Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China (7 page)

As part of his research, Min had run tests on full-size mockups of the Minuteman II warhead. With his Q clearance, he also had access to the design of every US nuclear missile
as well as those on the drawing boards. He was, in short, privy to every secret of the country's nuclear weapons program.

Cleveland then opened the
TIGER TRAP
file on Min. The FBI also tapped his phones, under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant.

Min's background appeared to be unremarkable. Born in Taiwan, he had received an engineering degree from Taiwan University and served two years in Taiwan's navy. After coming to the United States in 1963, he received an engineering degree from West Virginia University and, in 1970, a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan.

He decided to remain in the United States, became an American citizen, worked in private industry for a few years, and joined the Livermore lab in 1975. With his wife, who was born in China, he bought a house in Danville, California, a half-hour commute from the lab, and quietly pursued his hobby, collecting and studying gemstones.

Although he had a solid position at Livermore, Min seemingly felt that he was underpaid and his work not fully appreciated. He harbored ambitions to go into business trading with China. He decided to travel to Beijing in the summer of 1979 to further his prospects.

Jerry Chih-li Chen, the television-repair-shop owner in Oakland, helped Min with the paperwork for his visa application. Chen, who was born in China but grew up in Taiwan, had been active in the Diaoyutai Islands movement as a graduate student. His work brought official recognition;
he was one of a group of only five students who were invited to Beijing to meet Premier Chou En-lai.

On a trip back to China, Chien Ning asked Hanson Huang, who was then in Beijing working for the Ministry of Foreign Trade, to look over Min's visa application. Huang immediately recognized Min as someone with the knowledge, and access to secrets, that could help China's nuclear weapons program.

In the month before Min left for China, investigators found, he had checked out an increasing number of classified documents from the Livermore lab's technical library. He also gained access to the lab's top-secret weapons vault, which contained mockups of every nuclear warhead designed by Livermore's scientists.

After Min arrived in Beijing in June, Chien introduced him to Hanson Huang.
Min was asked to give a number of lectures in China, and did. Through Huang, he also agreed to answer questions from a small group of Chinese government scientists.

Min met with them, but since he was not a nuclear physicist, he could not answer all of their questions about weapons design. He was given several questions to take back to the States with him.

When Min returned from his trip, he told his fellow lab employees that he had gone to China to give lectures on gems. Since he was known as an amateur gemologist, his version of what happened was not questioned by his colleagues.

If Chien Ning was a female spymaster acting for the MSS, as the FBI believed, there was little on the surface to suggest that. Yet there was an element of mystery and intrigue in her background: she seemed to be all over the place, as a businesswoman buying rusted merchant ships for scrap metal, a scientist, a university professor, a magazine publisher. And she was somehow there at every twist and turn in the early stages of the
TIGER TRAP
story.

In an interview with the author in 2009, Chien denied that she had come to San Francisco on behalf of the MSS. "I mean, there was reason to suspect me of that," she said, "but that's not true.
I'm an intellectual, I don't have the mentality to do that."

Chien was living in Northern California when she was located and interviewed. She said she traveled to China twice a year on average. Had the MSS given her the $250,000 to set up the four projects? "They gave me no money," she said.

At the same time, she acknowledged that she knew Gwo-bao Min. "I introduced Min to Hanson [Huang]," she said. "Min came to see me and Hanson was there. In Beijing."

And had she founded the Eastwind bookstore in San Francisco? "No, I helped them," she replied.

Another mystery. Doroteo Ng, one of the owners of the bookstore, when asked about Chien, said, "I don't remember that name. I don't remember this person."
He said that the bookstore was founded in 1978 by "some twenty people," most of them community activists, to foster cultural understanding. Had China contributed any money to start the bookstore? "No money from the PRC, not a penny," he said.

Chien had come to America and founded the magazine, she said, "to bridge the two countries. To help the Chinese people be exposed to Western economy. Conservatives were in power, and I wanted to help China understand the market economy."

Chien Ning was born in Nanjing (then Nanking); most of her family moved to Taiwan in 1946 when she was in her midteens. Chien returned to China and said she scored number one on the national college entrance exam. She earned a degree in physics from Qinghua University, then studied geophysics. A decade later, she was caught up in the short-lived Hundred Flowers Movement, launched in 1957 by Mao Zedong and ostensibly designed to encourage "constructive" criticism of the government by intellectuals. Many of those who spoke out were severely punished when Mao cracked down on the movement.

"I was in a prison labor camp for many years because my family was in Taiwan and they thought I was a CIA agent," she said. "Anyone with a relationship with Taiwan was suspect."

Chien said she spent five years in the prison camp, from 1957 to 1962. "The camp was on the border with Siberia in the far northeast, near Lake Xingkai. It was very cold." Over time, hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and "rightists" were sent to the Lake Xingkai prison camp, where conditions were notoriously harsh. Chien built and repaired tractors in the camp.

At one point in her remarkable career, Chien led several exploration teams to remote areas of China to catalog the nation's mineral resources. She was credited with discovering the huge Baotou iron mines in inner Mongolia.

In August 1979, two months after Chien introduced Gwo-bao Min to Hanson Huang in Beijing, Huang flew to San Francisco and met twice with the Livermore engineer,
once in Min's car, a second time at his home in Danville. At the second meeting, Min provided information in response to the questions posed through Huang by the Chinese scientists. Huang flew to Washington, D.C., and went to the Chinese embassy with the data he had obtained from Min.

At the embassy he wrote out a report, which was sent to China by diplomatic pouch. Huang had now effectively become Min's case agent.

Hanson Huang was born in Hong Kong in 1951. His Chinese name is Huang Yien. (His given name, Yien, means "faithful.") He and his younger brother, Henry, were given English names, a not uncommon practice in Hong Kong, then British territory.

Henry Huang, a molecular microbiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, was estranged from his brother, whose pro-PRC views he did not share. "Our family was very poor," Henry Huang said. "Our father died when we were young children; my mother was a news reporter at a newspaper, and then a TV station, but we were not well-to-do."

Of his brother, Hanson, Henry said, "He was always somebody with a cause.
He was buying into communism, socialism, in a very naive way."

Hanson and his brother attended the Diocesan Boys School in Hong Kong, then both came to the United States to continue their education. Hanson enrolled in Harvard College in the fall of 1970, and graduated three years later magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in history. He went on to Harvard Law School and received his law degree in 1976.

From Harvard Law, Hanson Huang joined Baker & McKenzie in Chicago, the city where his path first crossed with Katrina Leung, if they had not met earlier in the Daoyutai Islands protests. By 1979 he had moved to Beijing. In 1981, back in the United States, Huang briefly joined the Manhattan law firm of Webster & Sheffield, where John V. Lindsay, a former Republican congressman and two-term mayor of New York, was a partner. The law firm was hoping that Huang would help it expand its operations in Asia, but he resigned abruptly that same year and returned to China.

After Huang's meetings with Gwo-bao Min in San Francisco, and following his trip to the Chinese embassy in Washington, he flew back to Beijing. His contacts there were presumably not satisfied with the information Min had provided, because Huang was given five additional questions and instructed to put them in a letter to Min. One question contained
SECRET RESTRICTED DATA
, a U.S. classification category reserved for nuclear information.
^*
Some of the questions could only be answered with classified information. Huang wrote the letter in the office of K. C. Meng, who was the Beijing director of Chien Ning's science magazine.

In case the letter should be seen by anyone, an innocuous show-and-tell letter was also prepared. The letter with the substantive questions included a warning to Min. "The other letter can be shown to others," it said. "This letter should be destroyed after reading."

Chapter 6

"HOLY SHIT, MR. GROVE!"

D
AN GROVE LOVED
the sights and smells, the bustle of Hong Kong. A tall, affable man, he was one of the FBI's most experienced Asia hands. He was born in the Pennsylvania hard coal country, graduated from Penn State, and joined the bureau in 1955.

Fluent in Mandarin, Grove worked Chinese cases in San Francisco in the early 1960s, then spent a year on the China desk at headquarters before going out East to Hong Kong in 1966 as an FBI legal attaché. (FBI agents posted overseas are called legal attachés, or legats, pronounced "
lee
-gats"). Given a choice, Grove would have stayed in Hong Kong forever. But after six years, he was called back to the States and assigned to the FBI office in Berkeley. As a counterintelligence agent, Grove routinely sought out individuals with ties to China, and to this end he obtained a list of students who had attended the All-China Games in Beijing and began interviewing them.

"I met a nice boy from Taiwan and asked him to come in, and he came down to the office. He was very forthcoming and told me all about his trip. He was in the rifle competition in Beijing, he had been in the military in Taiwan." The young man was a PhD student at Berkeley. His name was Tommy Tang.

"They're going to be after you,"
Grove told him. "They'll be in touch. There's no such thing as a free lunch."

Grove's prediction proved accurate. "We knew who had recruited him, and other students. Jerry Chen." The proprietor of the shop in Oakland, it seemed, was doing more than repairing televisions.

A month later Tommy Tang returned to see Grove. "He said, 'These people want me to work in a bookshop collecting technical books to send to China.' He was busy with school work. He said, 'I don't know if I have the time.'"

Grove considered the problem. "I said, 'If I pay you, will you do it?' He said, 'I will.'" After Tang agreed to collect the books, he showed them to Grove, so the FBI agent knew what materials were going to China. Soon afterward, Tang told Grove that Jerry Chen had called him and asked him to go to Beijing for the book project. Tang agreed to go. Which is why he was in Beijing at the precise moment when Hanson Huang was casting about for a secure way to deliver his letters to Gwo-bao Min. What better courier than a reliable student who would be passing through Hong Kong en route to Berkeley?

Grove recalled what happened next. "He [Tang] was gone a week or a couple of weeks when I got a call on my home phone. 'Holy shit, Mr. Grove! You'll never guess what I have.'

"He said, 'I got a letter for this guy at the Lawrence Livermore lab and I opened it and they want more information on missile guidance systems.'

"The letter was addressed to Gwo-bao Min," Grove said. "It was a typical Chinese airmail letter where you undo the flaps to open it. He did, and I said, 'You probably ruined it.' He had opened it before he called me. He probably tore the flaps when he opened it. He bought another envelope and copied the letter; it was in Chinese script."

The student told Grove that his copying the letter would not matter because the recipient would not know who originally wrote it. "He rewrote it in Hong Kong," Grove said. "He mailed the letter in Hong Kong as instructed by the Chinese. The kid brought the original letter back to me."

Grove did not recall seeing the for-show, innocuous letter that also made its way to Min. But thanks to Dan Grove, and a bit of lucky timing, the FBI now had Hanson Huang's substantive letter. The bureau did not have to wait long to see how Min would react.

After reading the letter, Min decided to deliver the answers in person to Beijing. He did not tell the lab, as required, that he planned to travel to China. His wife called his office at Livermore and said he was sick and would not be coming to work.

Bill Cleveland then orchestrated an elaborate ruse in an effort to trap Min. As the engineer walked through the terminal at San Francisco International Airport, the public-address system blared an unusual announcement, reminding passengers that it was illegal to transport certain items. The long list of prohibited materials included firearms, explosives, and nuclear weapons information.

As Min got in line to board his plane to Hong Kong, several FBI agents were, unknown to him, in the queue immediately ahead of and behind him. The passengers were told that all carryon luggage would be subject to a search by US Customs. Min's briefcase and the bags of his fellow "passengers" were taken to a room out of view.

Inside his briefcase, the FBI found two index cards. On one card, in Min's handwriting, were the same five questions that Hanson Huang had posed in his letter. On the other card was the answer to the first question, about a method to measure the yield of hydrogen bombs when they were tested in the atmosphere. Since there were no written answers to the other queries, the FBI judged that Min already knew the answers without committing them to paper. But Min was not an expert on atmospheric testing; the FBI later discovered he had copied the answer to the first question about measuring the yield of hydrogen bombs from a classified document.