Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

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  To Steven

  INTRODUCTION

  THE FBI GOES TO COLLEGE

  On an April morning in 2009, Dajin Peng shaved and dressed for a normal day of teaching. Then the University of South Florida professor of international studies sat down at the desktop computer in his bedroom and began surfing the Internet for the best way to kill himself.

  Peng was reeling from an abrupt tumble down the academic ladder. With little warning or explanation, South Florida had placed him on leave as director of its Confucius Institute, a China-funded language and cultural program. He was trying to find a painless poison, and one he could buy without attracting attention, when he heard his father calling to him from another room. Somebody was knocking on the front door.

  Visitors seldom climbed the outside staircase to Peng’s second-floor apartment in the drab, rust-colored roadside complex. He opened the door to a tall woman with an athletic build and shoulder-length brown hair, who was forty years old but looked younger. Although sunny, the weather was cool for spring in Florida, and she wore a coat over an off-white blouse.

  Giving him a reassuring smile and a business card, she introduced herself as Dianne Mercurio, a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although she grew up in South Carolina, where she had been a high school track star, her voice bore little trace of a southern accent. Peng briefly feared that the FBI intended to arrest him, but her friendly demeanor indicated some other purpose.

  As they shook hands, she said, “Nick Abaid sends his regards.”

  With a jolt, Peng recognized the name from his days as a graduate student at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Abaid, an FBI special agent, had cultivated Chinese students at Princeton who might become useful informants. He had identified Peng, who had gone to a university run by China’s spy service and had ex-classmates in the highest reaches of its government, as a potential prize. Abaid had taken him to lunch several times, usually just before or after Peng’s trips home to China. Explaining that he was worried about theft of American technology, Abaid had asked Peng if he had noticed anything suspicious about other Chinese students. Peng said he hadn’t.

  Mercurio’s reference to Abaid convinced him that she did indeed work for the FBI. It also put him on his guard. His last conversation with Abaid had been in 1994, when Peng joined the University of South Florida’s faculty. Abaid had asked him to stay in touch with the FBI’s Tampa bureau, an offer Peng politely declined, hoping he had seen the last of U.S. intelligence. For the next fifteen years, Peng and the FBI had gone their separate ways. Now the bureau was hounding him again.

  When Mercurio asked if he had time to talk, Peng suggested a walk outside. He wanted to avoid disturbing his father, a frail widower, who lived with him. As they strolled up and down a corner of the parking lot, Mercurio told him she was aware of his predicament at the university.

  Glad to have a sympathetic audience, especially an attractive woman, Peng recounted his tale of woe in fluent but heavily accented English. Funded by an affiliate of China’s education ministry, Confucius Institutes had sprung up in the past five years on campuses worldwide. As founder and director of South Florida’s branch, he deserved credit for its expanding array of courses, community outreach, and new cultural center. He had even arranged for the director of all Confucius Institutes to schedule a trip to USF, and he had expected her to lionize him and proclaim his institute a model for the world.

  Instead, weeks before her visit, he was ousted. Peng’s boss at USF handed him a curt notice that he was not allowed to return to the institute or have any contact with its staff, “pending investigation into allegations of inappropriate management of the Confucius Institute.” He could still teach his regular courses in international political economy and business, but that was scant consolation. The dean provided no details of the accusations against him, nor did she name his accusers. He would have expected such injustice in the China of his youth, but not in America.

  As if worried that Peng might connect her visit with his downfall, Mercurio volunteered that she had no influence over the university, and nothing to do with his difficulties. He accepted her statement at face value. Later, he would wonder how she knew about his troubles, and would suspect the FBI of instigating them to gain leverage over him.

  Mercurio’s next comment disturbed him. She wanted to know more about the Confucius Institutes, she said, because they harbored Chinese spies. Since the Chinese government funded them, and Chinese universities supplied most of their staff, they made ideal listening posts and recruiting stations, she explained. Left unsaid, but as unmistakable as a tabloid headline, was the accusation that Peng himself was a Chinese agent.

  “You’re wrong,” Peng told Mercurio. She asserted her opinion as fact, but where was her evidence? “China would never use the Confucius Institutes for spying,” he said. “They are too important. The government wouldn’t want to risk the U.S. shutting them down.”

  She didn’t argue with him. For Mercurio, who had recently taken over the China beat on the counterintelligence squad, an informant of Peng’s prominence and connections could make her career. Later, as their relationship ripened, she would ask him to spy on the Confucius Institutes and their Chinese government sponsors, as well as Tampa’s Chinese community and his Chinese colleagues at South Florida. Her CIA counterparts would have plans for him as well. In return, she would be prepared to protect his professorship and, if necessary, keep him out of prison. The FBI had pressured mobsters, drug dealers, and loan sharks to cooperate; why not a Princeton-educated professor?

  But first she needed to assess his enthusiasm for espionage. Peng was a U.S. citizen now, she reminded him. He understood her meaning. He’d been a Chinese national when he spurned Abaid’s request to stay in touch. Now he owed his patriotic allegiance to his adopted country, not his homeland. She asked him directly whether he would serve his country. Despite inner misgivings, he had little choice. He agreed.

  They had walked for almost an hour.

  As she said good-bye, she arranged a lunch date with him, and told him that she would set up an email account where he could contact her. She cautioned him not to mention her visit to anyone at South Florida.

  Afterward, a neighbor dropped by his apartment. She and her husband, both Chinese, were among his closest friends; he had used his university position to help them obtain visas to study in the United States. They shared his fury over his ouster from the institute, and fretted about his bleak mood.

  She had seen Peng with Mercurio, and her curiosity was aroused. Peng’s female friends were usually Chinese.

  “Who was your visitor?” she asked.

  “An FBI agent,” he blurted out. Distracted from suicide, his mind raced ahead, groping to understand why the bureau had reentered his life and what it meant for his future.

  * * *

  THE WORLD THAT we encounter in
our adolescence tends to entrench itself permanently in our minds. In the time and place where I grew up, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was a bigger villain than the thugs on the bureau’s “Ten Most Wanted” list. In the 1960s and early 1970s in Amherst, Massachusetts, where my parents and most of my friends’ fathers taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College, or Hampshire College, the FBI’s snooping on the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements had sullied its reputation.

  The CIA, which sabotaged Marxist regimes popular with many intellectuals, ranked even lower in academic esteem. Protests and sit-ins greeted campus recruiters. As late as 1986, demonstrators against CIA recruiting occupied a building on the UMass campus. Fifteen people, including Amy Carter (daughter of former president Jimmy Carter) and ex-Yippie Abbie Hoffman, were arrested and charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct. During their jury trial in Northampton, Massachusetts, just across the Connecticut River, they admitted breaking the law but argued that protests were needed to raise awareness of CIA crimes in Latin America and elsewhere. Emblazoned on their T-shirts was the slogan “Put the CIA on Trial.” Left-wing icons such as Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, and former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark testified about the agency’s complicity in assassinations and misinformation campaigns. The defendants were acquitted.

  I was slow to recognize that this conflict in my youth between academia and U.S. intelligence was a historical aberration, or at least the nadir of a cycle, preceded and followed by eras of closer cooperation. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, though, the thaw was too evident to ignore. In 2002, I reported in the Wall Street Journal on a rapprochement between the CIA and the Rochester Institute of Technology. A decade earlier, a scandal about the CIA’s influence on research and curriculum had spurred the resignation of the school’s president, who had concealed his own work for the agency. Now the CIA was back, recruiting top students and proposing topics for senior theses.

  Later, at Bloomberg News, I wrote about the growing threat of foreign espionage to U.S. universities. Then, in May 2014, University of South Florida associate professor Dajin Peng, a native of China, contacted me to complain that the FBI had forced him into an unappetizing choice: lose his job and face prison for alleged fraud, or spy on China. Although his tale struck me as bizarre, I checked it out, and found that it was largely true.

  I realized that globalization—the influx of students and professors from China and other countries; the outflow of American undergraduates to overseas universities; and the proliferation of China-funded Confucius Institutes and far-flung branches of U.S. colleges—had raised the academic stakes for foreign and domestic intelligence services alike. Often in hidden ways, they were penetrating higher education more deeply than ever. Academia, resistant in my youth, was acquiescing, despite the tension between its open, global values and the nationalistic, covert culture of espionage.

  The premise for this book crystallized when I was having lunch in a quiet corner of a suburban restaurant with a former U.S. government official. With some trepidation, I laid out my concerns about the invasion of academia by intelligence services—including his own. He thought it over for a moment, and then nodded.

  “Both sides are exploiting universities,” he said.

  Academia’s close relationship with the CIA in its early years, and the subsequent breach between them in the 1960s and 1970s, are well documented. But no one has chronicled the resurgence of clandestine U.S. intelligence activity at American universities. Several memoirs by former CIA officers, in which they mentioned trolling for recruits at universities or academic conferences or having been referred by their professors for agency employment, whetted my curiosity. Regarding foreign services, their cyber-espionage, especially against U.S. corporate and government targets, has overshadowed their use of student and faculty compatriots to acquire information, contacts, and sensitive research at American universities.

  I set out to explore how and why intelligence services were targeting American higher education, and what the implications were for national security and academic freedom. When I had looked into Professor Peng’s allegations, an open records request to the University of South Florida for its correspondence with FBI agent Dianne Mercurio had proven fruitful. Recognizing that the bureau, which famously investigated Hillary Clinton’s emails, could itself be electronically indiscreet, I extended the same tactic nationwide, asking a dozen public universities for their communications with the CIA and FBI. The CIA didn’t seem to mind, but the FBI did. Evincing a Hoover-esque hostility toward my inquiries, it took the counterintuitive legal position that its emails to universities still belonged to it, not to the recipients.

  After the New Jersey Institute of Technology notified me in April 2015 that its communications with the bureau were “voluminous,” eight FBI personnel reviewed the material for two days. At the FBI’s bidding, the institute withheld 3,949 pages due to various exemptions. It did release another 500 pages, but most were heavily blacked out. (The FBI later identified 1,500 additional pages, adding up to about 6,000 in all.) With the help of attorneys at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, I appealed to a New Jersey state court. The case ended up in federal court, and NJIT, in consultation with the U.S. Department of Justice, handed over most of the documents. The notation “Per CIA,” next to redactions in several emails, indicated a review by that agency as well.

  Gregory M. Milonovich, the FBI’s academic liaison, disparaged my project in a May 2015 email to the University of California, Davis’s, chief of staff, which the university provided in response to my public records request. “Dan Golden … is trying to … build a book regarding the relationship between academia and the intelligence community,” Milonovich wrote. “I’m not overly concerned that he is going to turn up anything worth writing about.” He copied four FBI colleagues, asking them to confer on how to help UC Davis in dealing with me.

  My approach met resistance in other quarters as well. Some liberals were unhappy that I was investigating foreign spies; some conservatives, that I was investigating American ones. Nevertheless, many people in the academic and national security realms were extraordinarily candid and helpful, and to them I am grateful.

  I have divided this book into two parts, examining foreign and American espionage on campus in turn. Among the episodes revealed in Part 1: A Chinese graduate student poaches Pentagon-funded invisibility research from a Duke University lab—and then is staked by the Chinese government to launch a competing venture in Shenzhen that makes him a billionaire. A Puerto Rican admirer of the Castro regime, who both spied for Cuba herself and recruited a graduate school classmate who would become one of the most damaging moles ever inside the U.S. government, now teaches high school in Sweden, beyond the reach of American authorities. To attract full-paying Chinese students, an Ohio college affiliates with a Beijing university run by China’s intelligence service—and sends its professors there to teach future spies about American culture.

  In Part 2: The CIA stages academic conferences so that it can lure scientists in Iran’s nuclear weapons program to defect. CIA officers who enroll undercover in Harvard mid-career and executive education programs cultivate unsuspecting foreign officials. And Dajin Peng, the beleaguered South Florida professor, matches wits with FBI agent Dianne Mercurio.

  * * *

  IN RECENT YEARS, U.S. universities have become a favored arena for the secret jousting of spy versus spy. While often portrayed as enclaves of scholarly learning and athletic prowess, or playpens for teenagers cavorting on the cusp of adulthood, they have taken on a disquieting real-world dimension as a front line for espionage. “Intelligence,” which in academia used to refer to brainpower, increasingly means “information and knowledge about an adversary.”

  In labs, classrooms, and auditoriums, espionage services from countries such as China, Russia, and Cuba seek insights into U.S. policy, recruits for clandestine operations and access to sensitive mi
litary and civilian research. The FBI and CIA reciprocate, developing sources among international students and faculty. With close connections to government, business, and technology, plus the technical expertise needed to compete in a knowledge-based economy, professors, graduate students, and even undergraduates find themselves coveted as informants by all sides.

  “Most if not all spy services view universities as a prime recruiting ground,” says Chris Simmons, a former counterintelligence officer at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. “People are most pliable in their late teens and early twenties, when they’re young and inexperienced. It’s easy for someone trained in the art of manipulation to steer them in a direction they’re already inclined, or help convince them it’s what they intended all along.” It’s also cheaper and less conspicuous for an intelligence service to enlist a student or professor who can be placed later in a federal agency than to lure someone already in a sensitive government position.

  Open campuses make it simple for foreigners and Americans alike to gather intelligence. Most classrooms, student centers, and even laboratories (except for the growing number that conduct classified government research) offer easier entry than a gated residential community in Florida. Spies with no academic affiliation can slip unnoticed into lectures, seminars, and cafeterias and befriend the computer scientist or Pentagon adviser sitting beside them.

  Hidden and sometimes deceptive, the spy services exploit—and taint—the traditional academic ideals of transparency and independent scholarship. Nevertheless, as universities pursue revenue and global prominence by opening branches abroad, allowing China to fund and staff institutes on their campuses, and ramping up enrollment of full-paying international students, they have ignored or even condoned espionage. Columbia Business School, for instance, didn’t rescind the master’s degree of Cynthia Murphy, a suburban New Jersey mother of two, when she turned out to be a Russian spy named Lydia Guryeva, tasked by Moscow to “strengthen … ties w. classmates on daily basis incl. professors who can help in job search and who will have (or already have) access to secret info.”