by David Wise
Where was Kam Leung during J.J.'s visits? When the FBI man came to the house, he said, "I stayed away. I didn't want a tap on the shoulder in Beijing if I knew intelligence secrets. I could have been interrogated and imprisoned. I didn't want to know what they were discussing.
"For over twenty years, J.J. would come to our house any time he wanted. Three days a week, sometimes five days a week. He would call first and say, 'Can I work?' All our relatives know they cannot come to our house without calling ahead."
J.J. had become so confident of PARLOR MAID and their partnership that he began taking classified documents to her home. TOP SECRET and other classified materials were stored in the FBI's Los Angeles office under tight security in a secure compartmented information facility, or SCIF (pronounced "skiff"). Usually, agents would read the documents in the SCIF. Sometimes they would check out documents to be reviewed in their offices and then returned.
Not the privileged J.J., who would stuff the documents into his briefcase and take them along to the house in San Marino. He was the only agent who, at least once, kept TOP SECRET documents overnight.
Having free run of the house in San Marino was marvelously convenient for the lovers. But it was also convenient for the MSS. J.J. would leave his briefcase open; the file folder pockets in the briefcase often contained documents with the text facing out. She could see the documents she wanted.
While the FBI man was dozing, or outside smoking, or in the bathroom, perhaps showering after they had sex, PARLOR MAID took classified documents from his briefcase and surreptitiously made copies of them on her photocopier or fax machine. Sometimes she took notes on the contents and later threw out the copies of the documents in the trash.
At other times she scribbled notes about what was in the documents without copying them. She also made notes of information that J.J. shared with her. How she could have managed all this without her lover's knowledge is somewhat baffling, but there is no evidence that J.J. realized his primo source was betraying him. Over the years, PARLOR MAID passed information to the MSS that she had stolen this way.
Even more remarkably, Katrina Leung continued to pilfer documents from J.J.'s briefcase for many years after 1991, when it had become clear to the FBI from the tape that as Luo she was reporting to the MSS.
What with J.J. dropping by so often, inevitably the Smiths and the Leungs grew close. "J.J.'s family and my family were good friends all these years," Kam said. "In 1992 we went to Hawaii together, island hopping."
And was he aware of his wife's affairs with not one but two FBI agents? He replied: "Gail [Smith] didn't know, William Cleveland's wife didn't know. And I didn't know."
Chapter 5
DESTROY AFTER READING
THEY MADE AN unlikely cast of characters for a spy drama: Chien Ning, a mystery woman and prominent Chinese geophysicist; Hanson Huang, the Hong Kong-born, Harvard-educated lawyer and friend of Katrina Leung; and Jerry Chih-li Chen, who ran a TV repair shop in Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco.
All were key players in the espionage case that the FBI code-named TIGER TRAP. At the center of it all was Gwo-bao Min, the aerospace engineer with a Q clearance who worked at the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab—the man who would give Bill Cleveland such a start when the FBI agent encountered him in a hotel lobby in remote Shenyang.
Cleveland was the case agent, the lead FBI investigator on TIGER TRAP. He pursued the case with the help of Al Heiman, another bureau special agent in the Bay Area, and J.J. Smith in Los Angeles.
William V. Cleveland Jr. had become a leading figure in the FBI's Chinese counterintelligence program from a very different background than J.J. Smith's. He grew up in Arlington, in Northern Virginia, the son of an assistant director of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover.
He graduated from William & Mary College and after two years in the Army joined the FBI in 1969. He was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, to learn Mandarin, then assigned to the China squad in the FBI office in Berkeley, and later in Oakland.
Over time, Cleveland's reputation as an expert on Chinese espionage and respect for him within the FBI grew exponentially. "He was the best I ever knew," said Ken Schiffer, a former FBI Chinese counterintelligence veteran. "I thought the world of him. He was my hero." Another former colleague put it this way: "Bill Cleveland was a god."
For all but one of his twenty-four years in the bureau, Cleveland remained in the San Francisco area. The California lifestyle suited him. Always trim, he stayed in shape by jogging every morning, in later years switching to riding a bicycle.
Cleveland was active in his church, seldom missing a Sunday, but some of his colleagues found him sanctimonious and his religious demeanor off-putting. "In Berkeley," said one, "he was holier than thou, you couldn't swear around him. One day a lot of people were crowded around a window. Somebody was getting a blowjob in a car in plain view and everybody was watching with interest and Cleveland was pounding on the window yelling, 'Stop that!'"
Inevitably, Cleveland's work brought him in contact with J.J. Smith in Los Angeles, and, of course, with PARLOR MAID. The two men were close; J.J. considered Cleveland a mentor and a friend. It was Cleveland, a rabid Oakland Athletics fan, who taught J.J.'s son Kelly to play baseball.
In 1978 Cleveland and the San Francisco China squad began investigating several Chinese and Taiwanese nationals. Their leader, the FBI concluded, was the geophysicist Chien Ning, who the bureau believed had been sent to the United States by the MSS.
With a reported bankroll of $250,000, Chien had been given four tasks by the Chinese intelligence service, the FBI surmised: First, she started a glossy Chinese-language magazine, Science and Technology Review, for which Chinese American scientists contributed articles on subjects of interest to China. Half a dozen issues were published in the United States; after that the publication moved to China.
The magazine was no marginal operation. It clearly had the backing of the Chinese government at the highest level. For the first time, the postal service in China and a network of official bookstores allowed the unrestricted sale of a foreign magazine. Published in Berkeley and printed in Hong Kong, the magazine's first issue, in January 1980, had 104 pages, a print run of two hundred thousand copies, and an interview with two Nobel laureates. It also had a congratulatory message from Dr. Frank Press, the science adviser to President Jimmy Carter and like Chien a geophysicist. In China, a lead article in the People's Daily promoted the magazine, and a large number of senior Chinese government officials sent handwritten notes of congratulation to the magazine's Beijing office.
As Chien's second project, through a commercial front set up as Kentex International, libraries at the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and other universities were combed for PhD theses and scientific books on a variety of technical subjects. The papers and books were copied and the copies shipped to Beijing.
In addition, Chien was tasked with opening a bookstore that would sell PRC publications and other books on Asia and Chinese language and culture. The FBI believed she may have helped to found Eastwind Books & Arts, at Stockton and Columbus streets in San Francisco. Finally, she was to open an import-export company.
All of this seemed fairly innocuous. But the FBI's suspicions about Chien's role were fueled when Gwo-bao Min, the Livermore scientist, turned up moonlighting as the advertising and sales manager of her magazine, Science and Technology Review.
The bureau's antennae went up because Min was an engineer at one of the nation's most sensitive and secret installations, the laboratory founded in large part by Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, who became its director. It was at Livermore that the hydrogen bomb, the most destructive weapon in the world, was created.
In the late 1970s, Min worked at Livermore on designing a system to shoot down enemy nuclear missiles. Min's project was a precursor to the Strategic Defense Initiative, the so-called Star Wars program launched in 1983 by President Ronald Re
agan.
As part of his research, Min had run tests on full-size mockups of the Minuteman II warhead. With his Q clearance, he also had access to the design of every US nuclear missile as well as those on the drawing boards. He was, in short, privy to every secret of the country's nuclear weapons program.
Cleveland then opened the TIGER TRAP file on Min. The FBI also tapped his phones, under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant.
Min's background appeared to be unremarkable. Born in Taiwan, he had received an engineering degree from Taiwan University and served two years in Taiwan's navy. After coming to the United States in 1963, he received an engineering degree from West Virginia University and, in 1970, a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan.
He decided to remain in the United States, became an American citizen, worked in private industry for a few years, and joined the Livermore lab in 1975. With his wife, who was born in China, he bought a house in Danville, California, a half-hour commute from the lab, and quietly pursued his hobby, collecting and studying gemstones.
Although he had a solid position at Livermore, Min seemingly felt that he was underpaid and his work not fully appreciated. He harbored ambitions to go into business trading with China. He decided to travel to Beijing in the summer of 1979 to further his prospects.
Jerry Chih-li Chen, the television-repair-shop owner in Oakland, helped Min with the paperwork for his visa application. Chen, who was born in China but grew up in Taiwan, had been active in the Diaoyutai Islands movement as a graduate student. His work brought official recognition; he was one of a group of only five students who were invited to Beijing to meet Premier Chou En-lai.
On a trip back to China, Chien Ning asked Hanson Huang, who was then in Beijing working for the Ministry of Foreign Trade, to look over Min's visa application. Huang immediately recognized Min as someone with the knowledge, and access to secrets, that could help China's nuclear weapons program.
In the month before Min left for China, investigators found, he had checked out an increasing number of classified documents from the Livermore lab's technical library. He also gained access to the lab's top-secret weapons vault, which contained mockups of every nuclear warhead designed by Livermore's scientists.
After Min arrived in Beijing in June, Chien introduced him to Hanson Huang. Min was asked to give a number of lectures in China, and did. Through Huang, he also agreed to answer questions from a small group of Chinese government scientists.
Min met with them, but since he was not a nuclear physicist, he could not answer all of their questions about weapons design. He was given several questions to take back to the States with him.
When Min returned from his trip, he told his fellow lab employees that he had gone to China to give lectures on gems. Since he was known as an amateur gemologist, his version of what happened was not questioned by his colleagues.
If Chien Ning was a female spymaster acting for the MSS, as the FBI believed, there was little on the surface to suggest that. Yet there was an element of mystery and intrigue in her background: she seemed to be all over the place, as a businesswoman buying rusted merchant ships for scrap metal, a scientist, a university professor, a magazine publisher. And she was somehow there at every twist and turn in the early stages of the TIGER TRAP story.
In an interview with the author in 2009, Chien denied that she had come to San Francisco on behalf of the MSS. "I mean, there was reason to suspect me of that," she said, "but that's not true. I'm an intellectual, I don't have the mentality to do that."
Chien was living in Northern California when she was located and interviewed. She said she traveled to China twice a year on average. Had the MSS given her the $250,000 to set up the four projects? "They gave me no money," she said.
At the same time, she acknowledged that she knew Gwo-bao Min. "I introduced Min to Hanson [Huang]," she said. "Min came to see me and Hanson was there. In Beijing."
And had she founded the Eastwind bookstore in San Francisco? "No, I helped them," she replied.
Another mystery. Doroteo Ng, one of the owners of the bookstore, when asked about Chien, said, "I don't remember that name. I don't remember this person." He said that the bookstore was founded in 1978 by "some twenty people," most of them community activists, to foster cultural understanding. Had China contributed any money to start the bookstore? "No money from the PRC, not a penny," he said.
Chien had come to America and founded the magazine, she said, "to bridge the two countries. To help the Chinese people be exposed to Western economy. Conservatives were in power, and I wanted to help China understand the market economy."
Chien Ning was born in Nanjing (then Nanking); most of her family moved to Taiwan in 1946 when she was in her midteens. Chien returned to China and said she scored number one on the national college entrance exam. She earned a degree in physics from Qinghua University, then studied geophysics. A decade later, she was caught up in the short-lived Hundred Flowers Movement, launched in 1957 by Mao Zedong and ostensibly designed to encourage "constructive" criticism of the government by intellectuals. Many of those who spoke out were severely punished when Mao cracked down on the movement.
"I was in a prison labor camp for many years because my family was in Taiwan and they thought I was a CIA agent," she said. "Anyone with a relationship with Taiwan was suspect."
Chien said she spent five years in the prison camp, from 1957 to 1962. "The camp was on the border with Siberia in the far northeast, near Lake Xingkai. It was very cold." Over time, hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and "rightists" were sent to the Lake Xingkai prison camp, where conditions were notoriously harsh. Chien built and repaired tractors in the camp.
At one point in her remarkable career, Chien led several exploration teams to remote areas of China to catalog the nation's mineral resources. She was credited with discovering the huge Baotou iron mines in inner Mongolia.
In August 1979, two months after Chien introduced Gwo-bao Min to Hanson Huang in Beijing, Huang flew to San Francisco and met twice with the Livermore engineer, once in Min's car, a second time at his home in Danville. At the second meeting, Min provided information in response to the questions posed through Huang by the Chinese scientists. Huang flew to Washington, D.C., and went to the Chinese embassy with the data he had obtained from Min.
At the embassy he wrote out a report, which was sent to China by diplomatic pouch. Huang had now effectively become Min's case agent.
Hanson Huang was born in Hong Kong in 1951. His Chinese name is Huang Yien. (His given name, Yien, means "faithful.") He and his younger brother, Henry, were given English names, a not uncommon practice in Hong Kong, then British territory.
Henry Huang, a molecular microbiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, was estranged from his brother, whose pro-PRC views he did not share. "Our family was very poor," Henry Huang said. "Our father died when we were young children; my mother was a news reporter at a newspaper, and then a TV station, but we were not well-to-do."
Of his brother, Hanson, Henry said, "He was always somebody with a cause. He was buying into communism, socialism, in a very naive way."
Hanson and his brother attended the Diocesan Boys School in Hong Kong, then both came to the United States to continue their education. Hanson enrolled in Harvard College in the fall of 1970, and graduated three years later magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in history. He went on to Harvard Law School and received his law degree in 1976.
From Harvard Law, Hanson Huang joined Baker & McKenzie in Chicago, the city where his path first crossed with Katrina Leung, if they had not met earlier in the Daoyutai Islands protests. By 1979 he had moved to Beijing. In 1981, back in the United States, Huang briefly joined the Manhattan law firm of Webster & Sheffield, where John V. Lindsay, a former Republican congressman and two-term mayor of New York, was a partner. The law firm was hoping that Huang would help it expand its operations in Asia, but he resigned abruptly that same year
and returned to China.
After Huang's meetings with Gwo-bao Min in San Francisco, and following his trip to the Chinese embassy in Washington, he flew back to Beijing. His contacts there were presumably not satisfied with the information Min had provided, because Huang was given five additional questions and instructed to put them in a letter to Min. One question contained SECRET RESTRICTED DATA, a U.S. classification category reserved for nuclear information.* Some of the questions could only be answered with classified information. Huang wrote the letter in the office of K. C. Meng, who was the Beijing director of Chien Ning's science magazine.
In case the letter should be seen by anyone, an innocuous show-and-tell letter was also prepared. The letter with the substantive questions included a warning to Min. "The other letter can be shown to others," it said. "This letter should be destroyed after reading."
Chapter 6
"HOLY SHIT, MR. GROVE!"
DAN GROVE LOVED the sights and smells, the bustle of Hong Kong. A tall, affable man, he was one of the FBI's most experienced Asia hands. He was born in the Pennsylvania hard coal country, graduated from Penn State, and joined the bureau in 1955.
Fluent in Mandarin, Grove worked Chinese cases in San Francisco in the early 1960s, then spent a year on the China desk at headquarters before going out East to Hong Kong in 1966 as an FBI legal attaché. (FBI agents posted overseas are called legal attachés, or legats, pronounced "lee-gats"). Given a choice, Grove would have stayed in Hong Kong forever. But after six years, he was called back to the States and assigned to the FBI office in Berkeley. As a counterintelligence agent, Grove routinely sought out individuals with ties to China, and to this end he obtained a list of students who had attended the All-China Games in Beijing and began interviewing them.
"I met a nice boy from Taiwan and asked him to come in, and he came down to the office. He was very forthcoming and told me all about his trip. He was in the rifle competition in Beijing, he had been in the military in Taiwan." The young man was a PhD student at Berkeley. His name was Tommy Tang.
