by David Wise
That did it. "You have details that only Ou knew," Chin said. He asked where the agents had gotten that information, then answered his own question. Ou Qiming must have defected, Chin said.
"He thought Ou Qiming had defected and was the one who had dimed him out," Schiffer said, referring to the pre-cell phone days when it cost a dime to use a pay phone. "Rudy and Terry allowed him to think that." But it was Yu Zhensan, not Ou, who had defected.
Chin stalled, asking the agents to come back the next day. They refused, and Chin, convinced that his handler had betrayed him, began talking. He talked, and talked, and talked.
Schiffer and Tom Carson were standing by. They received a phone call from Guerin. Chin had confessed. After getting the green light from the Justice Department, the two agents arrived at the apartment. Carson saw his quarry for the first time. He arrested and handcuffed Chin. The agents drove him to the Arlington County jail.
The trial of Larry Wu-Tai Chin on seventeen counts of spying and conspiracy opened three months later in federal district court in Alexandria. Chin took the stand during the four-day trial, and claimed he had spied to improve relations between the United States and China. His defense attorney, Jake Stein, believed Chin's explanation of his supposed motive offered the best, albeit slim, hope of swaying the jury.
When Chin saw a classified message from President Nixon about his plan for the opening to China, he said he believed "if this information is brought to the attention of the Chinese leadership ... it might break the ice. I wanted Chou En-lai to see it." The prosecutors, however, said Chin's motive was money, and pointed out that he had been well paid.
Perhaps the most interesting revelation during the trial was the testimony by Special Agent Mark Johnson that Chin had no contact with Ou Qiming from 1967 to 1976 because Ou was in prison. The chaos of the Cultural Revolution had ensnared even Chin's handler.
Joseph J. Aronica, the assistant US attorney prosecuting Chin, asked him if he was "stealing documents from the CIA and giving them to the Chinese?"
"Right," Chin answered.
"You knew the documents you gave ... would go to the highest levels of the Chinese government?"
"Yes."
"Your intent was to help the People's Republic of China?"
"Yes and ... the U.S., too."
Chin's admissions did not leave much for the jury to deliberate. They took just three hours to find him guilty on all seventeen counts. His wife, Cathy, sitting in the gallery, broke into sobs. Chin was escorted back to jail, facing two life terms in prison. Sentencing was set for March 17.
Why had he done it? Although he claimed he wanted to bring about a rapprochement between Washington and Beijing, the FBI agents who worked on the case thought that, even aside from the money, Chin, who toiled in obscurity in a CIA backwater, hungered for recognition, a sense of importance that he got from his Chinese intelligence admirers.
Two weeks after he was convicted, on the morning of February 21, Chin ate breakfast at 6:30 A.M. A little over two hours later, a guard found Chin in his cell. He had tied a plastic trash bag over his head with a shoelace. Efforts to revive him were unsuccessful.
He had left a note for Cathy.
"This morning I had a dream of a celestial world which makes me comfortable mentally and physically.... When I thought of the fact that I don't need to do anything after waking up and can ... keep on sleeping, it's extremely comfortable.
"So, Little Fish, don't worry about me. ... Isn't it a happy thing in the life.... Except that I can't stay with you, I already have everything."
It was over. The spy inside the CIA had been caught after three decades, and sentenced himself. At FBI headquarters, the EAGLE CLAW case file was closed.
Chapter 20
RED FLOWER
ON OCTOBER 19, 2005, Tai Wang Mak, chief engineer in Los Angeles for the Chinese-language television channel that broadcasts by satellite to the United States, placed a telephone call to a contact in Zhongshan, China.
"I work for Red Flower of North America," he said. Since Mak worked for the Phoenix North America Chinese Channel, not for a florist, it sounded like a line from a spy movie. To the FBI, however, the phrase was not scripted in Hollywood but an apparent code name for a family of spies headed by Chi Mak, Tai's brother. The group had been under intense FBI surveillance for more than a year.
The phone call to Zhongshan, a bustling city in southern China across the Pearl River from Hong Kong, was answered by Pu Pei-Liang, a researcher at Zhongshan University who the FBI believe was actually an intelligence officer for the People's Liberation Army—and Chi Mak's longtime handler.
According to FBI documents, Chi Mak, who worked for Power Paragon, a major defense contractor in Anaheim, had been secretly passing sensitive Navy data on US weapons systems to China for more than twenty years.
Nine days after the "Red Flower" phone call, FBI agents pulled Tai Mak and his wife, Fuk Li, from a security line at Los Angeles International Airport as they waited to board a midnight flight to Hong Kong. Both were arrested. At the same moment, other FBI agents swooped down on Chi Mak's home in Downey, a Los Angeles suburb, and arrested him and his wife, Rebecca Chiu.
Chi Mak, then sixty-six, was born in Guangzhou, educated in Shanghai, naturalized as a US citizen in 1985, and since 1996 held a SECRET security clearance at Power Paragon. He was the lead project engineer on research for the Quiet Electric Drive, or QED, a propulsion system designed to allow the Navy's submarines to run silent, and to make surface ships quieter and harder to detect as well.
In an affidavit filed for the arrest warrant of the Maks, FBI special agent James E. Gaylord described the QED as "an extremely sensitive project," with the technology banned from export to denied countries, including China. The QED was also labeled NOFORN, meaning "not for release to foreign nationals," so that the data was restricted and could not be divulged to other countries or foreigners.
The FBI charged that Chi took data about the QED and other Navy projects to his home, copied the information onto three CDs with his wife's help, and passed them to his brother, Tai, who encrypted the CDs. Tai was planning to deliver them to Pu Pei-Liang in Guangzhou, his ultimate destination, had he been permitted to board the flight from LAX.
Chi Mak's home had been wiretapped for months through a FISA warrant, and a video camera had been secretly installed over his dining room table. Gaylord's affidavit said that on October 23, 2005, five days before Tai Mak was to fly to Hong Kong with the CDs, Rebecca reminded her husband that the items Chi was asking his brother to take "are certainly against the law."
Months earlier, the FBI had recovered two lists from the trash at Chi Mak's house. The documents, in Chinese, which had been torn into small pieces, were reassembled and translated by the bureau. The FBI concluded that these were "tasking lists" from Chinese military intelligence, documents or information his handlers wanted him to collect. In secret searches of Chi Mak's home, the FBI found documents about several of the weapons systems on the lists.
One list of the items sought included a space-based missile-intercept system, submarine torpedoes, and aircraft carrier electronic systems. The second document asked for "ship submarine propulsion technology ... early warning technologies, command and control systems technology, defense against nuclear attack technology ... shipboard internal and external communication systems, establishment of high frequency, self-linking, satellite communications ... submarine HF transient launch technology," and information about the DD(X), the Navy's next-generation high-tech destroyer.
According to court documents, after Chi Mak was arrested he admitted passing to China data on electric converters and a circuit breaker for submarines, an electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS), to launch aircraft from carriers using magnets instead of steam, and data about the Aegis combat system, the Navy's most advanced command-and-control system, which uses computers and the powerful AN/SPY-1 radar to guide missiles to their targets.
A month after t
he arrests, Chi Mak, his wife, and his brother were indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles for acting as unregistered "agents of a foreign government, namely the People's Republic of China." They were not, however, charged under the espionage laws.
The prosecutors had run into a problem. Although much of the information the Maks were said to have transmitted to China was sensitive, and some marked NOFORN, none of it was classified, weakening the prosecution's case. Chi Mak had been careful not to filch any documents stamped SECRET or otherwise classified.
The government was not about to back off for that reason, however. In June 2006, Tai Mak's wife, Fuk Li, and their son, Billy Mak, twenty-six, were indicted on charges of lying to the government and acting as unregistered agents of China. In October, a superseding indictment was handed down, naming all five family members and adding charges of conspiracy to export defense information to China, and making false statements to federal investigators.
The trial of Chi Mak began in March 2007. The prosecution unveiled surprise testimony that tied Chi Mak to Dongfan "Greg" Chung, another Chinese American defense worker who was later prosecuted and convicted for illegally passing sensitive information to China.
FBI agent Gaylord testified that in the FBI's search of Chi Mak's home, a letter was found written by Gu Weihao, an official of China's Ministry of Aviation, to Chung, an engineer who worked at the Boeing plant in Huntington Beach on the space shuttle.
Gu, who was a relative of Chi Mak's wife, Rebecca, had introduced Chung to Chi Mak. In the 1987 letter, Gu wrote that China was planning to build commercial aircraft and a space shuttle. "I hope these products will be flying sky high soon. There are some difficult technical issues that need your assistance."
The letter indicated that Mak had been instructed to deliver it by hand to Chung. "You can discuss the time and route of your trip to China with Mr. Mak in person.... You may use 'traveling to Hong Kong' or 'visiting relatives in China' as reasons for traveling abroad."
Then came language that directly implicated Chi Mak. "Normally, if you have any information, you can also pass it on to me through Mr. Mak. This channel is much safer than the others. ... I hope that you will ... provide advanced technologies and information."
Chi Mak took the stand and denied that he had passed information to China. The encrypted disks, he claimed, were meant for two "friends." Pu Pei-Liang, to whom Tai Mak placed the "Red Flower" phone call, and who was supposed to meet him at the airport in Guangzhou and receive the disks, was simply another friend who was taking care of Tai Mak's sick mother-in-law. How encrypted information about a system to make submarines run silently would have proved beneficial for her health was not made clear.
After the six-week trial in Santa Ana, the jury on May 10, 2007, found Chi Mak guilty of conspiracy to violate the export control laws, acting as an unregistered agent of China, and lying to the FBI.
With Chi Mak convicted, the rest of the family pleaded guilty in rapid succession. In March 2008 Chi Mak was sentenced to twenty-four years in federal prison. His wife, Rebecca, pleaded guilty to acting as an agent of China, received a sentence of three years, and was to be deported afterward. Tai Mak was sentenced to ten years. His wife, Fuk Li, received three years probation, and their son, Billy Mak, was sentenced to time already served. All three were also to be deported after serving their sentences.
Having discovered the link to Boeing and the space shuttle in the search of Chi Mak's residence, the FBI opened an investigation of Dongfan Chung. A native of China, Chung came to the United States in 1962 and was a naturalized US citizen who had worked in the aerospace industry in Southern California for thirty years with a SECRET security clearance. Before Boeing, he had been employed by Rockwell International.
Chung was a volunteer spy. Around 1979 he sent a letter to Professor Chen Lung Ku at China's Harbin Institute of Technology. "I don't know what I can do for the country," he wrote. "Having been a Chinese compatriot for over thirty years and being proud of the achievements by the people's efforts for the motherland, I am regretful for not contributing anything. ... I would like to make an effort to contribute to the Four Modernizations of China"—a reference to Deng Xiaoping's 1978 plan to spur economic development in agriculture, industry, technology, and defense.
Chen wrote back in September 1979. "We are all moved by your patriotism. ... Your spirit is an encouragement and driving force to us. We'd like to join our hands together with the overseas compatriots in the endeavor for the construction of our great socialist motherland."
Chung lost no time in sending materials to China, among them twenty-four manuals from Rockwell on the B-1 bomber. In turn, the Chinese sent him elaborate tasking lists, with detailed questions. Example: "How many types of loaded flights are used for the fatigue test of small fighter planes? When performing loading test, are the sequences of the loading random or are they derived manually?"
Among other topics, the Chinese asked for "aircraft design manuals, fatigue design manuals ... space shuttle design manuals ... the space shuttle's airtight cabin, the space shuttle's heat resistant tile design, life-span ... analysis of U.S. fighter planes and airborne equipment; and S-N curves for fighter plane cabin plexiglass and cabin canopies."
In 1985 Chung was invited to lecture in China, on a trip paid for by the Chinese. Among the topics he said he would discuss was "Space Shuttle Heat Resistant Tiles, Brief Introduction and Stress Analysis." He also planned to lecture on "Fatigue Life" and "F-15 Jet Fighters."
"It's a great honor and I am excited to be able to make some contributions to the four modernizations of the motherland," Chung wrote. He looked forward to a trip "of several weeks to take a good look at the motherland with my own eyes."
Two years later, Gu Weihao, the aviation ministry official, appears to have become Chung's chief contact. "It is your honor and China's fortune that you are able to realize your wish of dedicating [yourself] to the service of your country," Gu wrote.
The Chinese official asked that Chung "collect information on airplane design for the trunkline and the development of the space shuttle." Once in Guangzhou, he would be able to meet with Gu and Gu's colleagues in a "small setting, which is very safe."
Perhaps as a cover story for his trip, Gu suggested, Chung's wife, an artist, could be invited to visit an art institute in China. Chung could then accompany his wife as his reason to visit the PRC. In 2001 Chung again traveled to China to lecture on the space shuttle, and he made two more trips there in 2002 and 2003.
When FBI agents interviewed Chung in 2006 and searched his home in Orange, California, they were astonished to find three hundred thousand pages of Boeing documents squirreled away in his residence, containing information about the space shuttle, the Delta IV rocket, used to boost unmanned vehicles into space, the F-15 fighter jet, the B-52 bomber, and the Chinook helicopter. Some of the documents were in a crawlspace underneath the house.
On February 11, 2008, Chung was arrested after being indicted on charges of economic espionage, acting as a foreign agent of China, and making false statements to the FBI. After a ten-day bench trial without a jury in July 2009, Chung, then seventy-three, was found guilty by US District Court judge Cormac J. Carney. In a scathing opinion, Judge Carney declared: "Mr. Chung has been an agent of the People's Republic of China ('PRC') for over thirty years. Under the direction and control of the PRC, Mr. Chung misappropriated sensitive aerospace and military information belonging to his employer, the Boeing Company, to assist the PRC in developing its own programs."
The judge minced no words. "As federal agents sifted through the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents in Mr. Chung's home, the story of Mr. Chung's secret life became clear. He was a spy for the PRC."
China's Foreign Ministry released a short statement. "The allegation that a so-called Chinese person stole trade secrets in the United States and gave them to China is purely a fabrication."
Chung was the first person to be convicted in a trial under the Econo
mic Espionage Act of 1996. In February 2010 he was sentenced to fifteen years and eight months in prison. Judge Carney said he imposed the long sentence because he wanted to send a signal to China to "stop sending your spies here."
Chinese spy cases have often proved to be linked or overlapping in some fashion. Chi Mak and Dongfan Chung were closely connected. On the same day that Chung was arrested in California, at the other end of the country, in Alexandria, Virginia, the government charged three people under the espionage laws with spying for China in what the press reported was "an unrelated case."
But it was not unrelated. For, as it turned out, Lin Hong, a Chinese intelligence official based in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, was the puppet master pulling the strings in the cases on both coasts and a fourth that was revealed a year later, in May 2009.
The three people arrested in February 2008 were Gregg W. Bergersen, a Defense Department employee, Tai Shen Kuo, forty-eight, a New Orleans businessman acting as a spy for China, and Yu Xin Kang, his young Chinese girlfriend who worked for Kuo's furniture company and served as a cutout between Kuo and his handler in China, Lin Hong.
Bergersen, a Navy veteran with a TOP SECRET clearance who liked to gamble in Las Vegas, worked in Arlington, Virginia, for the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the Pentagon unit that manages the vast program of US arms sales to foreign countries. He began his military career in naval intelligence, and served on a CIA committee (COMEX) that monitored technology transfer to the Soviets and eastern Europe. For that work, he received a Meritorious Unit Citation from then CIA director Robert Gates.
With a family to support, Bergersen, fifty-one, longed after he retired to move into the world of "beltway bandits," the military and intelligence companies and consultants that surround Washington and thrive on government contracts.
It seemed as though his prayers were answered when he met the free-spending Tai Shen Kuo, who cultivated Defense Department officials and claimed he was developing a consulting company to obtain defense contracts. He told Bergersen, "When my company get to the point ... where I can pay you three, four-hundred thousand a year, you come out" and retire. He also held out the prospect that Bergersen might become part owner of the company.
