Like Peng’s institute, Shepherd’s study-abroad program for USF students in China received Hanban funding. From 2009 to 2012, Hanban “gave every student a scholarship,” Shepherd said. “I know what their motive was. Our students came out of the program with a positive view of China.” In 2010, Kriesel served as Shepherd’s teaching assistant for one semester.
Peng contends that the FBI set him up using a time-honored tactic: enlisting people who had an animus against him. He suggests the following scenario: The FBI, which was scrutinizing Confucius Institutes nationwide, noticed that the director of South Florida’s institute had been a bureau contact while at Princeton. The possibility of deploying Peng to penetrate the Confucius Institute network and reverse the direction of its espionage captivated the bureau. Because the FBI expected Peng to be reluctant, based on his evasiveness at Princeton and his refusal to stay in touch afterward, it needed leverage over him, such as a threat to his status at South Florida.
Peng speculates that the bureau first cultivated Kriesel. She was active as a volunteer in Tampa’s Chinese-American community, helping to boost attendance at a Chinese church and Chinese-American Association of Tampa Bay events, so the FBI might well have found her useful. Perhaps she was initially unwilling to help the bureau with Peng but agreed once he began criticizing her work. At the bureau’s instigation, he theorizes, she persuaded Zhang to complain to Crummett. But Crummett was slow to act, and the FBI may have worried that the USF administration was writing off Zhang as a vengeful ex-girlfriend. So, Peng speculates, the bureau persuaded Kriesel to come forward, too. Kriesel might then have told the FBI that the university had punished Peng.
Peng also suspects that the campaign against him was carefully timed. He was placed on leave less than a month before the university honored Madame Lin Xu, director general of Hanban and chief executive of the Confucius Institute headquarters in Beijing, with a “President’s Global Leadership Award” at commencement exercises. If he were still director of the USF institute, Peng says, he would have coordinated Madame Xu’s visit and cemented his relationship with her, making it harder for the FBI to imperil his position. Instead Peng, who had invited Madame Xu to South Florida, wasn’t allowed to meet her.
University phone logs obtained through a public records request add to the intrigue. They show twelve calls from the mobile phone of Dianne Mercurio, the FBI special agent, to USF extensions in January and February 2009, shortly before the Zhang and Kriesel complaints. The university redacted the numbers she contacted, citing an exemption in Florida public records law for disclosing anything that could identify a confidential informant.
Zhang told me that she had never spoken to an FBI agent and never heard of Mercurio. I visited Kriesel’s home in suburban Tampa twice, hoping to ask her the same questions. The first time, in 2014, her husband told me that she was resting and didn’t want to be disturbed. When I returned in 2015, I encountered a man fishing in the pond out back. He told me that he had rented the house from the Kriesels, who had moved to Texas, and that Shuhua was spending a lot of time in China. He gave me their email address, which I wrote to, receiving no reply.
Professor Baojing Sang, whom Zhang and Kriesel had accused Peng of harassing, is another puzzle. She was back in China when I phoned her in 2014. She described Peng as a caring supervisor who had once arranged for a friend to pick up her mother and daughter at a Florida airport and take them to Walt Disney World.
“Maybe he is not a good manager, but he’s a good scholar,” she said. “I feel very sorry” about his troubles. “It was a shock.”
She was unaware that Zhang and Kriesel named her in their complaints. “They should not be talking about me. Who gave them the power to talk about me?”
In June 2015, though, she emailed me, upset that I had cited her defense of Peng in my Bloomberg article. “I think you need to know what kind of person Peng is,” she wrote, without elaborating.
* * *
AFTER SPEAKING WITH Kriesel and Zhang, Shepherd acted quickly. He notified Crummett and then accompanied Zhang to see a vice provost. On April 7, Crummett summoned Peng to her office and placed him on administrative leave with pay.
Stepping into the vacuum created by Peng’s absence, Shepherd wielded more influence over USF’s Confucius Institute. On a July 2009 visit to Beijing, he discussed the institute’s mission with Hanban’s director general, and passed along her views—which accorded with his own interest in teacher training—to Crummett and Provost Wilcox. Lin Xu, he told them, wanted USF to become the “focal center” for developing Confucius Classrooms in Florida elementary and secondary schools and could send “an unlimited number of teachers.”
USF closed its inquiry into the sexual harassment allegations because Zhang and Kriesel didn’t pursue them. “I was tired of telling the unpleasant facts again and again,” Zhang told me.
Still, the university’s probe uncovered an abundance of questionable activities, including a penchant for pornography. While searching Peng’s university laptop, USF’s audit and compliance office found “a large cache of sexually-related materials with disturbing thematic content.”
According to a family friend, Peng’s interest in pornography stemmed from a 1997–98 stint as a postdoctoral researcher at Tokyo’s Waseda University. The material, which included images of women in bondage, related to his academic research, Peng told me. “SM and naked pictures are a very important part of the Japanese culture, and you do not fully understand Japanese culture without it.”
Saying that “this discovery calls into question your judgment to serve in an administrative capacity,” Provost Wilcox removed Peng as Confucius Institute director in August 2009, though he retained his professorship.
Storing porn on an employer’s computer isn’t against the law; otherwise, the prisons would be even more crowded than they are. But stealing is. Unfortunately for Peng, the auditors dug into his spending and accused him of bilking USF out of $15,950 in entertainment and travel expenses, mainly by pretending that he was doing research or attending conferences when he was on vacation or teaching at Chinese universities.
In 2004, for example, USF gave Peng $220 for what he described as a weekend research trip to libraries in the Miami area. Emails and photos told a different story. Peng, accompanied by his father and a friend, visited a museum and took a dip in the ocean.
Peng’s response was an inimitable blend of admission and defiance: “Who said that you cannot swim in a research trip?”
In October 2006, USF reimbursed Peng $1,220 in expenses for a presentation he said he had given the previous January at the International Workshop on East Asian Political Economy, at Peking University. The auditors claimed that no such workshop took place, and that Peng had forged the letter of invitation on his laptop six months afterward. On the January dates given for the workshop, he was actually teaching at Nankai University, which both paid him and reimbursed him for airfare.
This and other disputed China workshops did take place, although there may have been discrepancies in dates and conference titles because he didn’t bother to double-check them, Peng maintained. He also said that he drafted the invitations himself because workshop organizers weren’t confident of their English. He acknowledged that he should have reported his outside income from Chinese universities to USF.
Peng also contended that he spent thousands of dollars of his own money to advance the Confucius Institute, entertaining influential guests from China and ensuring that USF officials visiting Beijing were properly received. “It might be a bit right that I do not know the university procedures well and do not distinguish university and private business very well,” he wrote in response to the auditors. “However, I do it much to the favor of the university and my hard work has brought great benefits to the university.”
Peng failed to separate university and private business in another way. The auditors found that he falsified official letters inviting friends and acquaintances from China to study at S
outh Florida. Peng’s letters to the Chinese students and scholars overstated stipends that USF would pay them, boosting their chances of visa approval. Although it is normally the department chairman’s responsibility to issue such invitations, Peng instructed one recipient to ignore the chairman’s letter and use his for the visa application instead.
Kate Head, who conducted the Confucius Institute audit as the university’s associate director of audit and compliance, met on July 31, 2009, with a USF police detective and an agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which then opened its own investigation. Peng, one immigration agent later reported, “somewhat appears to have traded favors as counterparts in Chinese academia helped him procure employment there and he tried to reciprocate the assistance. He helped a few individuals obtain positions at USF, as well as their corresponding visas, by overstating their qualifications for both.”
Peng’s favors for Chinese newcomers didn’t end at the U.S. border. In a separate investigation, Peng’s department at USF, Government and International Affairs, barred him from its graduate programs for three years because he gave answers from past master’s degree exams to two Chinese students preparing to take the test. Peng said there was no rule against doing so, it was common in China, and the students needed a boost because of their poor English skills.
All the while, the FBI kept track of the auditors’ investigation. Mercurio called the audit office three times on October 20, 2009, including one call to Kate Head’s number. On November 12, two calls were placed from Head’s phone to Mercurio.
Mercurio and Peng also had lunch several times. She asked him to reconnect with former schoolmates and colleagues at the Chinese security service so he could gather information about China’s foreign policy strategies. But he sidestepped her overtures, and didn’t contact the email address she gave him—[email protected]. He was hoping that the auditors would clear him to return to the Confucius Institute.
No such luck. The 187-page University Audit & Compliance draft report was scathing. It laid out in exhaustive detail Peng’s alleged “misuse” of USF funds and “providing of falsified letters of invitation,” and, concluding that these activities appeared to meet the legal definitions of theft and fraud, referred them to police for criminal investigation.
University officials were appalled. President Genshaft, Provost Wilcox, and General Counsel Steven Prevaux “wanted to put you in jail for what is in the Head report,” Steven Wenzel, Peng’s civil lawyer and a former USF general counsel, told him later.
Peng’s return to the Confucius helm seemed as unlikely as Taiwan conquering China. His professorship, and even his freedom, were in jeopardy. Despite his brave front, he realized he had little choice. Only the FBI could save him.
The bureau moved quickly to take advantage of his predicament. On November 17, a week after the draft report was sent to Peng, Mercurio and another agent took him to lunch. They discussed the audit and “particularly raised the issue of letters of invitation.” When Peng said that he wasn’t aware that sending inaccurate visa letters was a crime, Mercurio told him that “not knowing the law is not a defense. But how the violations are handled is more important. It all depends on whether the authority would pursue them or not.” The unspoken message was that he needed powerful friends—like the FBI.
Peng understood. “I asked them whether they could help me,” he later wrote. He promised to give her a list of his students in China. In return, “she also agreed that she would try to help with my matter, although she was not sure what they could do.”
“Thank you for your willingness to help me at this difficult time of mine,” Peng wrote the next day to the “snowbox” email address. “If the final report is very bad and I am severely punished, I will be in a very weak position to help you because I will surely lose my reputation in China and will no longer be invited. Then there will be little I can do for you. If you can help me and my status and reputation are kept, I promise I can do a lot for you. Please trust that most of the problems are caused by cultural differences and I am a truly high quality person.”
Having reeled him in, and understandably reluctant to make a written promise to interfere with university discipline, Mercurio played it cool. “As I stated at lunch, I don’t know if there’s anything that I can do for you,” she replied. “We can certainly keep in touch and deal with matters as they unfold. Since your troubles don’t have anything to do with assistance to my office, there probably isn’t much I can do. However, let me know your status, and if I can help you, I will.”
7
THE CIA’S FAVORITE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT
On the crisp autumn afternoon of November 26, 2007, a black car picked up Pennsylvania State University president Graham Spanier at Washington’s Dulles International Airport and whisked him to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Using his identification card embedded with a hologram and computer chip, he checked in at security and was greeted by the chief of staff of the National Resources Division, the CIA’s clandestine domestic service. They proceeded to a conference room, where about two dozen chiefs of station and other senior CIA intelligence officers awaited them.
Spanier was expecting to brief them on the work of the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, an organization he chaired and had helped create, which fostered dialogue between intelligence agencies and universities. First, though, the CIA surprised him. In a brief, confidential ceremony, it presented him with the Warren Medal that is, according to Spanier, the agency’s highest honor for non-employees. Named after late chief justice Earl Warren, and enclosed in a handsome hand-carved wooden box, the medal was about four inches in diameter and resembled a large gold coin. The front depicted an eagle and was inscribed, “For Outstanding Service to the United States.” The other side read, “To Dr. Graham B. Spanier. For your outstanding contributions to the national security of the United States of America. Thank you from a grateful nation.”
The honor recognized Spanier’s dedication to alerting college administrators to the threat of human and cyber-espionage, and to opening doors for the agency at campuses nationwide. A former family therapist and television talk-show host with an unruffled, empathetic manner and features—round face, white hair, blue eyes—reminiscent of Phil Donahue, Spanier soothed many an academic’s anxieties about dealing with the CIA and FBI.
Since the intelligence agencies were going to meddle anyway, Spanier reasoned, they should do so with the knowledge and consent of university presidents. “My feeling was, If there’s a spy on my campus, a potential terrorist, or a visiting faculty member you believe is up to no good, I know you’ll be pursuing it,” he told me in April 2016. “Here’s the deal. Rather than break into his office, come to me, I have top-secret clearance, show me your FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] order, and I’ll have someone unlock the door.”
* * *
SPANIER’S CIA MEDAL—and a similar FBI award a year later—symbolized a reconciliation between the intelligence services and academia. The relationship has come full circle: from chumminess in the 1940s and 1950s, to the animosity during the Vietnam War and civil rights eras that I remember from my youth in Amherst, Massachusetts, and back to cooperation after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Their unequal partnership, though, tilts toward the government. U.S. intelligence seized on the renewed goodwill, and the red carpet rolled out by Spanier and other university administrators, to expand not only its public presence on campus but also covert operations and sponsoring of secret research. Except for the snubbing of Game of Pawns, the FBI movie about Glenn Shriver, federal encroachment on academic prerogatives met only token resistance.
The two cultures are antithetical: academia is open and international, while intelligence services are clandestine and nationalistic. Still, after Islamic fundamentalist terrorists toppled the World Trade Center, universities became part of the national security apparatus. The new recruiting booths at meetings of academic associations were one telling in
dicator. The CIA began exhibiting at the annual convention of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in 2004, as did the FBI and NSA around the same time. Since 2011, the FBI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and NSA have participated on a panel at the Modern Language Association convention titled “Using Your Language Proficiency and Cultural Expertise in a Federal Government Career.”
Today American universities routinely offer degrees in homeland security and courses in espionage and cyber-hacking, and vie for federal designation as Intelligence Community Centers for Academic Excellence and National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations. They obtain research grants from obscure federal agencies such as Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. Established in 2006, IARPA sponsors “high-risk/high pay-off research that has the potential to provide our nation with an overwhelming intelligence advantage,” according to its website. To date, it has funded teams with researchers representing more than 175 academic institutions, mostly in the United States.
While almost all IARPA projects are unclassified, universities increasingly carry out secret but lucrative government research at well-guarded facilities. Two years after the 9/11 attacks, the University of Maryland established a center that conducts classified research on language for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. Edward Snowden worked there in 2005 as a security guard, eight years before he joined government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. and leaked classified files on NSA surveillance.
Spy Schools Page 21