The Scientist and the Spy

by Mara Hvistendahl

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  THE SENTENCING HEARING lasted for three days. On the third day, Judge Rose gave each side a final chance to make its case. Griess shifted the focus back to the crime, arguing that the impact of the seed theft would not end with Robert Mo’s sentencing. Pioneer and Monsanto might suffer losses for years to come, he speculated. Sales of their products in China could decline. Americans might lose their jobs. “This is market share that Pioneer and Monsanto have earned through years of research and development, innovation, trial, and hard work,” he said. “And unlike other types of theft, once those trade secrets are out, there’s no getting them back.” Then he zoomed out, moving from a cornfield in Iowa to the world beyond. With her decision today, Judge Rose had the power to deter future economic spies, he said. “We need to impose a sentence, or the court does, which doesn’t lead other would-be thieves, whether they’re foreign or domestic, to conclude that stealing a competitor’s trade secrets is worth the risk,” he said.

  Some people felt that as a solution to industrial espionage, sending individual perpetrators to prison for years had about as much effect as locking up drug runners in the fight against drug trafficking. It was a game of whack-a-mole: One person went to prison, and another took his place. Arrests of individuals also got mired in questions of discrimination and selective prosecution. In the long run, there were more productive ways to safeguard innovation: Improve education, subsidize health care, boost interest in science and engineering fields, liberalize green card requirements so that the United States had an adequate supply of talented workers. But these were systemic changes that didn’t have the sexiness of an urgent foreign threat. They were far beyond the purview of Griess as he stood in court, making the case for the man in the field to get as much prison time as possible.

  When Griess finished, Weinhardt rose to argue that Robert was a family man: active in his church, devoted to his wife and kids, giving of his time to others in need. In his job at DBN, he performed a number of entirely legal functions. His involvement in the corn theft scheme, Weinhardt explained somewhat improbably, was due to his overtrusting nature. The defense lawyer quoted a letter from a friend: “‘Although Robert is extremely smart and intellectually curious, he sometimes seemed child-like, naive, and gullible.’ And I’m sorry, Robert”—Weinhardt glanced at his client, pausing for effect—“but all of us on the defense team have had the same reaction, that we struggle to find a combination of someone of such immense intelligence and academic achievement on the one hand and naïveté and lack of street sense on the other.”

  After Weinhardt finished, Robert got up to speak. It was the first time that he had said more than a few words in court.

  “Dear Honorable Judge Rose,” he began, reading from a paper he clutched in his hands. “I’m writing to you, to Your Honor, for the only purpose of admitting my mistakes and in taking full responsibilities without any complaints or excuses.” He talked of once being taken with the American dream, of moving with Carolyn to the United States to build a future for his children. “Now I have destroyed everything that I wanted: my reputation, job security, and my family’s respect.” He started to sob.

  “Mr. Mo, you can take some time if you need it,” Judge Rose said. “Just continue whenever you’re ready, OK?”

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “I’m ready.” He resumed reading. “In my mind, the cancer that developed in Des Moines was a punishment for my crime.” He talked about how his family had suffered in his absence. “My heart is broken because I know that I am to blame.” And then he slipped into the comfort of metaphor, explaining how when he returned from house arrest he took his sickly garden as an omen. He threw his energy into reviving it. Finally, the rosebush flowered a deep crimson, and the mango and avocado trees yielded fruit. He relished the sight of his children eating this bounty. “It reminds me how precious it is to stay at home,” he said. Poetry and music held new meaning, as did life itself. He was, he suggested, already a changed man. “I have learned a lesson and will never put myself in a situation like this again.”

  As she prepared to announce her decision, Judge Rose was solemn. The case, she said, “was one that started with a man in a field and grew into something that internationally is an enormous case for both China and the United States.” It was, she added, “undeniably part of a larger trend that is being seen across the United States. I do think we have to send a message to China that this kind of criminal behavior is not going to be tolerated.”

  And then, midspeech, the judge suddenly began addressing Robert directly. “I have debated more hours than I could count what to do in this case,” she said. Faced with a single perpetrator, her certainty about sending a message slipped away. “And less than many other cases, I am not sure that I’m going to get it entirely right. I’m not sure there is a good or right answer.” It was a remarkable admission for a judge who had once compared herself with a superhero.

  “Ultimately, I think the appropriate sentence in your case is thirty-six months’ imprisonment,” she said, “and that is what I’m going to impose.” If Robert Mo had been entirely healthy, she added, she would have imposed the full five years.

  And then, as if to soften the blow, she gave Robert a pep talk. “I know you’ve said that you destroyed everything in your life. I don’t think you have. You certainly hit a bump in the road, but you are still a young man and you still have an incredible brain and you still have a good family. You can put this back together.” He looked at her, and for a moment the mood in the courtroom turned hopeful. The judge added: “You just learned a really harsh lesson.”

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  KEVIN’S IMPORTANCE TO THE CASE had diminished when it ended in a plea deal, so he learned about Robert’s sentence only after a friend sent him an article from The Des Moines Register. The news inspired mixed feelings. He recalled all of the intellectual property issues he’d heard about in his days as a seed breeder: the flashlight breeding of years past, the case of Holden and the stolen Pioneer inbreds. He could not recall anyone ever spending a day in jail. In that sense Robert’s sentence was an improvement over previous cases.

  But on another level the disconnect between Robert’s sentence and the punishments in those previous seed theft cases also bothered him. He wondered if the reason for the discrepancy was Robert’s ethnicity.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  2017–2019

  Mounted next to a door at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., is a light-up ON AIR sign left over from an era when radio was king. On the day I visited, the light was off. On the other side of the door, a floor-to-ceiling blue velvet curtain hung as the backdrop to two flags: one American and one featuring the intricate emblem of the FBI. The space felt like the set for a community theater production. It was here, in the J. Edgar Hoover Building’s midcentury media room, that I interviewed Mark Betten.

  That FBI headquarters is still named after the director who was responsible for some of the bureau’s worst abuses is a matter of significant controversy. A number of civil society groups and some former FBI agents have pushed for a change. But wrapped up in that conflict is the strange endurance of the building itself, a concrete behemoth that routinely tops lists of the world’s ugliest buildings. The FBI plans to eventually build a new headquarters. In the meantime, the tight corridors and fortresslike floor plan of the current building make it hard to forget the bureau’s history.

  Arranging a meeting with Mark had taken months of correspondence with the FBI’s media relations department. Donald Trump had been sworn in as president earlier in the year. Shortly afterward, he fired FBI director James Comey. Now that we were finally here, Mark had brought along his supervisor, acting Economic Espionage Unit head John Hartnett. On top of overseeing hundreds of other cases, Hartnett helped manage the investigation of Robert Mo and DBN.

  We sat at a small wooden table in the center of th
e room, Mark and Hartnett on one side and me on the other. His face expression-less, Hartnett talked about the corn theft investigation in broad strokes. “From the unit’s perspective, it ended up being a very important case,” he began.

  I asked him how it connected to theories about Chinese industrial espionage. China, he said, had challenged the nature of the Western research system by embracing a nontraditional collector model, which he explained meant focusing on “the individuals who have access to the information—typically engineers, scientists, researchers, and so forth.” He continued: “Other countries typically use their intelligence officers to recruit sources that have access to information. That’s a spotting and assessing cycle, which is a traditional counterintelligence approach. The Chinese approach is a little bit different. They utilize people of Asian or Chinese backgrounds that have come to the U.S. or to Western countries.”

  This sounded a lot like the thousand grains of sand theory, so I mentioned the case of Xiaoxing Xi, the Temple University physicist who had been arrested at gunpoint before being cleared of all charges. “Is there a concern with these cases that you might ensnare people who are innocent?” I asked.

  “Certainly it’s a concern,” Hartnett said. Then he backpedaled. “There can be certain portrayals of the FBI that may not put us in a favorable light, so it’s certainly a concern.”

  I brought up allegations of racial profiling from community organizers.

  “If there’s a larger percentage of one group that appears to be investigated or charged, it doesn’t mean they’re being targeted,” Hartnett told me. “The investigations are properly predicated. The FBI is just following the evidence.”

  In the case of Robert Mo, the evidence had led the FBI to spend two years bugging rental cars, intercepting phone calls, and flying surveillance planes overhead. The case that started with a man in a field had swollen into something much larger. There was the FISA warrant, the border searches, the arrest of Mo Yun while her children were escorted onto an international flight without her.

  Despite the vast resources expended in the case, in the end only one of the seven people charged was sent to prison. The company at the center of the scheme, DBN, had not suffered any serious consequences. Lily Cheng and other suspected insiders had not been charged. Dr. Li, Lin Yong, Ye Jian, Wang Lei, and Wang Hongwei remained on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, where together they accounted for nearly a third of all counterintelligence suspects at large.

  I turned to Mark and asked about the investigation’s limitations. Whether Robert was a tentacle of a foreign government or a cog in middle management who had been caught up in a harebrained plan, it seemed to me that there was no denying that the outcome of the case did not match the FBI’s ambition.

  “Do you feel frustration at all that you have these suspects in China who won’t be extradited in the case?” I asked him.

  “I think any agent is frustrated when you’re unable to get in custody the person charged,” Mark told me frankly. “But there are lots of member countries in Interpol. I haven’t ruled out the possibility that we could still get one of these individuals.”

  In the meantime, some of those individuals—Dr. Li, Ye Jian, and Lin Yong—were safe in Beijing, where the Chinese government had gone on the counteroffensive by hyping its own foreign espionage threat. In 2016, April 15 became National Security Education Day in China. Posters appeared around Beijing featuring a comic strip titled “Dangerous Love.” The story line starred a delicate young woman named Xiao Li, who had the misfortune to meet a dodgy-looking white man named David. Claiming to be a scholar, David persuaded her to hand over confidential documents—and then, as soon as she delivered them, he promptly disappeared. The encounter landed Xiao Li in trouble with the Ministry of State Security.

  The Beijing state security bureau unveiled a hotline and offered awards for tips on foreign spies. The bureau’s website explained that espionage had increased as China opened to the outside world. It was as if the Ministry of State Security’s publicity managers had closely studied the tropes of the FBI’s Strategic Partnership Program. Had the two agencies been corporations, one might have sued.

  Shortly after this campaign, I flew to Beijing to see what I could dredge up on DBN. One day I hired a taxi driver to take me to the village of Shenjiaying, fifty-five miles outside the capital. As we left the city on the expressway, the smog thinned and the terrain grew hilly. I glimpsed a stretch of the Great Wall crisscrossing the green slopes, fog hanging over the wall’s stone towers. Eventually we arrived in the village, where I knew there was a large farm that grew DBN seeds.

  It was harvest time, and there was dried corn everywhere. In Iowa, grain is typically transported to a silo or granary after being harvested by machine. In Shenjiaying, ears of dried corn were heaped in haphazard piles or spread clear across the road. Most of the village’s residents lived in bland cinder-block housing lining the fields. The only building of any size was an outlandish castlelike structure that looked like it had been transported from a second-rate Disneyland. A villager informed me it was the local elementary school.

  I located the farm I’d found online and walked toward a large house with whitewashed walls and a neat tile roof. There was no one in sight. As I watched a cat climb a sapling in the yard and contemplated what to do, a man with a weathered face and sandpaper hands appeared from an adjacent field. He introduced himself as Mr. Liu and confirmed that he planted DBN seed. “They work with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences,” he said proudly.

  He emphasized that the seed he grew was not genetically modified, adding that he believed GM seed was bad for people’s health, and from this I deduced that the seed lines he planted were not the ones that so interested the FBI. But Mr. Liu’s allegiance to DBN echoed what I had found elsewhere: that the company was doing just fine, despite several of its employees being charged with felonies in the United States. When news of Robert’s 2013 arrest first broke, the company’s share prices on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange had taken a hit. But they recovered within a few months, after it became clear that the case would have little impact on DBN’s day-to-day operations. Government planning documents continued to emphasize the importance of China’s agriculture and biotechnology sectors, and in 2014 DBN was selected by China’s Ministry of Agriculture as one of twenty companies to receive funding for “innovation demonstration” labs—signaling that the central government, like the company’s shareholders, didn’t care about the criminal case winding its way through America’s court system. By mid-2015, DBN’s shares had more than doubled in value compared with 2013.

  In February 2016, the state-owned petrochemical company ChemChina announced a $43 billion bid for Syngenta, a Swiss agricultural company. The largest ever Chinese takeover of a foreign company, the acquisition was a natural outcome in an industry in which Western multinationals held little real allegiance to the nations that had spawned them. (A few years earlier, the Chinese meat producer Shuanghui International had purchased the American meat-processing outfit Smithfield Foods.) For Chinese leaders, ChemChina’s acquisition of Syngenta was momentous. It meant that ChemChina would acquire Syngenta’s impressive portfolio of genetically modified seeds, and leaders would finally achieve their goal of having a seed company that could compete with DuPont and Monsanto. Industry consultants took it as a sign that a change in Chinese government policy was imminent, and that genetically modified corn would soon be commercialized.

  There was a certain irony to the fact that ChemChina had managed to do legally what DBN had spent several years trying to accomplish through theft. But if government policy changed, Shao Genhuo’s company stood to gain as well. DBN could soon begin selling genetically modified seeds in China—no matter their source.

  A few months after the Syngenta deal was announced, and several weeks before Robert’s sentencing, Kings Nower staged a flashy fifteen-year anniversary bash. Six hundred employees, contract
farmers, and other friends of DBN gathered in a large event hall in Beijing. Crimson banners hung from the ceiling declaring KINGS NOWER, RED UNDER HEAVEN.

  DBN CEO Shao Genhuo watched approvingly from the audience as Dr. Li took the stage, smiling his taut grin. His speech took the theme of “dreams, journeys, and futures.” The seed industry, he proclaimed, was “a major battleground for defending the country and a strategic sector for realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Shao had once told Chinese journalists that by 2023 DBN would become a world-class firm and by 2033 it would be the top agribusiness company in the world. Robert’s conviction apparently had little effect on this ambition. As far as I could tell from coverage of the event, no one mentioned him.

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  IN 2018, FBI DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER WRAY revealed that the bureau had active economic espionage investigations in all fifty states. “The volume of it, the pervasiveness of it, the significance of it is something this country cannot underestimate,” he said at the Aspen Security Forum that year. In a briefing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wray said that Chinese students and scientists were “exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have.” The FBI viewed China, he added, as “a whole-of-society threat.”

  Some counterintelligence analysts argued that Wray’s remarks were a reference to a speech Xi Jinping had made at China’s 2017 Party Congress calling for “a whole-of-society” effort to secure China’s rise. That same year, China enacted a national intelligence law that obliged citizens, businesses, and other organizations to assist with a broad variety of intelligence work. But Wray had singled out ethnic Chinese scientists and students in the United States, and U.S. community organizers interpreted the phrase to mean that they were part of the problem—and that ethnic Chinese scholars were guilty until proven innocent. Several Asian-American organizations coauthored a letter to Wray’s office, expressing concern. They never got a reply. Instead, Wray doubled down on his remarks in a later appearance.