While in Shanghai, Shriver and several other Grand Valley students visited an elementary school where an American was teaching English. The teacher told them that they could follow his example and earn enough to “live like a king” in Shanghai, McCann recalled. “A lot of us felt like that would be really amazing.” Several, including Shriver, seized the chance to teach at the school for a short time, he added.
“Glenn was like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to come back and do this,’” said another member of the group, Jill Gunnerson.
Grand Valley allows students with at least a 2.5 grade point average to spend their junior years abroad, and Shriver returned to East China Normal University in 2002–03. There he improved his Mandarin and acted in a Chinese-language beer advertisement that aired on video billboards on campus.
“He was driving a convertible, holding a beer,” Professor Shang said. “Every time we take the elevator, he showed up with a beer. I always pointed to him with our students: he’s a GVSU guy, now he’s on a commercial.”
Back at Grand Valley for his senior year, Shriver took modern Chinese history with Professor Patrick Shan. Shriver “offered very penetrating remarks” and his essays were well organized and insightful, Shan said. After class, he and Shan would stroll back to the professor’s office, speaking Chinese so that Shriver could polish his language skills.
“He was such a talented student, he could have been a scholar,” Shan recalled. “He is very confident. Sometimes you could use the word overconfident. He talked a lot in class. I still have a vivid memory of his participation.”
After Shriver earned his degree in international relations in 2004, he told Shan that he was interested in graduate school. Shan recommended him, but Shriver was rejected. He headed back to Shanghai.
* * *
INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN David Boren left a meeting about stockpiling minerals and made his way to the Senate chamber. How much more important it would be, he mused, to create a strategic reserve of human talent that understood foreign languages and cultures. So many intelligence failures over the years stemmed from American ignorance of the world. He scrawled the title of an amendment on a torn brown envelope and sent it to the floor, squelching the Senate parliamentarian’s protests that it wasn’t in proper form. The Oklahoma senator then pushed it into law in 1991, without any hearings, by holding the entire intelligence budget hostage.
Thus he created what are today named after him: the Boren Awards. Funded by congressional appropriation through the defense and intelligence budgets, and overseen by a board that includes the director of the CIA, the program provides as much as $20,000 to undergraduates and $30,000 to graduate students to live abroad and learn less commonly taught languages spoken in regions critical to U.S. security. Afterward, recipients must work in national security for at least a year, with priority given to the Pentagon, State Department, Department of Homeland Security, and the intelligence community.
“The most important thing you can have is a group of highly intelligent people who are extremely well educated, who understand the cultures, who speak the languages, who can go into those countries and be advocates for the United States, run our programs, collect intelligence, do all the things we need to do for national security,” Boren said. In other words, today’s students abroad would be tomorrow’s spooks.
That notion caused an uproar among academic specialists on Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East who feared for their own credibility and their students’ safety. Many governments on whose goodwill they depended for their research detested the CIA and had no desire to incubate American spies. Their scholarly associations warned that “linking university-based research to U.S. national security agencies, even indirectly, will restrict our already narrow research opportunities; it will endanger the physical safety of scholars and our students studying abroad; and it will jeopardize the cooperation and safety of those we study and collaborate with in these regions.”
Although the service requirement was originally looser, and the law prohibited recipients from gathering intelligence for the U.S. government during their Boren stint, many professors refused to recommend students for Boren Awards, and prominent universities debated whether to support the program. The University of California, Berkeley, deferred participation, while the University of Minnesota and University of Pennsylvania warned prospective applicants about the risks.
After Boren resigned from the Senate in 1994 to become president of the University of Oklahoma, his brainchild teetered on the brink of extinction. “I have no nerve endings left,” Robert Slater told me over coffee in January 2016 at a Panera Bread in a Washington, D.C., suburb. From 1995 to 2010, Slater served as director of the National Security Education Program, which oversees Boren and other language-training programs bankrolled by the Pentagon and intelligence. “We were always one Post story away from being done: ‘Boren fellow arrested in Russia on spy charges.’
“Everything was done that could possibly be done to protect academic integrity,” he continued. “There’s no way to mollify these people. Younger scholars who didn’t share these views wouldn’t risk their careers.… Why is it bad if a bright kid, who studies in Lebanon and learns Arabic, comes back and works for the CIA?”
The Boren program avoided scandal and gradually gained acceptance, aided by the study-abroad boom, and academia’s warming to intelligence agencies after the 9/11 attacks. The awards have become increasingly prestigious and selective: in 2014, only 271 of 1,365 applicants, or 19.9 percent, were chosen.
Some critics remained. While American University in Washington, D.C., led the nation with twenty-three Boren recipients in 2014, its executive director of study-abroad programs, Sara Dumont, advocates warning host families abroad that they’re sheltering future spies. “I feel like telling these families, watch out for these students,” she said. “Later on, they may try to use you or your family.” When “their clear career goal is to be a spy for the CIA, I worry about the ethics of what we do in study abroad.”
Of Boren alumni in federal jobs, 7.5 percent work for the CIA or other intelligence agencies, well behind the State Department (34 percent) and Defense (22 percent), according to a 2014 survey. That likely understates the true percentage, as one would expect many spies either not to answer or to use their employment cover. David J. Comp, who advised Boren candidates at the University of Chicago from 2000 to 2011, told me that two-thirds of them wanted to parlay the awards into intelligence jobs.
“The program was a life-changing experience that … broadened my world perspective and set me on a course to accept intelligence agency rotational assignments overseas,” one respondent to the 2014 survey wrote.
More Boren alumni would likely have joined the intelligence community if the agencies had moved more aggressively to hire them. Two CIA offices offered analyst positions to Steven A. Cook after his 1999 fellowship. But the security clearance and other red tape took so long that he opted for the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies. “The CIA would have been a blast,” Cook told me. “It would have made for a fun career. It also seemed, given my skills and background, a natural place to go.”
Fears that the intelligence connection endangered Boren recipients were overblown, Cook said. “In Egypt and Turkey, where I went to do field research, if I said I have a Boren fellowship, nobody would have known what I was talking about.”
As the Borens and the other National Security Education Programs become more recognized, though, some of those early forebodings are starting to be fulfilled. Michael Nugent, Slater’s successor as NSEP director, was expected to address a group of university presidents in October 2013 about “a recent incident with students under his program being aggressively targeted by a hostile intel service,” namely Iranian intelligence, and “the choices he had to make,” according to the meeting’s agenda.
Then, in 2014, two Boren fellows apparently alarmed Russian intelligence by visiting U
.S. consulates there and by sending emails to .gov and .mil domains. Local intelligence assumed that they were seeking instructions for espionage. Actually, the students were starting to look for national security jobs, although, under the Boren rules, they were supposed to finish their fellowships and return home first. One, a former U.S. military officer, hoped to rejoin the armed forces; the other wanted to work in the federal government. Both were studying Russian language at a state university in northwest Russia.
Russian agents checked the Boren website and learned about the service requirement, which raised their suspicions. They interviewed the fellows in a dormitory room, asking about their careers, why they had gone to the consulate, whether they had security clearances, and much more.
They threatened to detain one of the Boren fellows, according to a person familiar with the incident. “You’re scheduled to leave here tomorrow,” the agents told him. “If you want that to happen, you’ll talk to us now, you’ll tell us the truth. We don’t like people who mislead us.”
After two hours of questioning, he was let go, and returned to his room “a little shaken.” At the airport the next morning, his computer was seized.
Perhaps on the theory that the two were part of a spy ring, Russian intelligence interviewed a third Boren fellow in the same region. He was questioned twice in ten days by a total of three agents from the Federal Security Service, or FSB, successor to the Soviet Union’s KGB.
“They thought I was some sort of spy,” this Boren recipient told me. “They openly came out and asked me more than once, ‘Are you working for the government? Are you working for the security service?’”
The agents asked him about his dissertation on the Russian navy but “seemed to lose interest in it once they realized it was purely historical.” They examined the contacts on his cell phone. Then they grabbed a blank sheet, drew up a nondisclosure agreement, and ordered him to sign it. When he balked, saying it had no legal standing, “they threatened that they’d say I cooperated even if I didn’t, and that would prevent me from getting a job down the road.”
He signed. In August 2014, the Boren program quietly pulled out of Russia. Recipients were no longer permitted to study there; they now learned Russian in neighboring countries such as Kazakhstan.
* * *
WITH HIS APTITUDE for languages, Glenn Shriver could have earned a Boren and ended up working for U.S. intelligence. Instead, he went the other way.
Hard-pressed for money in Shanghai, he answered an ad in October 2004 on an English-language website that offered payment for political essays by people with a background in East Asian studies.
A young woman who called herself “Amanda” contacted him and gave him $120 to write about tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan and North Korea. She praised his work and assigned him more papers, and he soon regarded her as a close friend. Eventually she introduced him to her associates, “Mr. Wu” and “Mr. Tang,” in a hotel penthouse suite. They handed him business cards with only their names and phone numbers listed.
Although they posed as employees of Shanghai’s municipal government, Amanda, Wu, and Tang worked for China’s foreign intelligence service. The attractive woman, the paid essays, the business cards that didn’t list an employer, the hotel rendezvous: all were classic spycraft, used by intelligence agencies worldwide to entice students and researchers. “Businessmen don’t meet in hotel rooms, spies do,” says former FBI supervisory special agent David Major, founder and president of the CI Centre, a counterintelligence training company. “Beware of writing a paper and meeting in hotel rooms.”
Good-looking, personable, and multilingual, Shriver likely impressed the Chinese agents as a human missile that they could guide into the highest reaches of the U.S. government. “Shriver was able to present fairly well, he was relatively articulate, he spoke more than passable Mandarin, and he clearly showed an affinity for ‘things Chinese,’” Philip Boycan, a retired CIA counterintelligence officer who worked on Chinese matters for eleven years and investigated the Shriver case, told me. “Shriver was, on the surface, a nice-looking, seemingly all-American kid.… To the Chinese intelligence way of thinking, Shriver would be a good candidate to attempt to penetrate the U.S. government because he is not ethnic Chinese.” Chinese intelligence “undoubtedly thought that Shriver would be less likely to fall under suspicion and scrutiny than a person who had been born on the mainland, or for that matter, even a native-born U.S. citizen who was ethnic Chinese.”
Shriver also “had no regular employment or means of support and obviously needed a way to generate some income,” Boycan added. He “presented a unique opportunity” to Chinese intelligence because of “his accessibility, financial vulnerability, and, in my view, his personality traits.… He was motivated by money and, in my opinion, susceptible to the ego-stroking that he undoubtedly received from the Chinese.”
Expressing a desire to help promising young Americans with living expenses, Wu and Tang gave Shriver more cash. Over a series of meetings, which they asked him to keep confidential, they inquired about his career plans and encouraged him to work for a U.S. government agency, especially the State Department or CIA. If he did, they said, “we can be close friends.”
Gradually, Shriver realized who they really were. Just to make sure, he asked them, “What exactly do you guys want?”
“If it’s possible, we want you to get us some secrets or classified information,” they told him.
Shriver didn’t balk. Money was the primary lure; it’s also possible that, subconsciously, he sought to please his antiestablishment father by outfoxing the U.S. government. In April 2005, he took the exam in Shanghai to become a State Department foreign-service officer. Although he failed, Wu and Tang gave him $10,000. A year later, he flunked again, but received $20,000. Such up-front payments are “unheard-of” for Chinese intelligence, Major says. “That shows how aggressive they’re becoming.” His test scores indicated that Shriver perhaps wasn’t as clever as he considered himself, or as capable of matching wits with China’s intelligence service. He didn’t realize that it now owned him. If he had landed a job with the State Department or CIA, and then refused to spy for the Chinese, they could have blackmailed him.
Shriver took a job with a tattoo supply company in Los Angeles. In communicating with his Chinese handlers, he adopted a pseudonym, Du Fei, which was a common Chinese name as well as a pun on his middle name, Duffie. In June 2007, he applied online to the CIA’s clandestine service. That September, he flew to Shanghai, where he told Chinese intelligence officers about his CIA application and requested $40,000, which they supplied in U.S. currency. He understood the unspoken deal: if he succeeded in penetrating the CIA and supplying classified information to the Chinese, they would continue to pay him.
“It was very unusual and lavish for a PRC intelligence service to spend the amount that they did on Shriver,” Boycan said. “If Shriver had not asked, I personally doubt that the Chinese would have given him that much at one meeting. The fact that they did, however, suggests the potentially high value—and probability of success—that the Chinese ascribed to the Shriver operation.”
Shriver strapped the $40,000 to his belly and smuggled it through customs on his return to the United States. He gave part of the money to his father and brother, describing it as profit from an English-language school he had opened.
Shriver didn’t hear from the CIA for more than two years. In the meantime, he relocated to South Korea, where he taught English. In December 2009, the CIA got in touch with him, inviting him to Washington the next spring for what it described as final employment processing. It’s likely that the CIA revived his application after so long, and hinted that it was planning to hire him, because it had been tipped off about his relationship with Chinese intelligence. The agency was baiting a trap.
Shriver fell for it. Amanda had asked him to meet her in Shanghai or Hong Kong, but he put her off, figuring that federal agents conducting his bac
kground investigation would be curious about a trip to China. “I am making some progress for us,” he wrote to her. “But right now is a bad time for me to come visit. Maybe you can wait six months. In six months I will have good news”—in other words, CIA employment.
From June 7 to June 14, 2010, the CIA interviewed Shriver. Asked in polygraph tests if he had ever been approached by, been affiliated with, or accepted money from a foreign intelligence service, he lied each time. Next it was the FBI’s turn. As he was driving away from CIA headquarters, the FBI called and told him to pull off at the next exit and go to a hotel. There its agents confronted him, and he confessed.
The bureau wasn’t quite sure how to deal with him. Unlike moles caught inside the target government, Shriver never got that far. Despite accepting more than $70,000 from Chinese intelligence, he had no security clearance, never gained access to the U.S. intelligence community or any classified secrets, and claimed he never meant to betray his country. “My father says, if I give you a thousand dollars to buy drugs, but you don’t buy drugs, you didn’t commit a crime,” he told one FBI agent. (Shriver, or his father, was mistaken; it could still be a criminal conspiracy.)
U.S. intelligence considered using Shriver to spy on his contacts in China. “Recruiting Shriver as a double agent was suggested by some, which I argued strenuously against,” the CIA’s Boycan said. To deter further attempts to penetrate the CIA, Boycan felt, Shriver should be imprisoned. “I also believed that the utility of operating Shriver against the Chinese would be marginal.”
While the FBI and CIA deliberated, Shriver made up their minds for them. On June 22, 2010, he was about to fly from Detroit to South Korea when FBI agents boarded the plane and arrested him. He pleaded guilty in October 2010 to conspiring to commit espionage for a foreign government and was sentenced to four years in prison.
“I think I was motivated by greed,” he told the judge at his sentencing in January 2011. “I mean, you know, large stacks of money in front of me. And them saying, ‘Hey, don’t worry, you don’t have to do anything for it.’”
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