Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China (33 page)

Although it has never previously been disclosed, another Chinese defector came out soon after Yu Zhensan. He was a coworker of
PLANESMAN
, but neither knew about the other. The second defector brought with him a list of the names of Chinese intelligence agents in the United States. The FBI tracked all the names down. Some were kept under surveillance and others quietly deported.

As the cases described in this book make clear, espionage is a very difficult crime to prove, unless a spy is caught in the act, or confesses, because counterintelligence agents seldom have direct proof that a suspect passed documents to a foreign power. For all the evidence that the bureau had compiled on Chin, without a confession it would be difficult to convict him. With
PLANESMAN
safely in the United States, the way was clear for the FBI to confront Chin. Everything would depend on how well and carefully that was done.

Ken Schiffer decided that the approach to Chin would be made by agents Rudy Guerin, Terry Roth, and Mark Johnson. Guerin was a veteran counterintelligence agent at the FBI's Washington field office and later head of the China section at headquarters. Roth was his regular partner, and Johnson had worked closely with Carson on the investigation.

Late in the afternoon of November 22, 1985, the trio knocked on the door of Chin's condominium in Alexandria.
They identified themselves as FBI agents. They said they were investigating a leak of classified information to China's intelligence service and hoped Chin might be able to assist them. Chin invited them in and the four men sat down around Chin's dining room table.

Guerin lost little time in coming to the point. He told Chin that the FBI suspected
he
was the spy.

Chin denied it, and claimed to have had no contact with Chinese intelligence. Then he was told that the FBI knew of his flight to China on February 6, 1982, and his return flight on February 27. While you were there, the agents said, you were the guest of honor at a banquet and received an award.

Now Chin knew he was in trouble. He was shown a picture of Li Wenchong, the senior Chinese intelligence official who had given him the award. He was told the FBI also knew of his meetings with a Chinese contact in Toronto.

And then he was shown a photo of the key to room 533 of the Qianmen Hotel. We know you were checked into that room in June 1983, the agents informed him.

As the agents had hoped, Chin was rattled by the picture of the hotel key. "He realized somebody on the inside had betrayed him,"
Ken Schiffer said. The hotel key was just one of the specific facts that we had, but it was a very powerful one. Because it indicated to Chin that someone had inside access to his case in [Chinese intelligence] headquarters."

Mark Johnson ratcheted up the pressure. In September, he said, Chin met in Hong Kong with Ou Qiming, his handler. He had talked to Ou about whether the Chinese might want to try to recruit Victoria Liu Morton, the CIA employee who had a brother in China. And, Johnson added, he had requested $150,000 to get a divorce.

That did it. "You have details that only Ou knew,"
Chin said. He asked where the agents had gotten that information, then answered his own question. Ou Qiming must have defected, Chin said.

"He thought Ou Qiming had defected and was the one who had dimed him out,"
Schiffer said, referring to the pre-cell phone days when it cost a dime to use a pay phone. "Rudy and Terry allowed him to think that." But it was Yu Zhensan, not Ou, who had defected.

Chin stalled, asking the agents to come back the next day. They refused, and Chin, convinced that his handler had betrayed him, began talking. He talked, and talked, and talked.

Schiffer and Tom Carson were standing by. They received a phone call from Guerin. Chin had confessed. After getting the green light from the Justice Department, the two agents arrived at the apartment. Carson saw his quarry for the first time. He arrested and handcuffed Chin. The agents drove him to the Arlington County jail.

The trial of Larry Wu-Tai Chin on seventeen counts of spying and conspiracy opened three months later in federal district court in Alexandria. Chin took the stand during the four-day trial, and claimed he had spied to improve relations between the United States and China.
His defense attorney, Jake Stein, believed Chin's explanation of his supposed motive offered the best, albeit slim, hope of swaying the jury.

When Chin saw a classified message from President Nixon about his plan for the opening to China, he said he believed "if this information is brought to the attention of the Chinese leadership ... it might break the ice. I wanted Chou En-lai to see it." The prosecutors, however, said Chin's motive was money, and pointed out that he had been well paid.

Perhaps the most interesting revelation during the trial was the testimony by Special Agent Mark Johnson that Chin had no contact with Ou Qiming from 1967 to 1976 because Ou was in prison.
The chaos of the Cultural Revolution had ensnared even Chin's handler.

Joseph J. Aronica, the assistant US attorney prosecuting Chin, asked him if he was "stealing documents from the CIA and giving them to the Chinese?"

"Right," Chin answered.

"You knew the documents you gave ... would go to the highest levels of the Chinese government?"

"Yes."

"Your intent was to help the People's Republic of China?"

"Yes and ... the U.S., too."

Chin's admissions did not leave much for the jury to deliberate. They took just three hours to find him guilty on all seventeen counts. His wife, Cathy, sitting in the gallery, broke into sobs. Chin was escorted back to jail, facing two life terms in prison. Sentencing was set for March 17.

Why had he done it? Although he claimed he wanted to bring about a rapprochement between Washington and Beijing, the FBI agents who worked on the case thought that, even aside from the money, Chin, who toiled in obscurity in a CIA backwater, hungered for recognition, a sense of importance that he got from his Chinese intelligence admirers.

Two weeks after he was convicted, on the morning of February 21, Chin ate breakfast at 6:30
A.M.
A little over two hours later, a guard found Chin in his cell. He had tied a plastic trash bag over his head with a shoelace.
Efforts to revive him were unsuccessful.

He had left a note for Cathy.

"This morning I had a dream of a celestial world which makes me comfortable mentally and physically.... When I thought of the fact that I don't need to do anything after waking up and can ... keep on sleeping, it's extremely comfortable.

"So, Little Fish, don't worry about me.
... Isn't it a happy thing in the life.... Except that I can't stay with you, I already have everything."

It was over. The spy inside the CIA had been caught after three decades, and sentenced himself. At FBI headquarters, the
EAGLE CLAW
case file was closed.

Chapter 20

RED FLOWER

O
N OCTOBER
19, 2005, Tai Wang Mak, chief engineer in Los Angeles for the Chinese-language television channel that broadcasts by satellite to the United States, placed a telephone call to a contact in Zhongshan, China.

"I work for Red Flower of North America,"
he said. Since Mak worked for the Phoenix North America Chinese Channel, not for a florist, it sounded like a line from a spy movie. To the FBI, however, the phrase was not scripted in Hollywood but an apparent code name for a family of spies headed by Chi Mak, Tai's brother. The group had been under intense FBI surveillance for more than a year.

The phone call to Zhongshan, a bustling city in southern China across the Pearl River from Hong Kong, was answered by Pu Pei-Liang,
a researcher at Zhongshan University who the FBI believe was actually an intelligence officer for the People's Liberation Army—and Chi Mak's longtime handler.

According to FBI documents, Chi Mak, who worked for Power Paragon, a major defense contractor in Anaheim, had been secretly passing sensitive Navy data on US weapons systems to China for more than twenty years.

Nine days after the "Red Flower" phone call, FBI agents pulled Tai Mak and his wife, Fuk Li, from a security line at Los Angeles International Airport as they waited to board a midnight flight to Hong Kong. Both were arrested. At the same moment, other FBI agents swooped down on Chi Mak's home in Downey, a Los Angeles suburb, and arrested him and his wife, Rebecca Chiu.

Chi Mak, then sixty-six, was born in Guangzhou, educated in Shanghai, naturalized as a US citizen in 1985, and since 1996 held a
SECRET
security clearance at Power Paragon. He was the lead project engineer on research for the Quiet Electric Drive, or QED, a propulsion system designed to allow the Navy's submarines to run silent,
and to make surface ships quieter and harder to detect as well.

In an affidavit filed for the arrest warrant of the Maks, FBI special agent James E. Gaylord described the QED as "an extremely sensitive project," with the technology banned from export to denied countries, including China. The QED was also labeled
NOFORN
, meaning "not for release to foreign nationals," so that the data was restricted and could not be divulged to other countries or foreigners.

The FBI charged that Chi took data about the QED and other Navy projects to his home, copied the information onto three CDs with his wife's help, and passed them to his brother, Tai, who encrypted the CDs. Tai was planning to deliver them to Pu Pei-Liang in Guangzhou, his ultimate destination, had he been permitted to board the flight from LAX.

Chi Mak's home had been wiretapped for months through a FISA warrant, and a video camera had been secretly installed over his dining room table. Gaylord's affidavit said that on October 23, 2005, five days before Tai Mak was to fly to Hong Kong with the CDs, Rebecca reminded her husband that the items Chi was asking his brother to take "are certainly against the law."

Months earlier, the FBI had recovered two lists from the trash at Chi Mak's house. The documents, in Chinese, which had been torn into small pieces, were reassembled and translated by the bureau. The FBI concluded that these were "tasking lists" from Chinese military intelligence,
documents or information his handlers wanted him to collect. In secret searches of Chi Mak's home, the FBI found documents about several of the weapons systems on the lists.

One list of the items sought included a space-based missile-intercept system, submarine torpedoes, and aircraft carrier electronic systems. The second document asked for "ship submarine propulsion technology ... early warning technologies, command and control systems technology, defense against nuclear attack technology ... shipboard internal and external communication systems, establishment of high frequency, self-linking, satellite communications ... submarine HF transient launch technology," and information about the DD(X), the Navy's next-generation high-tech destroyer.

According to court documents, after Chi Mak was arrested he admitted passing to China data on electric converters and a circuit breaker for submarines, an electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS), to launch aircraft from carriers using magnets instead of steam, and data about the Aegis combat system,
the Navy's most advanced command-and-control system, which uses computers and the powerful AN/SPY-1 radar to guide missiles to their targets.

A month after the arrests, Chi Mak, his wife, and his brother were indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles for acting as unregistered "agents of a foreign government, namely the People's Republic of China."
They were not, however, charged under the espionage laws.

The prosecutors had run into a problem. Although much of the information the Maks were said to have transmitted to China was sensitive, and some marked
NOFORN
, none of it was classified,
weakening the prosecution's case. Chi Mak had been careful not to filch any documents stamped
SECRET
or otherwise classified.

The government was not about to back off for that reason, however. In June 2006, Tai Mak's wife, Fuk Li, and their son, Billy Mak, twenty-six, were indicted on charges of lying to the government and acting as unregistered agents of China. In October, a superseding indictment was handed down, naming all five family members and adding charges of conspiracy to export defense information to China, and making false statements to federal investigators.

The trial of Chi Mak began in March 2007. The prosecution unveiled surprise testimony that tied Chi Mak to Dongfan "Greg" Chung,
another Chinese American defense worker who was later prosecuted and convicted for illegally passing sensitive information to China.

FBI agent Gaylord testified that in the FBI's search of Chi Mak's home, a letter was found written by Gu Weihao, an official of China's Ministry of Aviation, to Chung, an engineer who worked at the Boeing plant in Huntington Beach on the space shuttle.

Gu, who was a relative of Chi Mak's wife, Rebecca, had introduced Chung to Chi Mak. In the 1987 letter, Gu wrote that China was planning to build commercial aircraft and a space shuttle. "I hope these products will be flying sky high soon.
There are some difficult technical issues that need your assistance."

The letter indicated that Mak had been instructed to deliver it by hand to Chung. "You can discuss the time and route of your trip to China with Mr. Mak in person.... You may use 'traveling to Hong Kong' or 'visiting relatives in China' as reasons for traveling abroad."

Then came language that directly implicated Chi Mak. "Normally, if you have any information, you can also pass it on to me through Mr. Mak. This channel is much safer than the others.
... I hope that you will ... provide advanced technologies and information."

Chi Mak took the stand and denied that he had passed information to China. The encrypted disks, he claimed, were meant for two "friends." Pu Pei-Liang, to whom Tai Mak placed the "Red Flower" phone call, and who was supposed to meet him at the airport in Guangzhou and receive the disks, was simply another friend who was taking care of Tai Mak's sick mother-in-law. How encrypted information about a system to make submarines run silently would have proved beneficial for her health was not made clear.