by David Wise
For Denise Woo, ETHEREAL THRONE had become a different sort of ordeal. Intensely loyal to the bureau, she had been put in an impossible position. From the start, she was skeptical that Jeff had done anything wrong. Yet she had to conceal from her longtime family friend that she had been assigned to investigate him some eleven months earlier.
Worse yet, after Wang was called in to the FBI, she was told to renew their friendship, to take advantage of it, and become close to Jeff. To spy on the spy, as it were. Denise Woo had never expected to be put in such a difficult situation when she joined the bureau in 1994. She had worked her way through college at UCLA, then graduated from business school at the University of Southern California.
When Woo joined the FBI, then in her midthirties, she was sent to Quantico, Virginia, for agent training, then assigned to the Long Beach, California, FBI resident agency to work white-collar crime. There she greatly impressed her boss, Special Agent Jack Keller, a handsome, square-jawed Irishman and bureau veteran who helped to train her in criminal investigations. US attorneys and other government officials she worked with praised Woo as a top-notch agent.
From time to time, fellow agents had suggested to Woo that because of her Asian appearance, she should work in Chinese counterintelligence. Although her mother was Japanese American and her father half Chinese, Woo, a fourth-generation Californian, did not write or speak Chinese. She was not interested in following her colleagues' advice, partly because inside the FBI there was a belief, held by some agents, that if you were not good enough for criminal work, you ended up in counterintelligence. As a result, CI was not considered the best career path.
In September 1998 Gil Cordova sent a supervisor to meet with Woo. She was pressured to take a counterintelligence assignment. The bureau, the supervisor said, was aware that Woo knew Jeffrey Wang. The FBI had strong evidence that Wang was a spy for China, the supervisor went on, but it had not been able to prove the case and needed her help. The supervisor waved the flag: this is what it means to be an American, he said, this is why you joined the bureau.
Reluctantly, Woo agreed to help the three case agents working on ETHEREAL THRONE. She provided information on Jeff's family background and her own family's long friendship with the Wangs.
Early in 1999 Woo decided that she wanted to get out of Long Beach and try something new. In June her request was approved, and she was transferred to the Los Angeles division to work on child pornography cases, tracking predators on the Internet. Which is how she happened to be in the Wilshire office the day that Jeff was called in and polygraphed there.
By that time, Woo had gleaned some of the details that had cast suspicion on Jeff. But she did not know everything.
She was not aware of the backstory that had begun in San Francisco. Dave LeSueur was an FBI counterintelligence agent in that city, on the China squad. A bit on the heavy side, LeSueur spoke slowly and always seemed to feel underappreciated. But he had two attributes in his favor. He spoke Cantonese, and perhaps because of that he had developed a number of useful informants, including two women.
But LeSueur's prize informant was a man who, over the years, had provided a good deal of valuable information to the FBI. The source did not work in the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. But he appeared to be trusted by Chinese officials, because some of the tips he provided to the bureau were far too intriguing to have been picked up by someone just hanging around bars in San Francisco's Chinatown. The FBI concluded that the source, although providing useful information to the bureau, was being run by Chinese intelligence.
Sometime in the 1990s LeSueur's informant moved to Los Angeles. The reason remains murky, but perhaps romance called, because at some point during this period he appears to have married. Although the source had relocated, he continued to be run by LeSueur.
In September 1997 the informant told a story to the FBI that triggered the ETHEREAL THRONE investigation. He claimed to have met a Chinese intelligence officer, or IO, in a hotel in the San Gabriel Valley. The officer, the FBI source claimed, spoke no English but asked him to dial a telephone number in Torrance, California.
A man answered the telephone, the FBI informant went on, and said he had been expecting the call. As instructed by the Chinese IO, he told the man to come to the hotel. As the source related the tale, the person he called came to the hotel and exchanged envelopes with the IO. Although the informant could not see what was inside the envelopes, he assumed that cash had been exchanged for secret documents.
The envelope the man brought to the hotel was big enough to hold documents, the informant said. And the envelope given in exchange looked the same as one in which he himself had been given money. That was an interesting statement, because, if true, it meant that the informant, who was on the FBI payroll, had also been paid by China.
Investigating the source's story, Serena Alston, Cordova, and Gilbert were able to obtain toll records showing that a telephone call had been placed from a room registered to the supposed Chinese intelligence agent. The number called was the home telephone of Jeff Wang.
Now the FBI had a suspect. A FISA authorization was obtained and the bureau began wiretapping Jeff's telephones. Counterintelligence is a difficult and often complicated business. The FBI had no reason to doubt the informant's story. He was a longtime bureau source who had always provided useful information.
But there were problems from the start with ETHEREAL THRONE. Often the MSS recruited people by inviting them to China. Alston and the other agents could not find any connection between Jeff and China. So they started to investigate his relatives, to see if that might turn up any leads.
Jeff's father, the FBI learned, had emigrated from the Shanghai area in the 1920s. But the bureau was unable to locate his immigration file, which would have included a list of his relatives. His father's file was either lost or destroyed.
In the meantime, with help from Denise Woo, Jeff was trying his best to figure out who might have led the FBI to suspect him as a spy. He knew nothing of the story told by the informant, about a phone call from a hotel, or an exchange of envelopes.
Jeff's father had died at age seventy-two in July 1999, a month before Jeff was called in and grilled by the FBI. He asked his mother whether she knew of anyone who might have had reason to accuse him. She was able to shed the first ray of light on the mystery.
He learned from her that relatives of his father in Los Angeles were claiming that before his father died, he had promised he would help them out financially. There was nothing in his will, however. But the relatives contended that he had told them that if they needed money he would try to assist them.
By now, Denise Woo had become convinced that Jeff Wang was innocent. She had suspected as much all along. Now she had learned that there was a family disagreement over money, which might hold the key to the puzzle. Jeff gave her the name of a few relatives who he believed might have had a grudge against him over the money his father had supposedly promised them. Woo provided the names to her FBI superiors but was told that none of those individuals was the informant who had fingered Jeff.
Meanwhile, Woo found that although the hotel toll records showed a call had been made to Jeff's number, the duration was only thirty seconds. After six rings, there would be a record of the call even if it was not answered. It was not clear whether anyone had picked up at the Wang residence, or if so, whether the person who answered or the caller said it was a wrong number.
When the FBI examined the computer the agents had taken from Jeff's house, besides Daniel's Tonka truck game they found a few work-related documents from Raytheon, but none that were classified. And there was nothing in the computer to suggest that Jeff Wang was anything but a loyal American citizen.
The FBI investigation was stalled. It had been under way for more than a year, and the bureau was no closer to proving its case. Moreover, the investigation was split between Los Angeles, where J.J. Smith was Alston's supervisor, and Long Beach, where an agent named Linas Danilevici
us was Cordova's supervisor.
On the wiretap of the Wangs' house, the FBI overheard Jeff discussing the investigation, trying to figure out who had cast suspicion on him, talking to his mother about his relatives, and mentioning various aunts and uncles. By now, the FBI had learned the names of a number of relatives, even though his father's old immigration file could not be found.
Checking out their names, Alston noticed that one of Jeff's cousins, his father's niece, owned a house and that the co-owner of the house, her husband, had the same name as the FBI informant. That seemed an odd coincidence. But there was a reason for this.
Her husband, the co-owner of the house, was the informant.
Now the FBI had to face the fact that an informant it had relied upon for years had concealed the fact that his wife was Jeff Wang's cousin. Confronted, the informant denied, and kept denying, that he knew his wife was related to Jeff. Eventually, he admitted that Jeff was his wife's cousin, but claimed he had not known that.
The informant's entire story was falling apart. Pressed by the bureau, he admitted that he actually had met Jeff. It was, the source said, at a big family dinner. But the source said they did not talk, because Jeff did not speak Chinese and all the others did.
The gathering had taken place about a year before the informant told his story to the FBI. Jeff's parents had come to visit him and Diane and arranged for the large family dinner in Monterey Park. Jeff met his father's brother for the first time, as well as his father's nephew, niece, and other relatives. The informant was there.
By now, the picture was clear. J.J. Smith, Alston, and the FBI did not believe the informant's tale. He had used his relationship with the FBI to settle a personal score. He had invented the whole story. Later, when the San Francisco office investigated the mess, it determined that the informant was well aware all along that his wife was Jeff's cousin.
"It was a frame job," one senior FBI agent put it bluntly.
If the clouds of the bogus espionage accusation hanging over Jeff Wang were now dissipating, there was another storm gathering for Denise Woo. She had been told to become Jeff's confidante. He had been trying for months to figure out who had set him up and why. It was logical, therefore, that Woo, convinced of his innocence, would have encouraged him in that effort.
But the FBI fiercely guards the identity of its sources. And the bureau's agents, listening in on Jeff's conversations with Woo on the wiretap of his home telephone, decided that she had crossed the line, even by discussing the subject with Jeff of who his accuser might be. The fact that Jeff was speculating about what relative might have had a grudge against him did not seem to matter. Nor did it seem to make a difference that Woo's assignment by the FBI was to win Jeff's confidence, lend him a sympathetic ear, and act as his friend.
In the weeks after Wang was called in by the bureau, Woo argued with her superiors that he was innocent. She pushed, asking what evidence they had on him. She was told she had fallen prey to a version of the Stockholm syndrome, becoming too close to the person who was being investigated as a supposed spy.
In November, Woo was interviewed by the FBI. She denied that she had discussed the identity of the informant with Jeff, or given him any hints, or tipped him off that his phone was tapped. That the FBI had the Wangs' phones wired would hardly have surprised Jeff, an engineer; he and Diane assumed from the time the FBI agents had swarmed their house that their phones were tapped. A few weeks after Woo was questioned, the FBI suspended her.
In trouble now, Woo hired a lawyer, Marc S. Harris, who had worked with her on criminal cases when he was an assistant US attorney for eight years. "She was a fantastic agent," he said. "She was outstanding, extremely diligent and conscientious."
But Harris's small law firm could not handle what loomed as a long investigation of Woo. Mark Holscher, then with O'Melveny & Myers, took the case pro bono.
Federal prosecutors convened a grand jury—not to investigate how an FBI informant had lied to the bureau and framed an innocent man as a Chinese spy, but to build a case against Denise Woo, the FBI agent who tried to help clear his name.
Jeff and Diane Wang were called to testify before the grand jury. The prosecutors played a tape of a conversation between Diane and her mother. The tape confirmed the Wangs' suspicions that their phones were bugged. On the tape, Diane apparently told her mother that she would call her on another line. The government played the tape to attempt to show that the Wangs knew they were being wiretapped, and had been tipped off.
Woo remained suspended by the FBI. Early in 2003, after four years, the bureau fired her. In August 2004 Denise Woo was indicted on five felony counts for supposedly disclosing the identity of the "covert agent" to Wang, allegedly telling Jeff that his phone was wiretapped, and lying when she denied having done either of those acts. If convicted she faced a minimum sentence of ten years. On December 6, she was arraigned and freed on $50,000 bail.
The government was coming down hard on Denise Woo, even though its case against Jeff Wang had totally unraveled. The prosecution of Woo carried some hidden risks for the FBI, which was not at all anxious for the public to learn that one of its star Chinese counterintelligence informants had framed an innocent man. In the indictment of Woo, Wang was not identified. He was referred to only as "J.W."
Facing five felony counts and a possible ten years in prison, Woo, on the advice of her lawyers, decided to accept a plea bargain. On June 6, 2006, she pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor of disclosing confidential information.
The original charges, that she had identified the FBI source, revealed the wiretap to Wang, and made false statements denying that she had done so, were dropped. Nor, in the plea bargain, did she state that she had disclosed the identity of the informant to Jeff.
The language of the plea was artful, dancing all around the subject, implying that Woo had revealed the source's name without explicitly saying so. The plea bargain asserted that Woo "discussed with and thereby disclosed to J.W. confidential information concerning the identity of an FBI confidential informant." The wording does not claim that Woo revealed the identity of the informant, only that she disclosed information "concerning the identity." That could mean almost anything, perhaps something as innocuous as encouraging Jeff's speculation that a relative, or a relative by marriage, bearing a grudge over his father's estate, was responsible for the false accusation against him.
On October 30, 2006, seven years after she was suspended by the FBI, Woo was sentenced by US District Court judge Gary Klausner to probation and a $1,000 fine. "This is a kind of bittersweet ending to a long and continuing tragic injustice," Woo said after the sentencing. "I am relieved that after years of false allegations, my family and I can finally get on with our lives."
Mark Holscher criticized the government's pursuit of Woo. "It was very unfortunate that the FBI chose to indict Denise," he said. "She loved the bureau. She was put in a horrible position of investigating a family friend. The FBI has policies and procedures in place for agents placed in undercover roles, including you don't investigate someone you know. If those policies had been followed Denise would be a decorated FBI agent today."
Had the case gone to trial, Holscher was prepared to show a link between the Woo and Wang investigations and J.J. Smith and Katrina Leung. And here, the plot, like so many aspects of counterintelligence, becomes both shadowy and complicated.
Although it was not known at the time, J.J. had briefed Katrina Leung on the Jeff Wang investigation and consulted her on all details of the case. J.J. later told the Justice Department's inspector general that the informant's reporting about Jeff "did not make any sense."
The source who in the spring of 2000 told the FBI that Leung was an agent of China's intelligence service was the same informant who fabricated the story about Jeff Wang. The informant was angry at PARLOR MAID, accusing her of having told the MSS about his relationship with the FBI. He also claimed that Leung had told Beijing about the Jeff Wang investigation.
When the bureau finally determined that the informant had falsely accused Jeff Wang, he was dropped from the FBI payroll for lying, according to a former FBI counterintelligence agent and a current bureau official. By 2006, when Woo signed her plea, he was no longer being used as an informant.
When it was all over, Jeff Wang was able to obtain another job in the defense industry, one that required a security clearance. His name briefly surfaced in the press when he attended the sentencing of Denise Woo. But he will learn many of the details of ETHEREAL THRONE for the first time when he reads them in this book.
Brian Sun, who represented Jeff Wang early on in the FBI probe, summed up what had occurred. "A truly innocent man and his family suffered some very damaging consequences. Here's a guy at Raytheon for over fifteen years, had a great record, loses his job. It was just devastating for them to have to go through that ordeal."
Jeff and his wife have tried to pick up the pieces of their lives and move on. The FBI finally told his attorney that he was no longer "a person of interest." That was nice to know. But Jeff Wang could not understand why he never received an apology from the FBI.
Chapter 13
STORM CLOUDS
IN 2000 THE FBI'S national security division, then headed by Neil J. Gallagher and his deputy, Sheila Horan, was preoccupied with tracking down the Russian mole in US intelligence, who turned out to be the FBI's own Robert Hanssen. But the division had also begun to hear disturbing hints that something was very wrong with the Chinese counterintelligence program in Los Angeles.
In July, Ken Geide had taken over as chief of the division's China section at headquarters. Encouraged by Gallagher, Sheila Horan and Geide began a detailed review of the Los Angeles Chinese counterintelligence program. They concentrated on PARLOR MAID, if only because Katrina Leung had been a source for so many years.
