The Scientist and the Spy

by Mara Hvistendahl

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  ROBERT’S LOVE FOR HIS PARENTS did not extend to the name they gave him at birth: Mo Tian, 莫天. “Tian” was a nice enough word, meaning “heaven” or “sky,” but his well-meaning parents had not thought about how it could be distorted by cruel children when combined with “Mo,” which can mean “nothing” or “none.” His classmates christened him Mo Tian Mo Di, 末天末地—No Heaven No Earth. That sometimes morphed into Wu Fa Wu Tian, which translates as Without Law or Heaven. By age seven, Robert was sick of being branded an outlaw, so he changed his name.

  He chose Hailong, which means “sea dragon.” Mythical sea dragons, he knew, could swim like fish and fly like birds. They were transient, mobile. Gliding on water and soaring through the air, they could propel themselves up and away from whatever challenges life threw their way. They did not disobey the law. They were simply above it.

  The name proved fitting, because in the years that followed, Robert and rules did not always agree. At Southwest University in Chongqing, where he studied heat power engineering, he became enamored with American-style democracy. It was a heady time for science in China, when many researchers advocated political reform. The liberal ideas of physicist Fang Lizhi helped inspire student activism, and as students occupied Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, similar protests sprang up around China. Robert joined a march to the mayor’s office in Chongqing. In his version of events, administrators removed him from the school’s honor roll in retaliation. (Fang, meanwhile, took refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing and was eventually shuttled out of China to the United Kingdom.)

  After college Robert moved eastward to earn a master’s degree, and then in 1993 he started his first PhD, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Engineering Thermophysics in Beijing. He specialized in the mechanics of boiling, spending his days happily observing the formation of bubbles in liquids, watching as tiny globules of air spread over the surface of water.

  In his free time, Robert met friends for dinner, laughing over steaming vats of Mongolian hot pot, or slapped down tiles in raucous rounds of mahjong. One day at a friend’s wedding he was drawn to a woman who was finishing her graduate degree. Her name was Li Ping. They fell in love and married in 1998. Soon after, Li Ping rechristened herself Carolyn, and they moved to America so that Robert could pursue a second PhD at Kansas State University.

  Manhattan, Kansas, turned out to bear little resemblance to the island in New York City for which it was named. Robert marveled at how locals heeded stop signs even when no one was around. Nonetheless, puffed up with democratic ideals, Robert was full of hope for his prospects in the land of opportunity. As the number of American-born children studying science and engineering had slumped, the United States depended on a steady influx of researchers and students from other countries to power its labs. The man who knew the darkness of the mines and the voodoo of rural medicine was determined to achieve a comfortable life in America.

  Robert arrived in the United States as the Chinese Communist Party was redoubling efforts to influence ethnic Chinese researchers living overseas. Many of these scholars had, like Robert, supported the Tiananmen protests from afar, by providing safe havens and funding for dissidents back in China. That worried party leaders, who expanded the organization that kept tabs on overseas scholars. But Robert was mostly unaffected by this shift. In the end, it was the academic job market that deflated his ideals.

  In 2003, after finishing his PhD, he took an untenured research position in a thermodynamics lab at Florida International University in Miami. Any enjoyment he felt in practicing the skills he spent years acquiring was offset by his salary: around $40,000 a year. He and Carolyn scraped by for a while, renting a small apartment near campus. Then Carolyn got pregnant, and the apartment seemed even smaller. Their arguments turned bitter, at one point inviting a visit from the police. Around the time that Carolyn gave birth to a daughter—a small person forever linking them to the United States—the center that Robert worked for was reorganized, and he found himself out of a job.

  Robert wanted a paycheck that could cover a mortgage on a real family home, and he knew that it would be hard to find another research position in thermodynamics. When he confided his troubles to his sister, Mo Yun, back in Beijing, she lined up the position at DBN. Robert knew next to nothing about agriculture, but Mo Yun’s connections overrode other concerns. Her husband was DBN’s CEO—a billionaire named Shao Genhuo whose business interests had earned him a spot on the Forbes China rich list.

  By the time Carolyn had a second child, a son, Robert had transformed himself into the family’s stable breadwinner. In 2009, three years after he started at DBN, Robert had enough for a down payment on a five-bedroom house in a nice part of Boca Raton, Florida.

  The new house had blush-colored paint and a neat tiled roof, and it looked out on a cul-de-sac dotted with basketball hoops and palm trees. He and Carolyn joined a local Chinese Christian church and settled into a rhythm with their children. Carolyn became a U.S. citizen. Robert never bothered to apply. Giving up his Chinese passport would have made travel to Beijing more complicated.

  Their house was walking distance from two golf courses and a country club, and the elegant office building where he rented a suite on behalf of DBN offered a view of a second country club. Working for a large agricultural corporation, he had the whole package: nice house, supportive community, and, when he wasn’t traveling around the Midwest, plenty of free time for tennis, chess matches, and gardening.

  Determined to prove his worth at work and show that he deserved the job he had won through nepotism, Robert happily learned about the pork industry and the business of sourcing animal feed. He worked closely with Mo Yun, who had a PhD in veterinary science and oversaw DBN’s research and technology division. At first, his only regret was not joining DBN sooner. But that didn’t last.

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  THE RISKY TRIPS that Robert and other DBN employees made to Midwestern fields had their origins in a single problem: China didn’t produce enough grain to feed its people. Like other Chinese agricultural companies, DBN depended on a steady flow of imported corn and soy for its animal feed business. That made its executives, and Chinese leaders more generally, vulnerable to the whims of foreign suppliers. An increase in U.S. corn prices could have a direct impact on Chinese food security—and on DBN’s profits.

  Shao Genhuo, Robert’s brother-in-law, had founded DBN in a Beijing apartment in 1993 with less than three thousand dollars in capital. As China grew wealthier and people ate more meat—braised pork belly, Peking duck, cumin-spiced beef—demand for grain-based animal feed surged. The Chinese central government helped out with its campaign to “modernize” people’s diets with meat produced on large industrial farms, and Shao, who was the son of farmers, became wealthy. That had been enough for a while. Then the farmer’s son watched as others’ riches accumulated at a rate far faster than his. The company’s margins could be even higher, Shao saw, if the company went into business growing corn itself.

  In 2001, he created a subsidiary to focus on seed breeding. In Chinese the company was called Jinse Nonghua, which means Golden Agriculture. Kings Nower was an awkward anglicization of that name, and in choosing it, Shao and other executives evidently did not consider whether it had cachet for a Western ear. The goal was not to reach U.S. farmers, though. It was to dominate developing world markets—starting with China.

  Despite the Chinese government’s best efforts to give local companies an advantage, farmers still tended to favor international players like Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer. A few breakthrough seed lines might allow DBN and Kings Nower to edge out the foreign competition in China. And yet success was far from guaranteed. There were thousands of Chinese seed companies—by one count 8,700—and none of them had successfully managed to create seed lines that rivaled those of the internation
al seed outfits. Developing an elite seed line required a good supply of inbred seed lines, which most Chinese companies didn’t have, and the process took years and demanded both talent and money.

  Kings Nower shared an office with its parent company in Beijing, and the two companies’ operations were mostly indistinguishable. Dr. Li was put in charge of the seed subsidiary. Robert’s boss had a peasant’s face, with a prominent mole on his right cheek, and a peasant’s coarse humor. He was prone to rash ideas, and not long after Robert started working at DBN, he dreamed up a shortcut that avoided years of research. With Robert’s help, Kings Nower would swipe top-notch seeds from American seed companies and then reverse engineer the seed lines.

  Robert knew that this was illegal under U.S. law, and he made his discomfort clear early on. When he and his sister began talking of targeting American seed lines, Robert wrote Mo Yun that he needed to be careful in order to “drive to somewhere unseen.” She agreed. It was, of course, her family’s safety that was on the line—not just that of her brother but that of her husband as well. But then Mo Yun cut back on her work with DBN to spend more time with her children. That left Dr. Li fully in charge of the seed operation. Wang Lei, Kings Nower’s vice president, mostly deferred to him on business decisions.

  Dr. Li sought the components for one hundred seed lines. In some cases, he wanted as many as five thousand samples of a single strain of corn. Robert pleaded with him that a hundred varieties were too many. Although reverse engineering the seeds was theoretically quicker than developing them from scratch, the process of re-creating even one seed line still could take years. But Dr. Li didn’t listen. So Robert shipped thousands of seeds back to China, then lived in fear that they would be seized en route by customs officials. He flew from Florida to Iowa and back, wasting time he could have spent with his children or tending the mango and avocado trees in his backyard. Dr. Li always wanted more samples. Robert could send two thousand seeds from a particular seed line to China and still it wouldn’t be enough.

  In service of the scheme, Robert logged long days driving across the Midwest, burning through tanks of gas, sneaking nervously into fields. Robert worried that someone would notice and report him for suspicious behavior. And what could he do in the face of all of that wide-open land, the roads that shot straight through to the horizon? Cornfields may be where the Midwest hides its secrets—illicit affairs, crop circle hoaxes, covertly seeded marijuana plants—but to Robert, the cover that was provided by seven-foot-tall crops was scant reassurance.

  During periods of intensive activity, like planting time, Dr. Li thanked Robert for his hard work. But at other moments his boss could be overly critical, even dismissive. Robert heard that he went around the office in Beijing saying that Robert was afraid of being escorted back to China as a business spy.

  Dr. Li would have known that the risk of this happening was very real. He had, no doubt, heard of the case of former Boeing engineer Greg Chung, which was followed by the Chinese press. After the FBI found hundreds of thousands of pages of sensitive documents stashed in a crawl space beneath Chung’s house, he was charged with stealing secrets connected to the Delta IV booster rocket and the U.S. space shuttle. In 2010, at the age of seventy-four, Chung was sentenced to fifteen years in federal prison.

  But Dr. Li was unsympathetic to the dangers that Robert faced. If Robert was in fact deported as a business spy, Dr. Li had joked, at least the company would save money on flights.

  When a colleague in Beijing relayed this anecdote to Robert in an online chat one day, Robert’s response was bold. Let Dr. Li come to the United States, he told his co-worker. Let him face the guards patrolling the seed companies’ parking lots. Let him see the ominous DO NOT ENTER signs. Let him read all the news in America about people being shot by a trigger-happy vigilante. See if he’d be scared.

  Now Dr. Li was here in the rental car, his smug grin for once wiped off his face by their run-in with the authorities in Iowa. And yet he still wanted to continue with the plan.

  THREE

  2014

  When I first came across the story of Robert Mo, I was working as a journalist in Shanghai. I researched and wrote articles from a home office on the seventh story of an apartment tower. From my desk I could hear the drone of traffic below and watch as tiny figures on motor scooters zoomed between cars, tempting fate. One afternoon, an article on my screen captured my attention and made it hard to look away. DESIGNER SEED THOUGHT TO BE LATEST TARGET BY CHINESE read the headline in The New York Times. The story described a man found in a cornfield in Iowa, in what the article called “an unusual and brazen scheme to undercut expensive, time-consuming research.”

  By then I had lived in Shanghai for two stints totaling eight years. Before I became a foreigner in a city of twenty-three million, I spent my childhood in the wide-open country of southern Minnesota and central Iowa. In the Midwest, corn and not people were the backdrop. As a child I ran through corn mazes, visited roadside monstrosities constructed from corncobs, and sat on the porch during barbecues, shucking husks into paper bags. As a teenager I sneaked off to cornfields to party. I knew that corn’s role in American society is more complex than is often portrayed—that high-fructose corn syrup contributes to the high rate of obesity in the United States, for example—but nonetheless the case of the man in the field awakened some latent nostalgia in me. I was fascinated by how it spanned my country of residence and the place of my birth, and by the fact that it purportedly combined mundane corn seed with the cloak-and-dagger drama of espionage.

  I worked for the journal Science, which meant that I spent my days interviewing Chinese researchers and contemplating China’s technological rise. Tales of industrial espionage had always lurked in the background. I had heard Western businesspeople try to outdo one another at dinner. You know the American company whose Chinese supplier set up an identical factory right across the street? The joint venture partner who made off with the technical plans six months into the partnership? The guy who comes around with auto parts that fell off the truck from factories in Taiwan? Usually these stories were laced with cynicism. I never heard anyone suggest a solution to this technological drain. But now, suddenly, industrial espionage was one of the top priorities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I watched from afar as federal prosecutors charged a string of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. Some of the technologies at issue had military applications, but others were more prosaic. Working closely with corporations, U.S. attorneys brought cases involving wind turbines, pharmaceuticals, the whitener used to brighten the creme in Oreo cookies—dozens of cases in all, with prison terms extending to more than ten years. The United States government had declared war on Chinese trade secrets theft.

  For decades, countries all over the globe had relied on professional intelligence agencies to glean nuggets of critical importance. Compared with this more conventional spying, industrial espionage was a free-for-all. To succeed, it wasn’t necessary to be trained as a spy. Trade secrets theft could be perpetrated by defense agencies, private companies, and profit-minded individuals alike. Pundits alleged that the United States and China were locked in a new cold war, and that technology and research was its major battleground. Stealing the color white was a national security threat, they contended, because it was an assault on American innovation and jobs. America, it was said, faced a new kind of spy.

  I came to wonder: Were criminal prosecutions really the best way to safeguard American ingenuity? Could arresting researchers from the country responsible for much of America’s scientific talent backfire? And what did this crackdown mean for relations between my home country and the one where I had lived most of my adult life?

  The answers to these questions only grew more complex as I delved into the story of the stolen seeds and the Chinese scientist at its center.

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  I MOVED TO SHANGHAI IN 2004, at the age of
twenty-four. I arrived as China was in the throes of a remarkable scientific rise. The economic reforms that had transformed a stagnant state-owned economy into a vibrant consumer market were closely linked to funding for science and technology. The first major boost to research had come back in 1986. That was the year China adopted the 863 Program, which allocated funding for spaceflight and information technology at a time when for many families in the Chinese countryside a refrigerator was a luxury. In the decades that followed, spending on research and development shot up. Between 1991 and 2016, it grew by a factor of almost thirty.

  In 2006, China overtook Japan to become number two in the world for spending on research and development, behind only the United States. China tends to dominate metrics because its population is so large, but there is no doubt that the country has become a center of high-quality research. As Chinese researchers publish in English and reach a broader audience, citations in international journals have skyrocketed. Today China ranks first in the world in the number of science and engineering papers published in international journals and second in international patent filings. It claims several of the world’s fastest supercomputers, as well as the world’s first quantum communications satellite. An institute in Beijing has proposed building the world’s largest supercollider, a project that if approved could lead to significant breakthroughs in physics.