Espionage without evidence

Is it racism, or realism, to look at Chinese-Americans when trying to figure out who's spying for China?

By Jeff Stein

Aug 26, 1999 | As the case against Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist accused of spying for China, seems on the verge of unraveling, critics have raised the volume of their complaints about the fact that Lee was targeted at least partly because of his Chinese origins. But U.S. espionage experts say scientists of Chinese descent working in this country are trapped in an endless game of spy vs. spy between the United States and China, tangled in a web of espionage so subtle that many don't even know they're players.

And for the foreseeable future, these experts say, Beijing won't stop targeting them for recruitment, thus provoking the attention of FBI gumshoes who run roughshod over the lives of Chinese-born scientists like Wen Ho Lee because they don't know what they're looking for.

Paul Moore, the FBI's top China hand from 1975 until he retired last year, called China's spy system "espionage without evidence," so impenetrable to U.S. counterspies and prosecutors that it was "bulletproof."

China's espionage operations are so subtle, he and others added, that scientists might not even know they were handing over valuable information. Thus the United States is wasting time pursuing Los Alamos espionage suspect Lee and turning its nuclear labs upside down in security sweeps.

"It's nice to think, but it's not true, that where there's espionage there inevitably is evidence of espionage," Moore told Salon News in a two-hour interview. "The Chinese have found a way to commit espionage against the United States which does not leave sufficient evidence behind for there to be successful investigations and successful prosecutions."

With the resignation this week of Energy Department security official Notra Trulock, the prime source of alarm over Chinese espionage in the media and on Capitol Hill, many critics are lambasting the FBI for singling out Lee because he is Chinese-American, when Beijing could have acquired U.S. nuclear secrets from multiple sources.

Chalmers Johnson, a University of California China specialist, called the Lee investigation America's version of the Dreyfus Affair, wherein a Jew was scapegoated for French security lapses a century ago.

"The sole evidence cited against [Lee] is that in June 1988, during the Reagan administration, he along with 200 other scientists attended an International Computational Physics Conference in Beijing with the permission and clearance of the Los Alamos Laboratory," Johnson wrote.

But engaging scientists at conferences is exactly how the Chinese operate, Moore says.

"Their major effort is to try and develop relations with Chinese-Americans, as many of them as possible, in the hopes that the relations will turn out to be profitable -- someday, somehow, somewhere," Moore said.

Understandably, FBI sources bristle at charges of racism, and say if anybody should be tagged with that brush, it's the Chinese, for singling out scientists of Chinese descent.

"First critics say our government is racist because the government is targeting Chinese-Americans because they are Chinese," said Harry Brandon, a former head of FBI counterintelligence who retired in 1995 as the Los Alamos probe was heating up. "And the answer is, Yes, we are targeting them, because they are targets (of Beijing)."

"The only people racially biased in this case is the Chinese intelligence service," Brandon said in an interview, "which continues to target Chinese-Americans for the only reason that they are ethnic Chinese."

Brandon said that "probably 99.99 percent of Chinese-Americans wouldn't have anything to do with" Chinese spying overtures. But Moore said that Beijing's spy operations are so subtle that most U.S. scientists "wouldn't even know" they were supplying valuable information to China.

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