the Monee farm, he noticed that his breeding project had been overshadowed by a remodeling job that was going on at the farmhouse. Kevin watched in amazement as a crew gutted the interior, tore out the fixtures, and built a new two-car garage alongside the house. Robert informed Kevin that he had plans to add an office, a conference room, and a bedroom.

  His test fields, meanwhile, had been invaded by pigweed and velvetleaf, which in some places had grown as tall as the corn. Robert had hired someone to spray the field for weeds, but the man didn’t show, so one day Kevin drove out to the farm with a hoe and a gas-powered weed whacker to take care of it himself. When he arrived, it struck him that something was off. Vandals had taken note of the remodeling effort and broken into the house. They had swiped copper fixtures and all other parts of value. Swaths of drywall were now punctuated by abrupt holes. Lightbulbs dangled from thin electrical wiring. Kevin wasn’t entirely shocked—the house had sat conspicuously vacant for weeks—but he was struck by the totality of the destruction. It was hard to tell where the remodeling ended and the vandalism began.

  He emailed Robert offering advice on how to ward off vandals. Mow the lawn, he suggested. Park a vehicle on the property. Make it look like someone lives there, even if no one does. In his response, Robert let on that the timing of the break-in was inopportune. He was preparing to host visitors from China. Kevin passed on the news to his contact at the FBI.

  * * *

  • • •

  DESPITE EVERYTHING, Kevin still held out hope that some of the hybrids planted in the Monee plot would be exported to South America and from there sent on to China. All he knew was that DBN was being investigated and that Robert, as the FBI agent had put it, had an unhealthy interest in Pioneer seeds. His handler didn’t share with him the details of the FBI’s
investigation, or the extent of the activity that had interested agents in Robert. Because Kevin had set up the seed licensing arrangement surrounding the Monee hybrids, he knew that it was legitimate. DBN was a large company, and it was possible that the FBI investigation was limited to one aspect of its work. Plus the Chinese company was still paying him.

  Kevin wrote to a winter nursery in Chile to arrange for shipment of the hybrids, then pestered Robert about which ones he should send on. The nursery required contact information for someone in China so that it could obtain an export permit. Whom should he list as a contact? Kevin asked. When Robert didn’t respond to his emails, Kevin called him and asked him for an address over the phone. A long and awkward pause ensued.

  “So when can you send the seed?” Robert asked finally.

  “When you give me an address,” Kevin said.

  Robert hung up.

  A few weeks later, Robert did something that truly annoyed Kevin. He mentioned that he had hired another breeder to go through the plot that Kevin had tended all summer to select hybrids to send on to Chile.

  Nearly forgetting he had become an FBI informant, Kevin dashed off an indignant email. “I would like to know how and when the independent testing/observation was conducted and just as important, why was I not involved?” The memory of Robert’s telling him that he wasn’t his first choice for the job still stung. He continued: “Are you dissatisfied with my performance or involvement in this project? Has my role changed?” He never got a reply.

  The conversation turned Kevin against Robert once and for all. Trade secrets theft was one thing. Insulting his scientific ability was another.

  TWENTY

  SUMMER 2012

  Dr. Li and Ye Jian holed up in their storage unit and reluctantly got to work. On the asphalt outside, boats and RVs sat parked in wait of outings. The lot stretched the length of a soccer field, ending abruptly at a chain-link fence. In the distance, beyond the fence, was a row of rural businesses that was as close as New Lenox, Illinois, got to a downtown. Temporary storage outfits see all sorts of people: a drug cartel looking for a place to stash heroin; thieves attracted to a trove of unwatched loot. And yet in some ways food is a more pernicious storage threat, as it could attract rodents that might burrow into other units. When the manager of the Infinite Self-Storage learned that the men were storing whole ears of corn in their shed, he told them he wanted the crop out. He gave them forty-eight hours.

  They had rented the shed only a few weeks before, and already it held hundreds of ears. When Ye Jian and Dr. Li finished boxing it up, they loaded the containers into the back of a rented silver Dodge Journey and drove nine miles along unswerving roads to the farm in Monee.

  Robert arrived at O’Hare on a flight from Florida soon after and checked into a hotel near the airport. He spent the evening exercising in the gym and lounging by the pool, trying to postpone his trip to the farm as long as possible. When Ye Jian and Lin Yong had toured cornfields several weeks earlier, he had happily stayed in Florida. Ninety-five percent chance that the FBI is watching us, he had told Dr. Li. But now the seeds were almost out of the country. Lin Yong had already returned to China, and Dr. Li and Ye Jian were preparing to fly to Beijing as well. And the next day was Mid-Autumn Festival, an important holiday in China that is usually celebrated with a nice meal. Robert felt obligated to at least show his face.

  In the morning, Robert set out for the farm bearing mooncakes, the sweet and savory pastries that are eaten to celebrate the holiday. Dr. Li and Ye Jian were already there. They were joined by Michael Yao, the balding real-estate agent, along with a man named Wang Hongwei, who lived in Quebec and had flown in for the weekend. The house was a mess from the vandalism and the renovation, so the men stayed outside in the gravel clearing, gathering around the newly built garage. It was there that they divided the seeds.

  They worked steadily. Some seeds they slipped into small manila envelopes, of the sort hardware stores use for copied keys. Others they wrapped in plastic bags or rolled up in napkins they had swiped from Subway. One by one, they coded these packets so that breeders in Beijing would be able to distinguish the seed lines: 2155, 2403, F1, F2. Then they hid the envelopes in boxes of Pop Weaver and Orville Redenbacher microwave popcorn, taking care to lay bags of popcorn on top and re-glue the boxes shut so that they appeared factory-sealed—a corn swap that rivaled the FBI’s FedEx switch in its ingenuity.

  In the afternoon they broke for a meal at Monee’s lone Chinese restaurant, where the chef cooked them a feast for the holiday. When night fell, Ye Jian returned the Dodge Journey to an Enterprise rental outfit. The men checked into a nearby hotel and rested for their flights.

  It had been an eventful month. Ye Jian and Lin Yong in particular had tested fate with their conversation as they toured corn country. Theft or larceny, Lin Yong had said. Violation of IP law. All criminal offenses. Dr. Li, they had agreed, understood all of this deeply. He knows. And even if the two low-level employees had been the ones to take corn from the fields, it had all been Dr. Li’s idea. He had been in the getaway car at the very beginning, when Robert was stopped by the sheriff’s deputy in the Monsanto field outside Bondurant, Iowa. Now Lin Yong was back in China, and Dr. Li and Ye Jian were preparing to take stolen corn out of the country. It would be difficult for either man to claim complete ignorance. But they were just hours away from a flight to Beijing, where U.S. law enforcement couldn’t reach them. Only Robert would remain on American soil.

  * * *

  • • •

  BEFORE LEAVING FOR THE AIRPORT the next day, the men stood around Robert’s rental car discussing how to divide up the seed. They decided to send a set of seeds with each group of travelers. That way, if one didn’t make it for some reason, they’d still have the other sets.

  When they had distributed the contraband, Dr. Li got in Wang Hongwei’s car, and Ye Jian climbed in next to Robert.

  “Your Z-1 F-1 is a set?” Robert asked the younger man.

  “Yeah.”

  “Z-2 F-2 is the second set,” Robert asserted, as much for himself as for Ye Jian. “The key is to ensure safety. They were also divided into three batches last year. Three batches and all arrived safely.”

  Safety was critical. As the U.S. crackdown on industrial espionage intensified, there were more and more cases involving Chinese defendants. A few days earlier, a federal jury in Newark, New Jersey, had convicted a Chinese national who formerly worked for a U.S. defense contractor of nine felony counts, for trying to take information about the design of missile guidance systems and other unmanned aerial vehicles back to China. In Detroit, meanwhile, a husband and wife accused of stealing hybrid car secrets from General Motors were about to go on trial. They faced the prospect of decades in prison.

  As the two men neared O’Hare, Robert nervously instructed Ye Jian on the importance of cleaning the rental cars. Remove any traceable marks or clues. Wash the car yourself, and then wash it again. Vacuum it twice. Clean it inside and out.

  “The car has been washed many times,” Ye Jian assured him.

  Robert persisted. “Last time, when we returned the car, you guys finished and left, and I went back and vacuumed it one more time. Because I—well, I am very attentive to details.”

  “Right. Not a single kernel of corn was left behind.”

  * * *

  • • •

  AT O’HARE, THE MEN PARTED WAYS. Robert Mo boarded a plane to Fort Lauderdale, and Wang Hongwei got on a flight to Burlington, Vermont. Ye Jian and Dr. Li headed for the international terminal.

  As the two men checked their bags and walked to the gate, they could have been any other boss and employee duo heading out of the country. They passed people running to catch flights and others killing time in duty-free shops. Here, finally, they were among other foreigners. No more sideways glances, no more arming themselves with a story at every turn. They could blend in. Perh
aps they thought ahead fourteen hours to their arrival in Beijing—a city where men like them could sail through life with VIP club memberships and hired help, where their nationality would be an asset rather than a hindrance. Even as they were transporting contraband through the airport, there was reassurance in knowing that they were almost home.

  In the rear passenger door of the rental car, though, were a number of items that Ye Jian had overlooked. These included a plastic bag filled with rubber bands, a roll of cellophane tape, and a napkin inscribed with numbers close to the day’s date: 9-5–9-13, 9-19–9-22.

  Ye Jian had also neglected to vacuum the trunk. Scattered throughout were loose kernels of corn.

  TWENTY-ONE

  FALL 2012

  If Ye Jian and Dr. Li felt at home in the airport, the FBI agents on their trail felt even more comfortable. United States law allows searches and seizures at international borders without a warrant. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers are permitted to search any traveler at random. They can riffle through luggage, log in to phones and laptops, and scroll through photos on digital cameras. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens from unreasonable search and seizure, doesn’t apply in such cases. This is called the border search exception, and it has been liberally used since September 11, 2001. The CBP is often merely the outward-facing authority in a border search. Behind the scenes on this particular day was the FBI.

  When Ye Jian and Dr. Li arrived at their gate, CBP officers watched as they separated, taking seats in different sections. Elsewhere in the airport, other agents offloaded the men’s checked bags and examined the contents. Amid their clothes and toiletries, the agents found the Pop Weaver and Orville Redenbacher boxes containing hundreds of small envelopes of seed, each neatly labeled in code.