One day, he went too far. The Grand Valley group was touring the Stone Forest, a national park featuring enormous formations of limestone that tower over the hills of Yunnan Province like medieval battlements. Other students heeded signs prohibiting climbing in the Stone Forest, which is sacred to the local tribespeople. Not Shriver. He clambered all over the rocks, risking his limbs and the university’s reputation, until Professor Ni warned him to stop.
Two Chinese girls hung around with Shriver and his friend Michael Weits. When the program ended, they rode with the group to the airport, and “shed some tears over our leaving,” Weits recalled. By then Shriver had resolved to learn the language and return to China to study and work. Later, when he fulfilled that vow, he would again stray from the path of safety: this time, into the embrace of Chinese intelligence.
“When I saw the news, I had to chuckle,” one of his Grand Valley study-abroad companions told me in 2015. “I’m like, ‘I could see it happening.’ If it was anyone in our group, it would be him. He seemed quite confident. He didn’t necessarily care what other people thought. He walked to his own drum. There were some times on the trip when I felt like, ‘Seriously, let’s cut with the antics.’”
* * *
IN SPYING, AS in sports, the home team enjoys the advantage. Knowing the native language, culture, and geography, the buildings and the byways, makes it easier to blend in. There’s no risk of being caught by the authorities: instead, their cooperation can facilitate covert operations.
That’s why U.S. universities become more vulnerable to espionage when they’re transplanted overseas via study-abroad programs, branch campuses, research centers, and the like. Even if the administrators and faculty are mostly Americans, the support staff—janitors, cafeteria workers, librarians, mail carriers—tends to be local. Restricting foreign students’ access to sensitive research, hard enough in the United States, becomes that much more difficult in their own countries. And if U.S. intelligence wants to use an overseas campus for spying, as the FBI’s Dianne Mercurio proposed to the University of South Florida, it risks exposure and embarrassment.
American universities haven’t let such worries interfere with international expansion. Touting its “dynamic global network,” New York University has opened degree-granting campuses in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi, along with study-abroad centers from Buenos Aires to Prague, Accra to Tel Aviv. By requiring its Shanghai students to spend at least one semester at another NYU campus, including Manhattan, and encouraging Abu Dhabi students to do so, NYU may unlock a gateway to the United States and other countries for spies.
Not to be outdone, Cornell, Northwestern, Texas A&M, Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, and Virginia Commonwealth universities all have branches in Qatar. Carnegie Mellon also offers degrees with local institutions in Rwanda, Singapore, Bologna, Nanjing, and South Korea. The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business boasts campuses in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. Duke University’s campus in Kunshan, China, offered its first classes in August 2014; two months later, Yale opened a center in Beijing as a “convening space and intellectual hub for all of Yale’s activities in China.”
The number of U.S. students who travel abroad for academic credit more than tripled from 1993–94 to 2013–14. In 2006, Goucher College in Maryland became the first liberal arts school in the United States to require study abroad for undergraduates. China is the fifth most popular destination, and first outside Western Europe. President Obama’s five-year goal, announced in 2009, of sending 100,000 U.S. students to China was met in 2014, counting noncredit and high school students. In 2015, the State Department opened a study-abroad office to promote participation by minority and low-income students. More than 350 U.S. colleges and universities have joined an Institute of International Education initiative to boost the number of Americans studying abroad to 600,000 by 2020.
Although study abroad undoubtedly has educational value, it can also benefit U.S. universities’ bottom line. Many private U.S. universities require a student who attends an institution overseas for a semester or a year to pay their regular tuition; they then reimburse the other school. If their tuition is higher than the foreign university’s tab, as is usually the case, they pocket the difference. Moreover, at some U.S. schools, American students forfeit their university-funded scholarships while they’re abroad. Finally, U.S. universities can enroll and house more students, betting that a percentage of their enrollment will be sojourning overseas.
Branch campuses may also be lucrative. Not only are they often staffed by low-salaried adjuncts rather than expensive tenured professors, but—like football and baseball stadiums in the United States—they may enjoy tax breaks and other perks from grateful hosts. In both Abu Dhabi and Qatar, the royal families are bankrolling the branch campuses.
Most academic expatriates are too engrossed in their new surroundings to wonder if a particularly affable or generous foreigner might be a spy. “If I’m in a university in Florence, the last thing on my mind is that the Russians are targeting me,” says a retired CIA officer. “The better thing to do is drink wine and go to school and enjoy being twenty-two.” Students “don’t ask why Sergei wants to buy me drinks or invites me to take a trip with him.”
Occasionally, though, the approaches are too blatant to ignore. A graduate student at Columbia University, who also taught at a U.S. military academy, was leading a group of cadets to China in 2015 when intelligence agents there tried to recruit him. “They peeled him off the group,” a person familiar with the incident told me. They explained that if he was ever dissatisfied, he should let them know.
At one university in northeast China, the administrator in charge of foreign faculty arranged in 2006–07 for a young American who taught English there to earn extra money by tutoring an older Chinese man. The lessons consisted of conversation in English while the middle-aged pupil escorted the American to tourist sites and fancy restaurants with “real and fake plants … poisonous snakes in cages, and octopuses in tanks—to order,” the teacher wrote in emails home. The “50-year-old ‘sugar daddy,’” he realized, was “trying to buy me through trips and dinners.”
Once, a friend of the student joined them for a multicourse banquet. Describing himself as a security official, he denounced the Falun Gong, echoing the Chinese Communist Party’s attacks on the religious group as a dangerous cult that undermines social stability. Then he asked the American to help Chinese authorities combat the threat. When he returned home, would he gather information about the Falun Gong exile community in the United States? As a reward, the official promised a gem—literally. “He would give my mom some jade,” the American told me.
The teacher was “freaked out” but didn’t want to be rude. “I didn’t really give them a straight answer,” he said. “I smiled and nodded and tried to disassociate myself.” He quit his job and fled to another Chinese university, hundreds of miles away, but his ex-pupil pursued him, showing up one day with another man in the lobby of the teacher’s dormitory. “He had invested a significant amount of money and time into cultivating me,” the American said. “I had to go awkwardly confront them and awkwardly refuse to do anything.”
Michigan State University president Lou Anna K. Simon contacted the CIA in late 2009 with an urgent question. The school’s campus in Dubai needed a bailout and an unlikely savior had stepped forward: a Dubai-based company that offered to provide money and students.
Simon was tempted. She also worried that the company, which had investors from Iran and wanted to recruit students from there, might be a front for the Iranian government, she said. If so, an agreement could violate federal trade sanctions and invite enemy spies. The CIA couldn’t confirm that the company wasn’t an arm of Iran’s government. Simon rejected the offer and shut down undergraduate programs in Dubai, at a loss of $3.7 million.
* * *
CONSCIOUSLY OR NOT, intelligence services often engage in what’s known as “mirror-imaging”: that is, assuming that thei
r counterparts around the world think and behave the way they do. Thus countries that send students and researchers to spy on the United States expect it to do the same to them. While mirror-imaging can be a mistake, because every nation is different, such suspicions often snag efforts by American universities to establish campuses or conduct research overseas. And once those branches or laboratories open in China, Russia, or the Middle East, the host country’s intelligence service is likely to regard them as potential outlets for U.S. espionage, and try to infiltrate them.
China has long perceived the CIA’s hand in U.S. academic expansion there. The staffing of the first American campus in China stoked these fears. In 1986, Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies—the same school where Marta Rita Velázquez had recruited Ana Belén Montes to spy for Cuba not long before—established the campus as a joint project with Nanjing University.
For American co-director, Johns Hopkins chose Leon Slawecki, cultural affairs officer at the U.S. embassy in Beijing and, earlier, at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong. In November 1984, with plans for the center already under way, a Chinese-language Hong Kong newspaper, the Oriental Daily, reported that Slawecki worked for the CIA. Slawecki told me that the allegation was false, and that the newspaper leaped to the wrong conclusion, perhaps because he had been one of the first U.S. officials in Hong Kong to cultivate communist contacts, or because a Beijing-based CIA officer had posed in the boondocks as a cultural officer.
Soon after the article’s publication, Slawecki showed it to the Chinese co-director, Wang Zhigang, and assured him that he was never a spy. “I trusted him,” Wang said. “We had very good working relations, and we have been friends all these years.”
Nonetheless, an atmosphere of mutual wariness prevailed at the new center. Some Americans believed that the Chinese were watching them. “When service desks were moved without warning to the end of each dormitory corridor, Americans concluded it was to surveil them better,” Slawecki later wrote. “The Chinese explained it was to serve them better.”
“Every Chinese person our folks came in contact with in China, we assumed was a spy, whether they were students or a cabdriver or a person cleaning the buildings,” recalled Lloyd Armstrong, dean of arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins from 1987 to 1993. “I’m positive they thought all of us were spies.”
The Chinese tapped the center’s phone lines and read its mail. They also continued to suspect that Slawecki worked for the CIA. When he stepped down after two years, they tried to figure out who would assume that role. They settled on Professor Larry Engelmann. An expert on the Vietnam War, Engelmann had recently visited Vietnam, which was feuding with China, and had brought boxes of documents marked “classified” with him to Nanjing. They had been declassified, but the Chinese authorities didn’t realize it.
Meihong Xu, a Chinese military intelligence officer, enrolled at the center with orders to investigate Engelmann. She took his courses, became friendly with him, and took advantage of occasional times when he naïvely left her alone in his office or apartment to read his papers, letters, and diary. She soon realized that he wasn’t a spy. Meihong, who was married, also fell in love with him. Aghast, the People’s Liberation Army spirited her out of the center, interrogated her, stripped her of her rank as a first lieutenant, and discharged her. At the insistence of the Chinese, and over the American faculty’s protests, Engelmann was also tossed out of Hopkins-Nanjing. “The Chinese wanted him out for having a relationship with a married PLA officer,” said Richard Gaulton, who succeeded Slawecki as the American co-director. Engelmann and Meihong married in 1990 and moved to California, but a divorce in 1999 spoiled the Hollywood ending.
As the U.S. academic presence in China expanded, so did Chinese scrutiny. Before Eric Shepherd became Dajin Peng’s rival at South Florida, he was the program officer for US/China Links, an initiative funded by the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence to teach Chinese to young Americans and plug them into Chinese business, academia, and government. It aimed to develop a cadre of Americans who understood Chinese decision making.
The program drew attention from China’s security services, which likely viewed it as a U.S. plot to infiltrate key institutions. Shepherd, who lived in China, was followed, and his emails and phone calls were monitored. “I had Chinese friends distance themselves from me,” he told me. He was careful about what he said and wrote, and after six months the surveillance diminished.
If visiting American professors have any links to the Pentagon or CIA, Chinese intelligence pumps them for information. “From the moment I land in China, the minders are after me,” said Indiana University political scientist Sumit Ganguly, an expert on India and Pakistan who has been to China four or five times. They usually pose as advanced graduate students or affiliates of an institute; once, when he taught at prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai, “there was actually a minder in the classroom.
“They badger you. Sometimes it’s done more subtly, sometimes it’s very heavy-handed. ‘Do you think there’s going to be an imminent settlement of the China-India border dispute? Do you think the U.S. will sell ballistic missiles to India?’ They think I know things.” Ganguly has held security clearances, and the Chinese “might surmise I have access to classified information.”
“I can’t stand it,” he added. “I don’t know how my colleagues who are China experts stand it. I find it very uncomfortable. I am not a spy. I am a professor who happens to consult for American intelligence and defense agencies.” Ganguly has reported the hounding and the minders’ names to U.S. intelligence.
* * *
GLENN SHRIVER INHERITED his energy, swagger, and iconoclastic streak from his father. Six foot two and two hundred pounds, with blue eyes and brown hair, Jon Michael Shriver was strikingly handsome, and had a certain charisma. He grew up in a prosperous family, and, like so many teenagers in the 1960s, rebelled against parental and government authority. He married in 1972 but was arrested a year later and sentenced in Richmond City Circuit Court to ten years in prison for dealing heroin. He took college English courses in prison and became lifelong friends with his teacher. While he was behind bars, his first son—Jon Michael Shriver Jr.—was born, and his wife divorced him.
Paroled in 1980, he was married again in April 1981, in Richmond, Virginia, to Michigan native Karen Sue Dawson. Seven months later, they had a son, whom they named after his maternal grandfather, Glenn Duffie Dawson, a U.S. Navy veteran. The couple split up in September 1983, and Karen returned to Michigan with the toddler.
“Being married to Jon would be difficult, from a woman’s point of view,” says Linda Kimble, a family friend and retired high school English teacher in North Carolina. “I think the world of him. He’s good-looking, he’s interesting to talk with, enjoys life. But he demands a lot out of life, and he’s constantly on the go.”
The 1988 divorce judgment gave Karen custody of Glenn, and required Jon Michael to pay fifty-six dollars a week in child support, which he often didn’t. Although the Michigan court sought to garnish his wages from his employers, Century Data Systems of Raleigh, North Carolina, and W. Harold Pettus Metal of Drakes Branch, Virginia, Jon Michael owed $2,297 by August 1993. The court issued a warrant for his arrest. In 1998 it held him in contempt for nonpayment, but dismissed his debt at the request of Karen Shriver, who was by then remarried. Jon Michael eventually went into the antiques business, restoring and selling old furniture.
Glenn visited his father and half brother during summers and Christmas vacations. He attended junior high and the first two years of high school in the city of Wyoming, Michigan, the largest suburb of Grand Rapids, where he and his mother lived in a modest bungalow. As a high school junior, he traveled to Barcelona on a study-abroad program and learned Spanish.
“I knew early on that this country was going to need people who knew a multitude of languages” and were “able to work in a multicultural work force,” Shriver said later. “And that’s what I set out to achieve,
and I did.”
Gregarious and intellectually curious, the teenage Shriver conversed easily and on equal terms with adults. “He wanted to learn as much as he could,” Kimble recalled. “He was very approachable. You walk into a crowd of four or five people, and he’d be the one to make you feel very welcome.… I know he had big plans for himself. He wanted to make a difference.”
His mother married Luis Chavez, a Guatemalan immigrant, in 1997. The family moved the next year to a one-story tan ranch house in another Grand Rapids suburb, Jenison. She and Chavez, who worked for a trucking company, divorced in 2003.
As a senior at Jenison High School, Glenn impressed Stephanie Wagener, a classmate in world history. “He knew all the answers, and I was really jealous,” she told me. “Everybody liked him. He was funny, and smart.… He just thought he knew everything. But he did. I thought he was going places. I guess he went the wrong places.”
He enrolled at Grand Valley State, where his mother has worked in student accounts for more than thirty years. Established in 1960, Grand Valley had 18,579 students in 2000; its enrollment has since risen to more than 25,000. Amway cofounder Richard DeVos, father-in-law of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, has fueled Grand Valley’s expansion, having donated $36 million to the university in the past 30 years.
Professor Ni had established Grand Valley’s summer program in China in 1995 but struggled to attract students. He recruited them at study-abroad fairs, in history classes, and by word of mouth. “It’s even hard for students here to think about going to China,” he told me. “Too remote, too hard to imagine.” Already an experienced traveler, Glenn could imagine it, and signed up. Professor Geling Shang, the group’s co-leader, warned students at orientation to avoid drugs, prostitutes, and politics. The threat of espionage wasn’t on anyone’s mind.
Spy Schools Page 16