CHEEENator

When China began to modernize in the late 1970's, intent on becoming a world economic power by the early 21st century, it focused on the so-called 'Four Modernizations'.  One of the most important of these was in science and technology, and one of the key means of obtaining the relevant knowledge -alongside collaboration deals with Western technological companies and the sending of thousands of young Chinese nationals abroad to study in Western universities - was espionage.  Anyone traveling abroad was routinely expected to collect intelligence.

When British universities first began charging students to photocopy information in university libraries in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was not as a result of budget cuts but because the increasing number of Chinese students studying in Britain were routinely working their way through the libraries' science books and journals, copying any information at all on scientific developments in general and nuclear physics in particular.

	Chinese intelligence officers based in embassies and consulates abroad began recruiting any 'Overseas Chinese' who might be able to either provide technological assistance or recruit other members of the Chinese community to assist.  The recruitment technique played very heavily on a sense of shared national and cultural identity and China's desperate need to modernize in order to catch up with the rest of the world and restore itself to its historic position as a world leader in scientific and cultural innovation.  It was a direct appeal to their pride in their country of origin.

Money was unlikely to be offered as an incentive, although the possibility of business opportunities inside China often was.  The more likely inducement would be through improvements in the situation of relatives still living in China, and by extension the notion that the position of family members under Beijing's control might be worsened if the political agent declined to assist.

Although ethnic Chinese were routinely targeted as agents in many countries around the world, the main target - owing to the large number of companies and insitutes dealing in a wide range of technologies including nuclear, aeuronautics and computer science, - was, and remains, the United States.  There are almost five million ethnic Chinese living in America, representing the largest pool of potential agents from which to recruit.

Dongfan Chung was born in the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning in 1936.  he was ten years old when his parents fled to Taiwan to escape the civil war between the Nationalist and Communist forces.  Chung studied engineering in Taiwan, and in the early 1960s moved to the US, taking a Masters degree in civil engineering and then working for the American aircraft manufacturer Boeing.  In 1972, he joined Rockwell, which had just won the contract to build the first space shuttle.

By now, he had changed his first name to Glen, and he and his wife had become US citizens.  During the assessment process, was asked if he would be willing to 'bear arms' for his adopoted country if there was ever a war between the United States and China.  His response was in the affirmative, but not in the way the interviewer was expecting.  'If this happens,' he said, 'I will grab a gun and shoot myself.'

It was the moment that China began opening up to the West and seeking to modernize which provided the tipping point for the Chungs.  'Suddenly, the doors opened to China,' Chung's wife Ling said.  'We were curious and searching for self-identity.'  After attending a concert by visiting Chinese musicians, Chung bought an erhu, a two-stringed Chinese violin, and taught himself to play it.  He also began attending events by visiting Chinese academics, at one of which he met an engineering professor from the Harbin Institute of Technology who asked him about aeronotical stress analysis, Chung's specialty in the Space Shuttle programme.  According to the professor, China did not have enough information on this subject and anything Chung could do to help would be welcome.

Chung sent some information accompanied by a letter in which he suggested that he was open to helping in other ways if he could. 'I don't know what I can do for the country,' Chung said. 'Being proud of the achievements by the people's efforst in the Motherland, I am regretful for not contributing anything.'

A second meeting, unrelated to the first, this time with a senior official from China's state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China at a talk in Los Angeles, led to an exchange of letters and invitation to China for an unofficial ;technical exchange' on airframe design, including stress analysis and testing for fatigue.  'I would like to make an effort to contgribute to the Four Modernizations of China,' Chung said in one letter. 'It is a great honour and I am excited if I can make some contributions to the modernization of the Motherland.'

Chung's betrayal of the secrets of the space shuttle program lasted more than 30 years and was only finally uncovered in 2006 as a result of an investigation into another Chinese spy ring.  He was convicted in July 2009 of economic espionage and being a Chinese agent.  The prosecution presented no evidence of any money changing hands.  Chung had acted purely out of love of 'the motherland'.  A former FBI counterintellegence officer told the court that it was classic Chinese exploitation of a member of the 'Overseas Chinese' community.  'What they try to do is work on the China aspect,' he said. '"You are not so much hurting the United States; you are helping China."  You tell them they're doing it for the good of the Motherland or the good of their country.'

Chung was sentenced to 15 years and eight month's imprisonment.  He was 73.  The judge said he had imposed a long sentence because he wanted to send out a message to the Chinese: 'Stop sending your spies here.'

One of the most prominent cases of 'Overseas Chinese' being used to spy on the United States was that of double agent Katrina Leung.  Born Chen Wen Ying in 1954 in Canton (now Guangzhou) in southeast China, she moved to New York in 1970, where she changed her first name to Katrina, and after five years later married a fellow Chinese, Kam Leung.  After moving to Los Angeles, Katrina Leung lived in an appartment block known to the FBI as a 'nest of Chinese spies' and became involved with companies carrying out illgal technology transfer to China.  This led to her recruitment in December 1982 as an informant by FBI Special Agent James Smith, an intelligence officer tasked to send Agents into China to collect intelligence.  Smith gave Leung the codename Parlor Maid and sent her into China on a difficult mission, making contact with her old friend Hanson Huang, who had been imprisoned in China for espionage.  Huang was a key figure in a Chinese nuclear weapons spy ring in the United States, codenamed Tiger Trap by the FBI, who hoped that Huang's imprisonment might make him willing to deal with them.  Leung managed to carry the mission off against the odds, getting into the jail and speaking to him, albeit not managing to do anything other than prepare the ground for future contacts.  She was an impressive woman in many ways and less than a year after recruiting her, Smith began an affair with her, in contravention both of FBI rules and all sensible tradecraft.

The aim of the Parlor Maid operation was to 'dangle' Leung in front of Chinese intelligence officers operating out of the Chinese consulate-general in San Fransico and in Beijing as a potential agent, in the hope that the Chinese would attempt to recruit her as well so she could run as a 'double', ostensibly supplying intelligence to the Chinese, but in fact limiting her reports to them to relatively unimportant data and using them to gain access to far more important intelligence on Chinese espionage operations against the United States.  She was a very successful agent, using her growing reputation as a prominent member of the Los Angeles Chinese community to entertain Chinese diplomats and visiting Chinese officials, including then Chinese President Yang Shangkun.

Her close links to officials at the San Francisco consulate-general and in Beijing gave Leung accerss to a great deal of useful intelligence for the Chinese before Smith recruited her, she successfully passed polygraph lie detector tests in 1984 and 1986 which confirmed her reliability.  The FBI was particularly pleased with her access when, only a few months after the Tiananmen Square demonstrations were put down in June 1989, she traveled to Beijing to provide valuable information on the political situation which was virtually impossible to obtain by other means.

But sometime in the late 1980s, Leung appears to have been turned by the Chinese.  The balance of usefulness between what she provided to the FBI and what she gave to the Chinese had switched in Beijing's favour, while the affair with Smith severely constrained his ability to act.  If he launched an investigation, the affair between them would leak out and he would lose his job.

Unbeknown to Smith, and almost certainly at the instigation of her new bossess in Beijing, Leung began a second affair with Special Agent Bill Cleaveland, who ran the FBI's San Francisco counterespionage operations against the Chinese.  She also began opening Smith's briefcase and photocopying official documents, which she passed to her new Chinese controller.  The first clear sign that Leung had been 'doubled back' against the FBI came in June 1990, when the top secret US electronic surveillance systems which transmitted everything photocopied on the Xerox machines in the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles, including the cheques paid to Chinese agents (which were routinely copied for the records), suddenly stopped working.  Leung had given away the Americans' top secret surveillance systems.  The Chinese responded by replacing the photocopiers and transporting all of the old machines to Beijing where the systems were reverse engineered, allowing them to be used back against the Americans and other nations.

The second clear indication was even more worrying, particularly for Cleveland.  In April 1991, he was sent an NSA tape of a female agent talking to her Chinese controller, Mao Guohua, the head of the MSS America Department.  Cleveland immediately recognized the voice of the female agent.  It was Leung, his mistress, and she was telling Mao about a number of current FBI operations and investigations against the Chinese.  He telephoned Smith immediately and, while for security reasons he used guarded language, his message was clear. Leung could no longer be trusted.  Her loyalties were with the Chinese not the FBI.

At that point, the Parlor Maid operation ought to have been brought to an immediate halt.  The problem was that both Cleveland and Smith were stymied by their sexual relationships with Leung.  Although neither knew that the other was compromised, both of them knew that if they brought the houise down, they would lose their jobs.  Smith confronted Leung.  She claimed that the Chinese had told her she was working for the FBI.  She had no choice but to supply them with intelligence if she were to remain in a position to obtain the intelligence the FBI needed in return.  Leung admitted to Smith that she had disclosed highly sensitive intelligence about FBI investigations and operations, but claimed that she was still favouring the FBI. She refused to take a fresh polygraph text (pilznote: typo?), but even so Smith continued to describe her as a 'reliable' agent in reports to his bosses, who were so in awe of his depth of knowledge and reputation that, despite reports which ought to have suggested that the operation had gone disastrously wrong, they did not question his judgement at any point.  When a very reliable FBI source reported that an agent called 'Katrina' was a Chinese intelligent agent with an extremely productive source inside the FBI, Smith's bosses simply informed him and left him to deal with the issue, even though the 'extremely productive source' was clearly likely to be him.  When the same source reported that Leung was 'in bed with' the FBI's Los Angeles division, again Smith's bosses informed him and asked him to investigate.  Unsurprisingly, he did nothing.  He retired from the FBI in November 2000, by which stage Leung had been paid $1.7 million by the FBI for her work as an agent.

An investigation against Leung did not commence until May 2001 and the investigation of Smith was not opened until January 2002.  Even then the incompetence continued.  Prosecutors did a deal with Smith under which he came clean about everything that had taken place in return for a limited sentence of 3 years' probation and a $10,000 fine.  As part of the deal, Smith was not allowed to provide evidence on behalf of Leung, which led the judge in her case to throw it out on the basis that, without Smith's evidence, she could not possibly obtain a fair trial.  Leung ultimately pleaded guilty to two minor charges of lying to the FBI and failing to report taxable income and spent just three months in jail and 18 months in home detention, together with three year's probation, 100 hours of community service and a $10,000 fine.