Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  “The bureau understands it’s kind of sacred ground when you go into a university. There are higher levels of authority before an agent walks onto a campus, different levels of approval that have to be gained.… Education is kind of one of those areas where people including myself put it on a higher pedestal.”

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  U.S. INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS like Ibison pay tribute to the special status of universities, but their actions belie their words. Far from being a “sacred ground” off-limits to espionage, academia is like a well-trampled city park, once pristine but now littered with candy wrappers, broken glass, and dog droppings.

  What a former government official told me in the early stages of my project—“Both sides are exploiting universities”—proved to be true. Foreign and U.S. spy services alike prey on students and professors through deception and intimidation. China entrapped Glenn Duffie Shriver by paying him to write essays, the same trick that U.S. agents play on scientists at academic conferences. American intelligence pressured Peng and Carlos Alvarez to spy and Iranian nuclear scientists to defect, much as China warned a Chinese student at South Florida that his parents’ medical care depended on his cooperation. All services take advantage of students’ ideological fervor, as Cuba did with Marta Rita Velázquez and Ana Belén Montes.

  Forty years ago, after the Church Committee revealed the CIA’s ties to universities, the agency defeated the Harvard-led campaign to ban intelligence gathering by academics and deceptive recruiting of foreign students. Since then, the stigma on campus against working for U.S. intelligence—which was the main reason the CIA gave for hiding its relationships with professors—has faded. After 9/11, Graham Spanier and other university administrators welcomed U.S. intelligence, yet it still goes behind their backs, as in the FBI questioning of Libyan students like Mohamed Farhat. Invited or not, openly or not, U.S. intelligence today touches virtually every facet of academic life. Its influence likely equals or surpasses its previous peak in the 1950s, when it focused on a narrow swath of elite universities, and the population of foreign students in the United States was far smaller than it is today.

  To weigh the impact of this shift on national security and academic culture, it’s best to distinguish between overt and covert intelligence operations on campus. Most of the aboveboard activities, from sponsoring research to recruiting U.S. citizens for staff positions, appear on balance to be beneficial. Their openness fits academic values, and they may make America safer. For example, academic research funded by Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, such as analyzing how groups gain followers on social media, or detecting key phrases in conversations in noisy cafés or obscure languages, might erode privacy, but it could predict a terrorist attack.

  Public appearances by intelligence bigwigs foster student awareness and discussion of public policy. CIA director John Brennan often speaks on campuses, though protesters shouting “drones kill kids” and “U.S. out of the Middle East” thwarted his talk at the University of Pennsylvania in April 2016.

  Recruitment events, which used to spur similar demonstrations, replenish the CIA’s ranks. They take place on campuses nationwide, and are advertised in student and university media. At twenty-five to thirty-five universities each year, the agency tests the analytic skills of potential applicants by simulating a foreign affairs crisis. In April 2015, during a three-hour simulation at Harvard, thirty students—chosen by lottery from 130 who had signed up—advised five CIA analysts on responses to an imaginary oil and gas explosion in an Arctic region where Russia and the United States both had territorial claims.

  The CIA wanted to limit participation to twenty-five students, “but we had so much interest that we went to thirty,” organizer Eliza J. DeCubellis, a Harvard sophomore, told me. “As soon as you mention the CIA, anything to do with covert operations, students are very intrigued. After years of mistrust, people now are really interested in what the CIA actually does.”

  In September 2015, I attended a more traditional recruiting session. About fifty students and recent alumni from Harvard University’s adult education extension school crowded into the reading room of its career services office to listen to pitches from three CIA employees: two women, and a man in a bow tie.

  The trio emphasized that the CIA is education-friendly, offering student internships, tuition reimbursement for in-service courses, bonuses for mastery of “mission-critical” languages, and a chance to do academic-style research but with real-world impact. “I didn’t want to work for a think tank,” said one woman, a CIA analyst. “Here I know immediately, the president’s reading it.”

  The other woman said she majored in aerospace engineering at MIT, and had been looking for industry jobs when the CIA invited her for an interview. “I thought it was a hoax; it turned out one of my professors had called them.”

  They showed a slide presentation of the CIA’s organizational chart, starting with the clandestine Directorate of Operations: “the sexy side of the agency, the one movies are made about,” as the analyst described it. Its job “is to recruit people to commit espionage against their own governments.” Left unmentioned was that some of those people are foreign students and professors.

  In the question-and-answer session, audience members expressed concern about the impact of a CIA career on social and family life. “You have to be comfortable not talking about your successes or your failures,” said the analyst. “I go to a party with people who aren’t CIA officers, I don’t talk about work. I find I’m more interesting that way.” Employees can tell their spouses that they’re in the CIA, but not their children, because “children talk.” Her husband is an FBI agent, and most of their friends work for the FBI or CIA. “They understand.”

  The other woman said she had planned to work at the CIA for a few years and then enter the corporate sector. Instead, “I got hooked,” she said.

  “Like heroin,” the analyst replied.

  Even rejects from such recruiting events may prove valuable to U.S. intelligence. While unsuitable for staff positions, they often have skills—such as fluency in foreign languages—conducive to spying overseas. “Eighty-five percent of those interested parties would never qualify for a position,” a former federal law enforcement official told me. The CIA and FBI “then have this mailing list of names of people who sometimes are really, really talented and really, really crazy. They couldn’t pass the screening but they could be very helpful. They could never be an employee but they could be an asset.”

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  IN A SENSE, this overt presence may pave the way for, or legitimize, the covert U.S. operations in academia with which this book has been principally concerned. Because they’re hidden, their effect is harder to judge, but they seem of little advantage to national security, and corrosive to academic culture.

  There may be professorial James Bonds, or real-life Indiana Joneses, but I didn’t find them. As far as I could tell, using professors as spies tends to backfire. Accustomed to their low-risk tenured positions, where about the worst thing that can happen is being snubbed at a cocktail party, they don’t adjust well to the high-stakes world of espionage. Often they’re reluctant, like Peng. Or they’re modestly effective, like the professor whom the FBI fielded as a double agent against Russia. If they’re caught spying by a foreign government or terrorist group, not only would they be in danger; so would their friends, collaborators, and sources. Other researchers might be denied visas, depriving the U.S. public and policy makers of possibly vital information and knowledge.

  Generally, professors are more comfortable briefing U.S. intelligence when they return from their travels, or speaking at conferences run by CIA fronts. Such half-hidden complicity—the conference talks are usually listed on resumes, without reference to the CIA—is less perilous and more compatible with academic ethics than spying, but could still hamper academic research and credibility abroad.

  Recognizing the ethical tangles, Theodore Postol drew a careful line, balanci
ng his loyalties to his country, to science, and to his students. Postol, who retired in 2014 from the MIT faculty, aided U.S. intelligence but stopped short of spying.

  I’ve been friendly with Ted for a quarter century, ever since I profiled him for the Boston Globe Magazine in 1992. Always good copy, the expert on missile defense had been especially newsworthy in the wake of the first Gulf War. After millions of American television viewers thrilled to watch U.S.-made Patriot missiles destroy Iraqi Scud missiles launched at Israel, Postol spoiled the celebration. He contended that virtually all of the Patriots had missed the Scuds; the appearance otherwise had been an optical illusion caused by the insufficient speed of television cameras. The Pentagon and Raytheon, the defense contractor that produces the Patriots, disputed his findings, but he was proven correct.

  I knew Ted to be skeptical and scrappy, a classic whistle-blower. He fought with his neighbors, his university, and the national security establishment. For example, following the Patriot dispute, federal agents visited his office to complain that an article he had written for an academic journal about the missiles’ failure contained classified information, even though he had based his analysis on public sources. Fed up with being hassled, he eventually chose not to renew his security clearance.

  That is why I was somewhat surprised to learn, when we chatted for this book, that U.S. intelligence had been tapping his expertise behind the scenes for years. After 9/11, his brilliance mattered more to the intelligence community than his pugnacity, and an agent in the FBI’s Boston office contacted him. As the FBI shifted priorities to meet the terrorist threat, the agent had switched from organized crime to counterterrorism, and universities were his beat. Postol met with him three or four times a year for more than a decade. Sometimes the agent would call beforehand and ask to bring a friend, which meant that a CIA officer would join them.

  Postol educated them about weapons of mass destruction, and passed along research that he and his students had conducted exposing flaws in Russian satellite systems and U.S. missile defenses. When he returned from Russia or China, he supplied his “general impressions.” He hit it off with the FBI agent, who became a regular guest speaker in Postol’s MIT course on the technology and politics of weapons of mass destruction. The class included both international students and future U.S. military officers in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). “His presentations were excellent, and very carefully designed to provide general information about the FBI’s techniques for monitoring and reacting to potential attacks on the public,” Postol told me.

  Still, Postol avoided sharing names and specifics, especially those of his students, with the FBI and CIA. “I’m trying to be helpful to these people, at the same time I’m not an agent for them,” he says. “They’ve occasionally asked me questions that got close to the boundary. I said, ‘It’s not a good idea to talk about it.’” To make sure everything was aboveboard, he told the Russians and Chinese that he was talking generally to the CIA, without revealing their “direct discussions.”

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  SINCE NONCITIZENS AREN’T allowed to work for the CIA and FBI as staff employees, public recruiting sessions generally exclude international students and researchers. Secretly, though, U.S. intelligence pursues them. Because they can blend into their native societies and have contacts there, they’re potentially more helpful than even linguistically gifted Americans. The downside is that they also wash out at a significant rate.

  “There are a lot of people in schools in the U.S. who are potentially of interest when they go home,” a former CIA officer told me. “They get targeted whether they’re nuclear scientists or come from a country where we have problems with Islamic extremism. Getting them to agree in theory” to go home and help the CIA “isn’t a great trick. You start paying them; all college students need money. And even if I say it’s all voluntary, somewhere in his mind he never thinks of any conversation with a security service as voluntary. All of that works in your favor. ‘Sure, I’ll talk to you, this is painless, I’m not risking anything, I feel I have a contact in the government.’

  “Maybe he agrees, and then he never goes home. He falls in love and lands a job and never leaves the U.S. Or the day comes” when the CIA wants him “to go back on foreign soil. It’s no longer fun and games. It’s real. You have the issue: if he goes abroad, will he do anything?”

  Cultivating foreign scientists at academic conferences may be more productive than on campus, though so many intelligence services circulate at such events that they may cancel each other out. It’s possible that enrolling undercover CIA officers next to foreign businesspeople and officials in mid-career and executive education programs, as at Harvard’s Kennedy School, reaps dividends in the form of useful intelligence sources abroad, but it also undermines the candor and trust vital to education.

  Ishmael Jones, the pseudonymous former intelligence officer who wrote a scathing memoir about the CIA, suggested to me that the agency devotes too much time and manpower to U.S. universities. “I believe our national security agencies need to be focusing on foreign targets located in foreign countries,” Jones emailed me in October 2014. “Instead, working with US colleges lets agencies do soft, low-risk, nonthreatening kinds of things that let everyone look busy but don’t accomplish much. A case officer can take a leisurely drive over to the nearest college and chat with a professor or student and give Headquarters the sense that operations are being generated. It’s much nicer than traveling through a sweaty foreign country to a meeting with an agent in a nasty hotel room at which a hostile security service can come bursting in at any moment.”

  The strongest justification for pervasive U.S. espionage in academia is that hostile countries are doing it, too. With the influx of Chinese and Iranian students, the proliferation of Confucius Institutes, and Russia’s enthusiasm for academic espionage under an ex-KGB president, foreign spying on campus appears to be surging, in some cases jeopardizing U.S. national and economic security. Duke graduate student Ruopeng Liu funneled Pentagon-funded research to China; Cuba recruited its most effective agent, Ana Belén Montes, through a Johns Hopkins classmate; and Russia insinuated Andrey Bezrukov, Lydia Guryeva, and other “illegals” into prominent universities, though possibly to less advantage than it hoped. Glenn Duffie Shriver went from Michigan to Shanghai for a college study-abroad program and ended up taking seventy thousand dollars from Chinese intelligence to try to penetrate the U.S. government. We know about Montes, Bezrukov, and Shriver—and about cyber-hacks by foreign intelligence into academic networks—only because U.S. investigators exposed them. It’s likely that some foreign spies remain hidden in U.S. student bodies or faculties today.

  Even foreign agents who don’t imperil America’s security may undermine the credibility of its universities. Fairly or not, the revelation that Carlos Alvarez was working for Cuban intelligence placed the Harvard workshop and other programs that he led under a cloud.

  As American and foreign agents converge on campus, university administrators avert their gazes, making no complaints and taking no precautions. They don’t want to appear unpatriotic, or alienate research funders, by pushing back against U.S. intelligence. Nary a peep is heard from university authorities when the FBI or CIA, without notifying them ahead of time, hassles international students and professors. South Florida softened Peng’s punishment to accommodate the FBI’s plans to make him a spy. Owing much of its cachet to its intimate relationship with the federal government, which hires its graduates and supplies it with A-list speakers and visiting fellows, Harvard’s Kennedy School enrolled undercover CIA agents in a mid-career program, without informing either faculty members or other students about them.

  If universities act as accomplices for U.S. intelligence, they’re passive bystanders to foreign espionage. The values of diversity and internationalism, which invigorate U.S. higher education and attract so many foreign students, also make it vulnerable. Devoted to collaboration, Duke professor David Smith wa
s late to recognize that a graduate student in his lab, Ruopeng Liu, was taking advantage of him and passing Pentagon-funded research to China. Even after Smith began to suspect him, Duke gave Liu a doctorate. UMass Boston paid no attention to the visiting scholars, affiliated with China’s spy university, who snooped on one academic conference after another.

  Universities don’t bother to protect their research by requiring science graduate students to learn about intellectual property law, or by signing agreements with foreign collaborators that safeguard each side’s ideas. They plunge ahead with study-abroad programs in China and Russia, and vie for Boren fellowships that have aroused suspicion in Russia and elsewhere by requiring recipients to spend a year afterward in a national security position. Yet they rarely warn students at orientation sessions to watch out for foreign intelligence services. Few schools screened Game of Pawns, the FBI’s overwrought wake-up call.

  Their motives for ignoring foreign espionage aren’t entirely altruistic. They’d rather not offend countries on which they’ve become dependent for tuition revenue, researchers, and branch campuses. They welcome Confucius Institutes—which are funded and staffed by a Chinese government affiliate, sanitize China’s history and policy, and may at times be tapped to collect intelligence—as a low-cost option for teaching Chinese language and culture. Eager for full-paying international students, Marietta College went even further, initiating a partnership with a university run by China’s security ministry.

  Like their institutions, individual professors may put global prestige ahead of intellectual property. John Reece Roth, an emeritus professor of electrical engineering at the University of Tennessee, was convicted in 2008 of using graduate students from China and Iran on U.S. Air Force research that was off-limits to foreigners, and taking a laptop with restricted files to China. Roth wasn’t a Chinese spy. He was simply proud of his renown there. He found it hard to believe that a country where two universities had named him an honorary professor, where his lectures drew large audiences, and where both volumes of his book Industrial Plasma Engineering were available in translation, could have any duplicitous intent. When I visited him in 2012 in federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky, he was devising a makeshift Mobius strip to catch red ants swarming across the floor of his cell and feasting on candy bar scraps. “I still have some inventing ability,” he told me.