Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China (32 page)

In 1965 Chin became an American citizen, which meant that he could receive a security clearance after a background check. He passed a polygraph—so much for the accuracy of the lie detector tests by which the CIA sets great store—and was given his clearance. Chin later said he might not have passed if the questions had been asked in Chinese,
but they were not.

With his
TOP SECRET
security clearance, Chin now routinely received classified CIA documents, which he regularly gave to the Chinese. In 1970 he transferred to the CIA's FBIS office in Rosslyn, Virginia, not far from the agency's Langley headquarters.

Chin owned thirty-one properties in the Washington area, and two condominiums in Las Vegas. To coworkers and friends, he explained his wealth by saying that he played blackjack and was an expert card counter,
allowing him to beat the odds in the casinos. Since he was a high roller, he boasted, the casinos paid for his airfare to Las Vegas and his hotel stays.

Chin was handled by officers of the Ministry of Public Security, China's principal intelligence agency until the MSS was created in 1983. His method of stealing documents was simple; he squirreled them in his clothing or briefcase and walked out of the building.
At FBIS, there were only occasional spot checks of briefcases.

Chin then photographed the classified documents and passed the films to Chinese agents in a series of meetings in a Toronto shopping mall.
He also met Chinese intelligence officers in Hong Kong, Macao, and Beijing.

He kept meticulous diaries of his travels and his meetings with his handlers. One entry noted the dishes he ate when he dined in Beijing with three senior intelligence officers. The meal included "Bears' feet" and "muttonpot."

Among the most important documents that Chin fed to the Chinese were classified memos on President Nixon's secret preparations in 1971 for the historic opening to China.
Nixon announced on television in July that he would go to Beijing in an effort to normalize diplomatic relations between the two countries. He traveled to China in February 1972. Chin was suspected of having passed to Chinese intelligence the secret Presidential Review Memorandum outlining Nixon's plans and objectives for the China trip.

In July 1981, after almost thirty years as a Chinese mole inside the CIA, Chin retired at age fifty-nine. To show its appreciation—Chin was regarded as the CIA's best translator—the agency's deputy director, Bobby Inman, personally presented the Career Intelligence Medal to Chin at a retirement ceremony
attended by his coworkers. A week later, Chin flew to Hong Kong, met with a Chinese intelligence contact, and was paid $40,000.

Chin could look back on his espionage career with satisfaction. He was wealthy, his services greatly appreciated by China's intelligence service, which treated him royally, he had many playmates, and best of all, his spying over three decades had not been detected.

That, however, was about to change. Inside the Ministry of Public Security, a senior official was becoming nervous about his future. His name was Yu Zhensan,
and he was no ordinary intelligence officer. His background was unusual.

Yu's father had reportedly once been married to Jiang Qing,
an actress who used the stage name Lan Ping (Blue Apple) and was involved at one point with Kang Sheng, the legendary head of China's intelligence services. She joined the Communist revolution and met Mao Zedong, whom she married. Jiang was one of the central instigators of the Cultural Revolution, and after Mao's death in 1976, she was placed on trial as one of the infamous Gang of Four, blamed for the chaos and thousands of deaths during the period. She was convicted, her death sentence commuted to life, and she committed suicide in 1991 while receiving medical treatment outside the prison.

Before Jiang married Mao, Yu's father had been at odds with her, and until her downfall, she was a dangerous enemy. Yu Zhensan himself had become increasingly resentful of the Chinese Communist Party and its leadership. He contacted the CIA and warned the agency that Beijing had a spy inside American intelligence.
He was taking a huge risk, but viewed the information as his ticket out of China.

The CIA did not tell the FBI right away; it held on to the disturbing news for two or three months while it investigated, then concluded that the penetration could not be inside the CIA and was probably in the military.

In September 1982 the CIA notified the FBI that there might be a Chinese spy inside a US intelligence agency. The notice landed on the desk of I. C. Smith, the Louisiana native and FBI veteran who was in Shenyang with Bill Cleveland when they encountered Gwo-bao Min, the
TIGER TRAP
suspect.

Smith gave Yu Zhensan the code name
PLANESMAN
.
He assigned Special Agent Tom Carson, who was known as a tenacious investigator, to try to ferret out the mole inside US intelligence.

An Alabama native, Carson had joined the FBI in 1970, working foreign counterintelligence cases for most of his twenty-eight years in the bureau. Carson started on the daunting assignment, but it was slow going and the initial information from the CIA lacked details.

But then the CIA came up with a clue.
PLANESMAN
, Yu Zhensan, said that the mole had flown to Beijing on a Pan Am flight that left New York
on February 6, 1982, and returned to the United States on February 27.

Carson began checking flight manifests but was frustrated to find that there was no Pan Am flight on February 6. It looked like a dead end. But Carson, true to his reputation, kept digging. He finally discovered that there had been a flight by China Airlines scheduled to leave for Beijing on February 5. But a snowstorm had enveloped JFK airport, and the flight was delayed for hours. It did not actually leave until February 6.

There was no way to check the names of the passengers on the China Airlines flight; the company did not provide its manifests to US authorities. Carson did not give up. There was a Pan Am return flight to New York on February 27, and checking the list of passengers, Carson found only four US citizens. One was a male with a Chinese name, who lived in Alexandria, Virginia. The passenger was Larry Wu-Tai Chin.

The FBI asked the CIA if Chin worked for the agency. The CIA, after checking its rolls, said, He's not ours. Well, was he ever? the FBI asked. The CIA checked again and was dismayed to find the answer. Chin had worked for the agency for three decades, but had retired a year earlier.

Now
EAGLE CLAW
had a suspect. But having a name was far from what was needed to build an espionage case. Chin was placed under FBI surveillance, and his telephone tapped after a FISA warrant was issued. Bruce Carlson, the FBI China specialist, was assigned to the Chin investigation. Carlson spoke Mandarin so fluently that he was often mistaken on the telephone for a native Chinese.

From the wiretaps, the FBI learned that Chin was planning a trip to Hong Kong in the spring of 1983. "We got a FISA warrant to search his luggage at Dulles," Carson said. But there was a problem; it would take about forty minutes to retrieve and discreetly examine Chin's luggage. There wouldn't be time enough to do all that before the plane took off.

"We delayed the flight at Dulles enough to take the luggage
from the time he put it through the chute and search it, unpack it, and put everything back the way it was, without him knowing." The airport authorities cooperated and the passengers were given some bogus but plausible reason for the delay.

Carson had hoped to find classified documents in Chin's luggage but there were none. "We found the hotel key and took a picture of it. I didn't know what it was or realize it was important. It turned out to be the smoking gun."

"Back to the office, I asked Bruce, 'What are the Chinese words on the key?' He said it was the name of the hotel, the Hotel Qianmen. And there was a room number on the key, 533.

"It rang a bell, and I went back and looked through our files and that's where he had stayed on his first trip to China, one year after he had retired."
PLANESMAN
, the CIA's source inside the Chinese intelligence service, had provided that detail. Finding the key corroborated Yu Zhensan's information and, beyond that, it buttressed and tended to validate the other information he had provided. It also indicated that Chin was planning to travel on from Hong Kong to Beijing.

Why Chin was returning his room key was unclear. "In this country we don't care much about hotel keys," Carson said, "but maybe he thought he should return it."

A few months later, Chin flew to Hong Kong to meet with Ou Qiming, his handler. Chin suggested to Ou that the Chinese might want to try to recruit Victoria Liu Morton, a woman he had known at the CIA.
She had once mentioned to him that she had a brother on the mainland; perhaps, Chin suggested, that could be used as leverage against her. Ou decided one mole was enough and he rejected the idea. Morton was not approached or recruited by the Chinese.

At the same meeting, Chin mentioned his marital problems to Ou. If the Chinese would give him $150,000, he said, he could pay off his wife and get a divorce. Ou declined.

Yu, meanwhile, had more tidbits for the CIA. He said that the mole had an emergency contact in New York, a Chinese sleeper agent named Father Mark Cheung, a Roman Catholic priest
at the Church of the Transfiguration on Mott Street, in the heart of New York's Chinatown. Cheung had arrived in 1972, invited by the church as assistant pastor. He must have impressed the diocese because later Cheung was promoted to parish administrator, the first Chinese priest to hold that position.

The FBI investigated, trying to figure out whether Cheung was an actual priest, or simply posing as one. "Mark Cheung was a real priest,"
Carson said. "The Chinese intelligence service sent him to a seminary. He was co-opted by them before he became a priest. He was a mole in the church." He was also, as far as is known, the first Chinese "illegal" who was also a Catholic priest.
^*

Cheung had moved to Hong Kong, and two FBI agents, Pat Dooley and Larry Goff, interviewed him there. But Cheung was not helpful. "Then he skedaddled," Carson said. He left Hong Kong and disappeared into the mainland. The FBI learned that Cheung, although a priest, was married, with a wife in China. When he visited her, he switched his clerical garb to civilian clothes.

The FBI could not determine whether or how Cheung was supposed to help Chin flee the United States if his spying was discovered or he sensed he was under suspicion. "We never figured out what his role would be," Carson said.

In 1984 another FBI agent, Ken Schiffer, took over as supervisor of the Chin case.
PLANESMAN
, Schiffer said, "was a headquarters desk officer with supervisory responsibility." But he was not the handler of China's mole inside the CIA—that was Ou Qiming—and as in all intelligence agencies, Chin's name would have been closely held inside the Chinese spy agency.

But Yu took risks. "He went into his colleague's files," Schiffer said. "He rifled his colleague's desk
and got all the information about [Chin's] travels, hotels, people he met but not the name of the source." That was finally learned when Carson checked the manifest of the Pan Am return flight.

Although Chin had retired from the CIA, he continued to work as a translator on a government contract. But he realized his value to the Chinese had diminished once he left the CIA. So he falsely told Beijing that he had obtained a job with the National Security Agency. Since he had never worked for the NSA, he bought a copy of
The Puzzle Palace,
a groundbreaking book by James Bamford about the code-breaking agency. He translated parts of the book into Chinese, and passed them along to his handlers.

All was not well in the Chin household, however, thanks to Chin's extramarital wanderings. He was charged with assault in 1983, for allegedly fondling a teenage girl in the laundry room of his apartment in Alexandria, Virginia. The charge was eventually dropped.

Chin was married in 1949 and divorced after ten years; he and his first wife, Doris, had three children. In Okinawa, he met his second wife, Cathy. Their relationship was stormy. She was aware of his affairs and disturbed over his unexplained trips.

After catching him in their apartment in bed with a mistress, she called a friend, desperately asking what she should do. The FBI wiretap recorded the friend's suggestion that Mrs. Chin throw a pot of cold water on the couple; that would definitely cool their ardor. The friend remained on the line while Chin's wife carried out her advice.

A moment later the wiretap picked up Cathy screaming, "He's killing me! He's killing me!"
Soaked and naked, Chin was furiously beating his wife with the pot.

Chin often engaged in telephone sex with a "niece" in New York, who would sometimes travel to Washington, DC, and spend the afternoon with him in a motel. Once, talking on the tapped phone to a girlfriend, Chin told her to be sure to bring the "machine." The FBI agents were excited—was a confederate, perhaps another spy, about to deliver a code machine? This could be a big break in the case.

But in later conversations, Chin and the girlfriend talked in titillating detail about how they would use the "machine," and it became clear it was not a spying device, but a sex toy, a battery-operated vibrator.

As the FBI continued to watch Chin and gather evidence of his espionage, there was no longer any doubt that he was the mole who had burrowed into the CIA. But there was a problem. There was no way the bureau could move until Yu Zhensan was safely exfiltrated from China. Neither the CIA nor the FBI was about to blow a source who would, if uncovered, surely be executed or sent to prison for life.

When Yu had first approached the CIA, according to Schiffer, "the agency was cautious it might be a setup." Intelligence agencies often send "dangles" offering information, sometimes true, sometimes not, to rival spy agencies. The goal is to infiltrate or confuse the opposition.

"But when
PLANESMAN
provided details on a Chinese American who was a US government employee, that convinced the agency," Schiffer recalled. "He was still in place when we identified Chin. We sat on the case—we could not move on Chin for about a year until
PLANESMAN
got out.
They [the CIA] arranged for him to travel south from Beijing through China, maybe to Hong Kong."