But funneling the money from the National Security Bureau's secret slush funds to Harvard, and concealing its source, was a complicated matter. To do so, according to reports of the documents, the NSB enlisted the assistance of Peng Run-tzu, the president of the Taiwan Transport Machinery Corporation. Peng is a close friend of President Lee, often acting as Lee's personal representative in informal diplomatic contacts in Japan and the United States. On Dec. 15, 1999, the NSB transferred $100,000 to Peng. Five days later Peng transferred the money to the bank account of the Pacific Forum, an adjunct of the Washington-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies. At the time, the Pacific Forum was run by James Kelly. The arrangement to transfer the funds to Harvard to support Akiyama was confirmed when Peng and Kelly met at a Los Angeles restaurant on Jan. 15, 2000.

Kelly declined repeated requests by Salon to comment on this story. Akiyama, meanwhile, in a March 27 interview with the China Times, denied any contact with Taiwanese officials and said his funding came from Harvard. Yet an investigation into the funds transfer between Taiwan, Kelly's Pacific Forum, and Harvard raises further questions about Kelly's role and just what happened to the $100,000 he was reportedly given for Akiyama's support.

On Monday, CSIS spokesman Jay Farrar told Salon that CSIS has no record of any such transaction ever taking place. According to Farrar, CSIS's Pacific Forum has substantial autonomy and is able to earmark for its own purposes funds that it raises. But the two organizations have a single set of books and a single budget. In other words, says Farrar, any transfer should show up on CSIS's books. But apparently they didn't. CSIS did receive roughly $50,000 in general funding support from Taiwan in 1999 but the think tank's account books, Farrar told Salon, "do not show any payments that would correspond" to the transfers of funds described in the Taiwanese and Hong Kong press -- either of money coming in from Taiwan or going out to Harvard.

On Thursday morning, however, Farrar revised his earlier statement. Ralph Cossa, Kelly's deputy in 1999 and the current director of the Pacific Forum, told Farrar that Peng had asked Kelly to assist Akiyama in roughly the manner the NSB documents describe. CSIS records show that Peng gave Pacific Forum $50,000 and that Kelly passed approximately $40,000 to Harvard, keeping $10,000 for the Pacific Forum. Farrar told Salon that the December 1999 payment to Pacific Forum was actually one of four similar payments Peng made to Kelly's organization during the period in question: $25,000 in July 1998, $25,000 in August 1999, and $50,000 in June 2000.

Farrar's revised story is supported in part with an account provided to Salon by officials at Harvard's Fairbank Center on Tuesday. According to Asia expert and onetime Clinton administration appointee Ezra Vogel, who was the head of the Fairbank Center at the time, Akiyama applied and was accepted for a fellowship at the center through the established selection process. Akiyama was then told, however, that the center could not provide funds to support his stay. At this point, Kelly entered the picture. "Other people who knew [Akiyama] gave him some funds" Vogel initially told Salon. "And I believe that Jim Kelly played a role getting those funds." Later, Vogel said that Kelly had "arranged to get the money" for Akiyama's stay at the center but that he was not aware of the ultimate source of the funds Kelly provided.

Vogel then asked Susan McHone, the center's administrator, to review the center's records and McHone confirmed to Salon that Kelly had arranged for a payment of $39,600 from the CSIS Pacific Forum, which Harvard used to pay for Akiyama's apartment and other miscellaneous expenses during the first year of his stay at the center. During his second year at the center, says McHone, Akiyama's expenses were paid by the Arlington, Va., office of the Yamada Corporation, a Japanese defense and aerospace holding company. (A Yamada representative, who declined to provide her name, did not return a call requesting comment on Yamada's funding of Akiyama's fellowship.)

The available evidence raises a number of questions. Did Kelly funnel the funds to support Akiyama through CSIS's Pacific Forum, contrary to the denials of Akiyama? And if the NSB gave Kelly $100,000, but passed only $39,600 along to Harvard, what happened to the remaining $60,400?

There's no clear evidence that Kelly's role in the affair would have violated any American laws. He was not in government at the time. So the transaction would not be covered by any of the panoply of rules and regulations covering campaign finance or government ethics. But such an arrangement might have required Kelly to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent, under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), something records show he did not do. Marshall Williams, administrator of the FARA office, declined to "comment on any particulars or hypotheticals" regarding the FARA law. Williams did draw attention to the portion of the law that covers any individual who "disburses, or dispenses contributions, loans, money, or other things of value for or in the interest of [a] foreign principal." But he was also at pains to make clear that such a transaction might be exempted under various other provisions of the statute.

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