Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  Delegations of top administrators from each institution visit the other’s campus almost every year, and the two colleges have sponsored joint conferences in Beijing. Half a dozen Marietta professors teach in UIR’s summer program. UIR paid for publication of a 2013 book (on Chinese advertising) coauthored by one of its professors and a Marietta faculty member. Marietta’s choir performed at UIR in 2006.

  Only one aspect of a standard exchange program is missing. Marietta doesn’t send American students to UIR; its Asian studies majors generally spend their required semester abroad at other Chinese universities. When Marietta sophomore Michael Fahy considered enrolling at UIR in 2013, his adviser, political science chairman Mark Schaefer, discouraged him. Fahy wanted to work for the State Department someday, and Schaefer told him that attending UIR, or even socializing with its students, could hurt his chances for a security clearance.

  “He was pretty clear about what the school was,” Fahy told me.

  “I have a recollection of saying that UIR, to some government agencies, would be a red flag he’d have to deal with,” Schaefer said.

  Fahy heeded Schaefer’s advice and attended the Beijing Foreign Studies University, which is run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When he asked his classmates and professors there about UIR, they would say, “You know what that school is about.”

  Marietta’s administration instructed faculty members, if I contacted them for interviews, to refer me to communications director Tom Perry. (Thankfully, many of them disregarded that edict.) Perry said in a statement, “Marietta College and UIR have enjoyed a positive relationship for two decades, and we continue to be partner institutions. Our faculty have and continue to teach courses at UIR. We are also proud of the cultural diversity that is created on campus by the hundreds of international students who attend Marietta College each year.”

  Perry did arrange for me to interview then-president Joseph Bruno in February 2016. I asked Bruno whether he was aware that UIR is connected to the security ministry. “I heard they used to be,” he said. “I didn’t know they still were. It was mentioned once by one of the faculty visitors on campus. I think she mentioned that some of them have a rank in the Army. I was curious about it.… I do largely think it’s irrelevant. We’re in it for the educational benefits, and that’s all I’ve ever seen out of the interactions with the university.”

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  LOCATED NEAR THE Summer Palace in a scenic area of northwest Beijing replete with greenery and weeping willows, and shielded by security gates and guard posts and a row of pine trees, the University of International Relations forms what one alumna calls a “Golden Triangle” with Peking and Tsinghua universities, China’s Harvard and Yale. Especially by Chinese standards, UIR is small. It has about three thousand undergraduates and graduate students, and specializes in teaching international politics and economics, foreign languages, and public relations. All students must take advanced English language courses, a 2009 graduate told me. UIR has five research institutes, including a center for international strategy and security studies.

  UIR operates day-to-day like a typical college, with the usual array of extracurricular clubs and sports, including tennis and golf. On its website it describes itself as “one of the ‘key national universities’ under the administration of the Ministry of Education,” and doesn’t mention the security ministry. On a subcampus, its Center for International Education teaches Chinese language and culture courses, lasting anywhere from two weeks to one year, to hundreds of international students, who stay in a separate dormitory.

  Still, while the education ministry confers the university’s degree-granting authority and makes sure it runs smoothly, the security ministry sets its direction, supplies funding, and takes its pick of graduates. In U.S. terms, the Chinese spymasters are the board of trustees.

  UIR “probably fits on the Ministry of State Security organizational chart,” said Peter Mattis, a fellow at The Jamestown Foundation in Washington, D.C., who studies and writes extensively on Chinese espionage. “I’d be completely confident that there is a relationship, and a continuing relationship that’s not just arm’s-length.”

  Jeremy Wang, a Marietta professor of information systems and one of its first Chinese graduates, teaches at UIR every summer. He also makes arrangements at Marietta for visiting scholars from UIR like Yingjie Luo. Based on his conversations with UIR faculty, he told me, “the top students will have an opportunity to work for the security department. There’s a very strict process of selection. They have to be very good, with that kind of mentality.”

  UIR professors argue about the university’s future, Wang said. Some want it to shed the spy school stigma by severing ties with the security ministry and moving under the education ministry’s umbrella. Others are reluctant to lose a deep-pocketed patron. “Some faculty members say it’s better to stay with the security ministry, because it’s more funding,” he said. “If you go with the Ministry of Education, you compete against many other schools.”

  I asked Wang if, as a teenager in China, he considered applying to UIR. He laughed. “Never,” he said. “At that time, we know UIR is a [Chinese] CIA school, we don’t like it. I’m not into politics, I’m into business. At that time, if you want to enter UIR, it’s an honor for a family. Personally, I just don’t like politics.”

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  FOUNDED IN 1949, the same year as the People’s Republic of China, the then–Institute of International Relations was placed under the security ministry in 1965. The security agency needed people trained in international relations because Chinese leader Mao Zedong, who suspected the professional diplomats in his civil service of Western leanings and disloyalty to communism, gave his secret police unusual power over foreign affairs.

  “Mao hated the upper-class foreign-service types,” Adelman told me. As early as 1940, when Mao realized he would be likely to assume power if the Japanese were defeated in World War II, he asked the head of his personal security to run foreign policy. “Ever since then, the party elite has turned to the security people to provide them with vital information.” UIR, Adelman added, “is not that up front about its relationship with the security ministry. If you can’t hide your own university in plain sight, what good are you?”

  Ironically, as a feeder school for the security ministry, UIR became one of China’s most cosmopolitan and outward-looking universities. It couldn’t afford to reject the West or take refuge in political slogans, because future intelligence officers needed to understand what the rest of the world was actually like. When China under Deng Xiaoping began emerging from the Cultural Revolution, it was one of the few Chinese universities with professors who had studied in the United States, and its library was stocked Western publications and videos. “We had a greater latitude in learning about foreign cultures,” a former student recalled. “We watched CNN every night, and that wasn’t accessible by students elsewhere.” Now that Western-trained teachers are commonplace in China, UIR has lost some of its competitive edge, and its prestige has declined. Greater awareness of its link to the security ministry may also have hurt its academic reputation.

  “Some of the teachers had previously studied in the U.S.,” recalled I. C. Smith, retired supervisor of the FBI’s China squad. “They not only had the language skills but could talk with some authority about the U.S. as a country, its history, and its people,” at a time when there was a “dearth of information available to those inside China.” Students “weren’t being taught traditional tradecraft, but instead, cultural, political, economic awareness of the countries they were going to be targeting for analytical assessments.”

  Unlike their peers at other Chinese universities, UIR professors hold military ranks. Also as a privilege of its Ministry of State Security (MSS) affiliation, UIR enjoys priority in selecting students. If high school seniors identify UIR as one of their college choices, and excel on the national entrance exam, it can scoop them up first, shutting out other universities that they l
isted. “It gives the ministry a first cut and allows them to get a look at these students,” Mattis said.

  UIR heavily recruits from border provinces, where the security ministry maintains a strong presence. “Training for most MSS intelligence officers begins at the Beijing University of International Relations,” global consulting firm Stratfor reported in 2010. “The MSS taps university-bound students prior to their university entrance exams, choosing qualified students with a lack of foreign contacts or travel to make sure they haven’t already been compromised.” Loyalty is one of four virtues highlighted on UIR’s Internet home page, along with diligence, practicality, and innovation.

  U.S. officials have long been aware of UIR. When China began sending students to the United States in 1979, “the intelligence community went through a period of trying to sort out what institutes were important,” I. C. Smith, then supervisor of the FBI’s Chinese squad, told me. “The International Relations Institute was identified as being important. We were quite familiar with it.” The FBI nicknamed it “School of Spies” and tracked its graduates in the United States.

  China was also keeping tabs on its alumni, perhaps worried that U.S. intelligence would turn them against their homeland. In 1984, Fei-Ling Wang earned a master’s degree in international economics at the institute. Twenty years later, as a Georgia Institute of Technology professor of international affairs visiting China on a research trip, he was charged with espionage and detained for two weeks, including four days in solitary confinement.

  Wang declined to discuss his case, but commented generally on the institute in a May 2015 email. “IIR is affiliated to the PRC Ministry of State Security and many of its graduates are later presumably employed by the Ministry,” he wrote. “However, many IIR graduates have left and pursued other lines of work.… I would not be surprised that IIR graduates living in the U.S. might have gotten special attention from U.S. government.”

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  HOW MANY UIR alumni work for Chinese intelligence is unclear. The majority—like Liu Huan, China’s most famous singer-songwriter, who performed at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing—pursue other careers. Three UIR students told Adelman in the late 1980s that the security ministry hired one-fourth of its graduates. “The other 75 percent were told, ‘We’ll keep in touch with you.’” Some alumni may ostensibly have other jobs, but the security ministry pays their salaries, according to one graduate.

  Mattis disputed Stratfor’s finding that UIR trains “most” Chinese intelligence officers. He said “most” is an exaggeration, because the ministry employs more than thirty thousand people. “Is one small college in Beijing going to be able to train everyone for that?”

  One indication of UIR’s true master is its extensive overlap with the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a prominent think tank that conducts research for the Chinese government. According to Mattis, CICIR is a bureau of the security ministry. “It was previously the number eight bureau, and now I believe it’s number eleven,” Mattis said. The ministry “pays most of” CICIR’s bills, David Shambaugh, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University and director of its China Policy Program, wrote in 2002.

  Traditionally, applicants to UIR’s graduate school were tracked to become either professors at the university or researchers at CICIR. A 2011 CIA report found that nearly half of the think tank’s senior leaders had taught or studied at the University of International Relations. The two institutions appear “to have a close relationship,” it concluded. Tao Jian, the university’s president (and an alumnus), used to be a vice president of the think tank. Many researchers at the think tank also teach at the university, Mattis told me. He believes they act as talent spotters, referring promising students to the security ministry. UIR and CICIR also offer a joint doctoral program.

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  MANY UIR GRADUATES leave China. Of 636 bachelor’s degree recipients in 2014, 120 went abroad for further study. A LinkedIn site for UIR alumni identified 314 of them in the United States in 2016, including 72 in the New York City area. They not only attend premier graduate and professional schools, including Harvard Law School, but also work for major banks, high-tech companies, and investment and accounting firms, as well as nonprofits and municipal governments. It’s unlikely that they’re intelligence officers, since in that case it would be foolhardy for them to parade their spy school degrees on LinkedIn.

  The FBI was more worried about UIR graduates who tried to conceal their alma mater. “In most cases we ran into in the bureau, people masked their affiliation with the school,” a former agent told me. “They don’t list it on their resume. That’s a sure sign they’re operational.”

  Perhaps eager to distance themselves from Chinese intelligence, alumni from each of the past four decades told me that UIR’s connection to the security ministry was weakest in their era. For example, a 1989 graduate said that the security ministry hired less than 5 percent of his class. Today, he said, the percentage of graduates going into intelligence work is higher. “The affiliation is stronger, closer, and more students are specially recruited,” he said. The ministry “found that the past way is too loose.”

  Most of the UIR alumni in the United States whom I interviewed told me that they had little or no contact with Chinese intelligence, either in college or afterward. One exception was a former UIR student who completed his education in the United States. When he returned to China, working in a sensitive position for a Western organization, he began running into his former UIR professors in unlikely locations, such as cafés far from campus, and they would chat over tea. He sensed that the meetings were not accidental.

  “I think they wanted to recruit me,” he told me. “I feel very uncomfortable about that. If you refuse, they can turn against you.” He quit his job and left China.

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  FEW AMERICAN BUSINESSES and nonprofit groups appear familiar with UIR, or to regard an affiliation with the school as cause for concern, much less a deal-breaker. Courtesy of a well-known American human rights organization, one UIR graduate gained a front-row seat at an event of likely importance to Chinese intelligence.

  After earning a master’s degree at UIR in 2008, Xie Tingting became a researcher for the Charhar Institute in Beijing, which was established in 2009 and calls itself a “non-governmental think tank.” Like Confucius Institutes, Charhar is an instrument of Chinese soft power. It “focuses specifically on improving China’s overseas image,” David Shambaugh has written.

  Charhar is also a partner of the Carter Center in Atlanta. Founded by Jimmy Carter, who as president had welcomed the first influx of students from the People’s Republic, the Atlanta nonprofit monitors elections around the world to help ensure that the process is democratic and the results are accurate. Although deploying a representative from an authoritarian regime to safeguard a democratic election might seem counterproductive, the Carter Center draws observers from a variety of nations and has worked on village elections in China.

  Yawei Liu, director of the Carter Center’s China program and an adjunct political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta, is a senior fellow at Charhar. At his urging, the Carter Center sent Xie Tingting to East Africa for eight to ten days to observe the January 2011 referendum on self-determination for southern Sudan. Liu told me that his recommendation was “based on her research interest” at the China Foreign Affairs University, where she was pursuing her doctorate. “We need someone from China to participate in the observation. We want people to see how elections are conducted in developing countries. You have to debunk the fallacy that, if you’re not developed, you’re not able to hold elections. The Chinese always say they’re not developed enough.”

  Liu wasn’t worried about Xie’s connection to UIR. “That was just undergraduate,” he said. When I pointed out that actually Xie had been a graduate student there, he said, “No difference. I don’t think it’s under MSS any longer. I just don’t know
the exact relationship. My impression is, right now, when they graduate, they go anywhere they want to go. It’s just like any of the American students from Harvard or Georgetown or anywhere to be recruited by CIA or FBI.”

  The Sudan referendum posed a diplomatic conundrum for China. Sudan was one of its biggest oil suppliers in Africa, and China had invested heavily in oil production facilities there. It had also sold arms to the Sudanese government in Khartoum to help it suppress the rebels in the south. But now South Sudan, where most of the oil is located, was about to become a separate country, and China would need to conciliate it. Almost 99 percent of voters favored independence, and South Sudan seceded six months later.

  “There would be Chinese interest in following the 2011 referendum,” another observer told me. “They certainly had/have significant commercial interests and also quite significant political interests as well.… My impression is that with China expanding so much in Africa they have wanted to increase their own knowledge on the continent and boost their own ranks of Africa specialists.”

  David Carroll, director of the Carter Center’s democracy program, said he must have met Xie Tingting, but didn’t remember her. While “you’re not going to learn anything of a sensitive nature as a short-term observer,” he told me, “we would not normally take somebody who works for an intelligence service in their country.”

  After returning from Sudan, Xie became a visiting scholar at Emory University in Atlanta from August 2011 to May 2012, studying international relations on a Fulbright fellowship. According to Liu, she’s now a professor at a university in Quanzhou, China. She didn’t respond to my email to her LinkedIn account.

  If China’s security ministry was looking for a low-profile college where future intelligence officers could absorb American culture undisturbed, it couldn’t have found one more suitable or receptive than Marietta. Former president Larry Wilson calls it “centrally isolated” and “two hours from anywhere, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Cleveland.” Established in 1835, it has 1,200 students and seven “core values,” including “global perspective and diversity.” Its baseball team has won six small-college national championships.