Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China (9 page)

Before his trip, CIA officials briefed Keyworth on what to look for in China. Robert Vrooman, the CIA's man at Los Alamos, and later chief of counterintelligence at the laboratory, was his principal contact. "I met with other agency people too, but mostly Bob," Keyworth said. "They wanted to know about a lab down near Chengdu. We thought it was a nuclear weapons facility. I was able to validate it."

More broadly, the intelligence agencies wanted to know the state of China's nuclear weapons program. Ironically, Keyworth got into hot water when, at a CIA debriefing after his trip, he brought up what he had told the Chinese scientists about putting isotopes in a ball, as an example of how adroitly he had handled their questions. "The whole point was when this came up in my debriefing, I was trying to explain how it was possible to circumvent their question
by giving a basic answer." Keyworth explained all this to the FBI's satisfaction in several interviews with the bureau during the
TIGER SPRINGE
investigation.

The Chinese had invited Keyworth to come back the next year to visit their nuclear weapons test site. But in 1981 Reagan appointed him the White House science adviser, and in that sensitive post, it was made clear to Keyworth, he would have to abandon any thought of returning to China.

***

On December 3, 1982, almost two years after Gwo-bao Min was forced out of Livermore, the telephone rang in his house in Danville, California. The FBI had maintained the wiretap on Min's phone, and it heard the caller identify himself and say that he was a nuclear weapons designer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

According to a report of a polygraph exam that was later administered to the caller, he had learned that Min "was having problems with some men in China," was aware that he was from Taiwan, and had called just "out of curiosity." He offered to find out who had "squealed" on Gwo-bao Min.

The caller's name was Wen Ho Lee. The Los Alamos scientist had surfaced in the
TIGER TRAP
case seventeen years before he would become a celebrated spy suspect himself, in an unrelated FBI investigation.

Wen Ho Lee claimed that he had learned about Min's problems from a story in a Chinese-language newspaper. He called Min out of more than curiosity, however. Both Lee and Min were born in Taiwan, and Lee had been in contact with nuclear researchers in Taiwan for several years and had done consulting work for them. Attorney General Janet Reno testified at a closed Senate hearing in 1999 that Wen Ho Lee told the FBI "that he contacted [Min] because Lee thought [Min] was in trouble for doing the same sort of thing that Lee had been doing for Taiwan."
^*

According to a detailed
TOP SECRET
review of the Wen Ho Lee case in 2000 by a Justice Department team, the FBI was worried that "Lee might be acting on behalf of a Taiwan intelligence service."
Bill Cleveland was summoned to Albuquerque to brief the FBI field office on
TIGER TRAP
.

At the same time, after Lee's 1982 phone call to Min, the FBI opened a full counterintelligence investigation of Wen Ho Lee. The Albuquerque office asked the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit to prepare a personality profile to establish whether Lee might be "involved in clandestine intelligence activities."

Not realizing that he had been overheard on the wiretap, Lee lied to the FBI and although asked several times, said that he "had never attempted to contact" Min.
Lee, the review team concluded, "provided truthful answers only when confronted with irrefutable evidence (i.e. the FBI's awareness of his phone call ...) or when faced with a polygraph."

Then there was an astonishing development. Although Lee was under active investigation as a possible spy, in December 1983 the FBI asked him to go to San Francisco and help the bureau on the
TIGER TRAP
case. Lee was instructed to go to Min's home and try to lure him into revealing what secrets he had passed to the Chinese. Before he left, at the FBI's behest, Lee placed four telephone calls to Min, with the bureau's agents listening in.

When Wen Ho Lee showed up at Min's home, he was rebuffed by the former Livermore engineer. The door was not exactly slammed in Lee's face; he spent about half an hour with Min. But he did not succeed in the mission he had been given by the FBI.

The Justice Department review team was troubled, however, to discover that the FBI had enlisted Lee's help "in the direct contact of the subject of an espionage investigation."

Early in 1984, Lee passed a polygraph examination in which he was asked about his telephone call to Min. On the polygraph test, he denied working for any foreign intelligence agency. Although Lee had lied by denying his phone call to Min until he was confronted with the wiretap evidence, on March 12 the FBI closed its investigation of Wen Ho Lee.

***

With Gwo-bao Min forced out of Livermore, and Chien Ning's magazine operation moved back to Beijing, Chien left San Francisco and with her husband moved to Pasadena. She became an American citizen, taught seismology at the University of Southern California, and also engaged in a number of business ventures.

Federico C. Sayre, an activist attorney in Santa Ana—he once represented César Chávez, the charismatic leader of the United Farm Workers union—knew Chien and hoped through their friendship to become a middleman between the Chinese government and US investors hoping to do business in China. "We were interested in building hotels and restaurants," Sayre said.

In 1984 Chien arranged for Sayre and his law partner, Jay D. Gould, to travel to China and lecture in the law department at Beijing University. "She was a very kind of mysterious person,"
Sayre said. "I've seen planes wait for her. She seemed to have a lot of power for someone who was not in the government. She said she was not in the government. She spoke English well, very free with her criticism of Communism and the Communist government, although not when they [Chinese officials] were in earshot."

Three years later, Chien was involved in procuring old tankers and cargo ships for export to China, where they would be broken up for scrap iron, which the Chinese used in steel production. Her partner in that venture was Eugene Allen of Pacific Link International, a trade and brokerage firm in Los Angeles.

Chien confirmed that in the ship-procurement business she was acting for the Chinese government. "The Chinese Ministry of Materials asked my help to get scrap metals,"
she said.

The FBI, meanwhile, was still on the trail of Hanson Huang, hoping the Harvard lawyer might yet help the bureau close in on Min. Huang was released from a Chinese prison in 1985, after serving two years, but was placed under house arrest for a time and was not allowed to leave China for another seven years.

During the 1980s, Katrina Leung traveled to San Francisco often to work with Bill Cleveland on the
TIGER TRAP
case. Cleveland had enlisted Leung's help because of her friendship with Hanson Huang. And it was during those sojourns to Northern California that Cleveland and
PARLOR MAID
began their romance. "According to Cleveland, Leung initiated their relationship,"
a Justice Department review said. The affair went on from 1988 to 1993 and was revived in 1997 and 1999, after Cleveland had left the FBI.

Min had surrendered his US passport when he was confronted by the FBI. Chien Ning said she had tried to help him retrieve his passport. He got it back in 1984 and began traveling extensively to China, making eight trips in two years. He also launched an import-export firm, Grand Monde Trading, and a consulting firm, Min's Consulting Associates.

Counterintelligence agents are famously patient. In 1992, thirteen years after Cleveland had opened the
TIGER TRAP
case, Hanson Huang returned to his native Hong Kong, which gave the FBI another chance to contact him.

Huang wanted to be allowed to travel to the United States again, but he worried that he might be arrested if he did. He said he would meet the FBI in London to seek a deal that would give him immunity from prosecution. Cleveland and J.J. Smith flew to London in February with a Justice Department lawyer and a Livermore scientist.

Huang asked for immunity not only for himself but for Min and everyone else in the case. The FBI agents said no deal, unless Huang really opened up and revealed exactly what had happened during Min's trip to Beijing in 1979 and in his meetings afterward with Huang in California. Huang did talk about those events but offered up little that was new.

The group met with Huang for three days. In the end, he was told there would be no immunity for him or anyone else in the case.

TIGER TRAP
had run its course. The London meeting was the FBI's last hope. But the FBI could and did take comfort in knowing that Min was no longer in a position to pass nuclear weapons secrets to China.

Until now, the full story of this extraordinary espionage case has been wrapped in secrecy. The key roles of Hanson Huang and Chien Ning have never previously been revealed. And the
TIGER TRAP
case remains classified in the government's intelligence archives.

Even today, references to Gwo-bao Min in government documents are omitted, blacked out, or veiled. But a careful reading between the lines tells the story. An FBI document filed in the
PARLOR MAID
case, for example, nowhere mentions Bill Cleveland,
TIGER TRAP
, or his quarry:

"The San Francisco FBI SSA [special supervisory agent] was the case agent for a code named FBI counterintelligence investigation which concerned a ... subject who had obtained Top Secret information regarding United States nuclear weapons technology. This subject had conveyed the information to the PRC."

Translated from cryptic bureau-speak, the meaning is clear. Bill Cleveland was the San Francisco FBI case agent,
TIGER TRAP
was the code-named counterintelligence investigation, and Gwo-bao Min was the "subject" who the FBI said gave the
TOP SECRET
information on nuclear weapons to China.

But the bland language of the FBI affidavit masked the most startling and disturbing secret of the
TIGER TRAP
case.

Chapter 7

RIDING THE TIGER: CHINA AND THE NEUTRON BOMB

C
HRISTOPHER COX, A CONSERVATIVE
Republican from Orange County, California, served in the House of Representatives for seventeen years until 2005, when President George W. Bush named him chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although he instituted a number of reforms at the SEC, targeting insider trading and backdating of stock options, for example, he had the misfortune of presiding over the agency during the Wall Street meltdown and recession in 2008. Even John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, called for his resignation.

In the intelligence world, however, Cox was known not for his controversial role at the SEC but for a report documenting Chinese espionage against the United States. Cox was the chairman of the bipartisan House Select Committee on US National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China. The report's jaw-breaking title was so long that it became known informally simply as "the Cox Report." The committee issued an unclassified version of its nine-hundred-page report on May 25, 1999.

The central conclusion of the Cox Report was that China "has stolen classified design information on the United States' most advanced thermonuclear weapons," enabling the PRC to develop and test strategic nuclear missiles "sooner than would otherwise have been possible."
The report also warned that China had penetrated America's nuclear weapons laboratories.

The Cox Report created a firestorm. Critics argued that its conclusions were exaggerated, that the report was a political assault on the Clinton White House, and that China could have developed its nuclear weapons on its own, without using information stolen from the United States. Despite its flaws, the Cox Report served to alert the public to the reality that China was actively engaged in espionage against the United States and that the Los Alamos and Livermore labs were prime targets with woefully lax security.

Widely misunderstood in the debate over the Cox Report was the fact that at its core, the committee findings involved two separate questions. All nations spy, and there can be no doubt, from many examples, that China spies on the United States and has obtained secret information through espionage, among other means. Whether it has been able to use the information it acquired by espionage to speed its own nuclear weapons program is less demonstrable. But those are two distinct questions.

One of the most intriguing sections of the Cox Report is titled "Investigation of Theft of Design Information for the Neutron Bomb."

The neutron bomb, technically known as an enhanced radiation weapon, or ERW, is a thermonuclear weapon that is designed to release a much greater amount of lethal radiation than a conventional hydrogen bomb. The warhead releases intense waves of neutron and gamma radiation, with a minimal blast effect. In the popular imagination, the neutron bomb is understood to be a weapon that kills people but leaves buildings standing.

While that description is partly true, it is greatly exaggerated. Even a neutron bomb in the one-kiloton range would cause substantial destruction to buildings, although over a smaller area than that caused by a conventional nuclear explosion. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II was fifteen kilotons. It killed approximately 140,000 people and destroyed most of the city.

Because neutron and gamma radiation can penetrate armor, the ERW was designed primarily as a tactical battlefield weapon against tanks and infantry. During the years of the Sino-Soviet split, a period of tense political relations between China and the USSR that spanned more than two decades after the late 1950s, China sought to develop a neutron bomb to deter a potential ground assault by Soviet tanks. Similarly, during the Cold War, the United States saw the neutron bomb as a way to stop a Soviet army invasion of Western Europe and yet leave cities intact.