Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China (28 page)

She paused for a moment. Then she added softly: "They did not know I knew him."

Chapter 17

ANUBIS

I
N EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY
, he is the familiar jackal-headed god who was believed to protect the dead. His likeness guarded the tomb of King Tutankhamen for twenty-two centuries.

Perhaps the code name
ANUBIS
was chosen by the FBI with a touch of whimsy, because he was an RIP, although in bureau language that did not mean "rest in peace." It meant "recruitment in place."

His true name was Wen Ning. He was born in Shanghai in 1949.
At Qing Hua University in Beijing he earned a bachelor's degree in thermal engineering in 1976. He did two more years at a university in Shanghai, and married his high school sweetheart, Lin Hailin.

Because he finished at the top of his class, in 1980 Wen was allowed to come to the United States for graduate studies. During the next four years, he earned a master's degree and a PhD in engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. After leaving Berkeley, Wen and his wife returned to China for a few years and he entered the diplomatic service. In 1986, with his command of English and his graduate degrees, he was posted to the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. His wife also worked there, as a receptionist. Two years later, when China opened its consulate on Shatto Place in Los Angeles, Wen was transferred there as the science and technology attaché. But the family was forbidden to bring their only child, Sharon, with them to the United States.

In 1989, a year after the consulate opened, Wen apparently became disillusioned after the Chinese leadership brutally suppressed the protests in Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds of students and workers. He told an American friend that he was disappointed in the Chinese government's actions.

The friend introduced Wen to Steve Johnson, an FBI agent in Los Angeles who normally worked criminal cases. Johnson persuaded Wen to remain as a diplomat in the consulate, providing information to the FBI.
The intelligence he passed to the bureau through Johnson went to J.J. Smith, who became the acting supervisor of the China counterintelligence squad in April 1990.

In convincing
ANUBIS
to continue at his post, Johnson was able to play a powerful card. He offered to help Wen's daughter get a US visa. The FBI then arranged for Sharon to come to Washington, DC,
to live with her uncle there. In return, Wen agreed to meet clandestinely with Johnson on a regular basis until his tour ended.

A recruitment who stays on the job, becoming an agent in place, is the ultimate prize, the crown jewel of any counterintelligence operation. At great personal risk, a recruitment in place is in a position to provide continuous and up-to-date information. By contrast, a defector, while usually welcome, is of less value. Once debriefed of the information he or she knows, and with no further access to secrets, a defector has diminished worth.

By all accounts, the information that Wen passed to the FBI was valuable. Among other things, by virtue of his position, he had access to the code room. How much he obtained of the traffic between Shatto Place and Beijing is unknown. Code rooms are typically secured. The consulate had a husband-and-wife communications team, and the male, so that he could keep a close eye on the code room, was never allowed to leave the building.

But nothing in the counterintelligence world is uncomplicated.
ANUBIS
became aware that Katrina Leung had a relationship with the FBI, which she certainly made no effort to conceal and in fact advertised. And
ANUBIS
did not trust
PARLOR MAID
.

Leung, in turn, knew and socialized with a number of officials at the Los Angeles consulate—she had, after all, helped to select the site for the building. She knew Wen Ning.

In investigating the
PARLOR MAID
case in 2002 and 2003, Les Wiser and his team in Santa Monica had to consider whether Leung had learned that
ANUBIS
was an FBI source inside the consulate.

J.J. Smith may not have directly told
PARLOR MAID
about
ANUBIS
, but he worked closely with Leung, treating her almost as a member of his squad. From the informed, detailed questions he asked her, it must have been obvious to Leung that the FBI had a source inside the consulate.

Wiser and his team concluded that Leung would have figured out the identity of
ANUBIS
. That, in turn, led to the next question: if she did become aware that Wen was feeding intelligence to the FBI, did she tell the Chinese? Leung did not reveal everything she learned to Beijing. But the investigators could not determine whether
PARLOR MAID
, if she knew about
ANUBIS
, shared that information with the MSS. Like so much in the wilderness of mirrors that is counterintelligence, there was no unequivocal answer.

A lot of the intelligence that
ANUBIS
provided, however, was in the form of documents that he smuggled out of the consulate.
Despite the later concerns over
PARLOR MAID
's role, the FBI did not conclude that any of the documents were fake, or that Wen was under MSS control and deliberately handing the bureau misinformation. He was considered an important source.

ANUBIS
was very busy. In 1991, unknown to the FBI, and while still a consulate official, he began shipping computer chips to China
that had potential military use. He did so without obtaining the necessary export licenses. Whether he was moonlighting to make money on the side or acted at the direction of the Chinese government was not clear.

It had begun when a Chinese official asked Wen to help "a friend" in China. Wen was then contacted by Qu Jian Guo, who worked for an electronics company in Beijing. Wen, while continuing to work in the consulate and simultaneously serving as a secret FBI informant, sent thirteen shipments to Qu at his company, Beijing Rich Linscience Electronics.

By early 1992, however,
ANUBIS
had decided to call it quits as a recruitment in place for the FBI. "His tour was coming to an end, close to over," one bureau insider said. "They had a rule you had to rotate home before you could come back to the US. It was after Tiananmen, a lot of people were afraid to go home. He thought he might never get out again."

In March, Wen decided to defect. The FBI got him out and J.J. stashed him for a time in a safe house in the Valley. The Chinese may or may not have known that Wen had been spying for the FBI, although they certainly must have suspected as much when he walked out. But they realized he was gone for good.

Wen did not burn his bridges completely, however. Before leaving, he wrote a five-page letter to consulate officials. In it, he said that although he was resigning he still hoped he could "make actual contributions to my motherland."
He had been offered high-tech jobs at a good salary and that way could "take advantage of the American funds" to continue to help China.

In his letter, Wen admitted that he was worried that if he went back to China, "I might not be able to obtain an approval" to return to the United States and work abroad. "I decided to act before seeking approval," Wen said. He left three addresses of relatives, two in the States and one in Canada, where he could be contacted. "We will not be hermits 'hiding in the woods,'" he wrote.

What to do with
ANUBIS
? The FBI wanted to help Wen and his wife and daughter to start a new life in the United States, and it wanted to keep tabs on him as well. The bureau helped him obtain a job in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, a small city far away from Los Angeles on Lake Michigan, north of Milwaukee. The couple moved there and settled into a modest condominium on the city's south side. And they were reunited with their daughter.

Wen also continued to report to the FBI as a bureau asset. Special Agent Melvin Fuqua, from the FBI's Milwaukee division, was assigned as
ANUBIS
's new handler. Fuqua had worked counterintelligence most of his career, in Boston and Kansas before Milwaukee.
Over the next decade, he met with or spoke to Wen on the telephone perhaps one hundred times. Early on, the families socialized together, enjoying dinner around Christmas at a Chinese restaurant in Milwaukee.

In 1992 Wen established Wen Enterprises, an export company that he and his wife operated out of their home. From Manitowoc, Wen began shipping computer chips to Qu and Wang Ruo Ling,
Qu's wife, who also worked for the Beijing electronics company. Under federal law and Commerce Department regulations, some dual-use products, which have both military and civilian applications, are restricted and cannot be exported without a license. In addition, exporters must file a declaration if the item is valued over $2,500. Wen and his wife used various subterfuges to get around these requirements and ship chips without export licenses.

For example, many of the computer chips they sent to China were valued at more than $10,000, or in one case more than $20,000, but they would typically falsify invoices
and list the value at $2,457 or another amount just under $2,500. To pay for the shipments, money was wired to Wen Enterprises by a construction company in Beijing or a mysterious "Ms. Tsui Kan" in Hong Kong.

Wen, meanwhile, went to work in 1993 for the Manitowoc Company, one of the nation's largest manufacturers of cranes and ice machines. In 2000 the company sent Wen back to China as president and general manager of its refrigeration company in Hangzhou,
in the Yangtze River delta south of Shanghai. The job required him to spend ten months out of the year in China.

It was an unexpected bonanza for the FBI, which now found itself with a long-term asset inside China who could travel freely back and forth between the mainland and the United States.

For Agent Fuqua,
ANUBIS
now became much more interesting. Wen was reporting to him on contacts in China and on his dealings with officials of the Chinese government. Wen became a naturalized American citizen in 2000 and his wife became a citizen the following year. In Wisconsin, they listed their names in American style, surnames last, as Ning Wen and Hailin Lin.

From Hangzhou, Wen kept a close eye on his export business, telephoning his wife frequently. Wen Enterprises may have been a mom-and-pop shop, but it was very lucrative. In just one two-year period between 2002 and 2004, almost $2 million was wired to Wen Enterprises from China.
With a 20 percent markup on the computer chips, Wen's firm was earning about $10,000 a month, in addition to his salary from the Manitowoc Company.

Wen and his wife prospered. In 2002 they bought a $400,000 home on a leafy cul-de-sac in the upscale Lakeshore neighborhood on the north side of town.

The only downside of his job was all the months he had to spend in Hangzhou. Three times a year he was able to visit his wife in Manitowoc for a few weeks and once a year she joined him in China. The job was demanding; Wen was working fourteen hours a day and in charge of more than a hundred employees.

But Wen was looking forward to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. "There are about three hundred big hotels in the city, but that will double," he told an interviewer for the local paper in Manitowoc. "They will need ice machines.
There will be big growth for our products."

As matters turned out,
ANUBIS
never made it to the Beijing Olympics. Wen Enterprises first showed up on the Commerce Department's radar screen in 2001 when a US company that had sold an electronic part to Wen tipped off the Office of Export Enforcement that the component had been shipped to China and ended up in the "54th Research Institute,"
which, according to the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), specializes in telephone exchange systems for China's public security forces, satellite communications equipment, and communications jamming equipment.

Because the Commerce Department has designated shipments to the 54th Research Institute as posing an "unacceptable risk in the development of missiles,"
exports to the institute are subject to greater restrictions than components sent to other end users.

The Commerce Department sleuths did not get very far with their investigation of Wen Enterprises, however, until 2003, when an agent gained access to a database that showed about fifty shipments of integrated circuit chips to Qu's Beijing firm.

In March 2004 the Department of Commerce called in the FBI, the US Attorney's Office in Milwaukee, and Homeland Security. The FBI obtained a FISA authorization and began tapping Wen's home telephone and his faxes and e-mails. The bureau recorded thirty-seven hours of conversations between Wen and his wife.
Without Wen's knowledge, he was removed from the bureau's informant rolls.

That same month, Agent Fuqua, Wen's FBI handler, learned that his prize asset was being investigated. In all the years they had met, Wen somehow never thought to mention that he and his wife were running an illicit export business. Fuqua got the news in a phone call from an immigration agent. "I was shocked and just about fell out of my chair,"
Fuqua later claimed. "I had no idea that was going on."

In April an FBI counterintelligence agent began searching Wen's trash. The search turned up a note from Qu to Hailin Lin telling her to ship items in two different packages, using two shippers, and to report false values.

On the wiretaps, the FBI heard a woman who was one of Qu's associates in Beijing warn Wen's wife about one shipment of an expensive part. "Risk. The risk is big," the woman said. Lin agreed, replying, "Risk, yeah."

Hailin Lin complained in one phone conversation that Qu was slow to wire money from China to pay for the goods he had ordered. On May 28, Wen and his wife had a long conversation about a faster way to get the money. If Qu would share his Visa card number with her, Wen said, "You can use it to get cash from an ATM machine."

"This is a better way," Wen assured his wife. "You get money from the bank, the bank won't know. You get money directly from ATM.
It's better."