The Scientist and the Spy

by Mara Hvistendahl

  At the time, policy makers were particularly concerned about France, whose secret service chief had been blunt about his interest in obtaining American economic secrets. But critics suspected that the drive to designate industrial espionage as a federal crime was also about the intelligence agencies’ interest in self-preservation. The fall of the Iron Curtain had made the mandate of the FBI and CIA unclear. Newspapers were running headlines like COLD WAR’S END BRINGS ENEMY GAP and CIA—COSTLY, INEPT, ANACHRONISTIC. After he was sworn in as CIA director in 1991, Robert Gates had promptly written on a notepad, “New world out there. Adjust or die.” Gates became a staunch advocate of the Economic Espionage Act.

  Legal scholars pointed out that state law was deemed sufficient for a range of high-stakes crimes, including many types of murder. Why did trade secrets theft deserve different treatment? Senator Bill Bradley worried that economic espionage could become “a pretext for a new program of counterintelligence surveillance by the FBI of either foreigners or Americans.” Others simply thought that the threat was inflated. “The law gives the FBI not only a cold war reason for being but a reason for using once again the formidable methods of the cold war,” journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote in The New Republic.

  Whatever the reality, a consensus built in Washington that technical information was so dangerous a weapon when in the hands of a foreign company or government that America needed tougher tools to deal with it. The 1990s was an era of intense globalization and consolidation, and multinational corporations were advancing into new markets where they faced foreign competitors. Stiffer penalties provided a way to hobble those competitors in court, or at least bog them down in costly litigation. And because economic espionage was a federal crime, corporate lawyers could step back and let federal prosecutors bring charges on their companies’ behalf. Large corporations were among the law’s biggest backers. Some even felt that the United States should go further, by actively spying on other countries’ firms—a proposal that was rejected mainly because it was impractical, not because of strong moral objections.

  In the years following the Economic Espionage Act’s passage, the Justice Department brought cases involving cancer drugs, software programs, and razors. Then, on September 11, 2001, terrorists associated with al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airplanes and steered two of them into the World Trade Center. As the United States waged an assault on terrorism, economic espionage faded from view.

  In the late 2000s, when trade secrets theft investigations picked up again, the focus shifted to China. Western elites agreed that while other countries, including nineteenth-century America, had relied on industrial spying to advance technologically, China took it to a new level. “In a manner of speaking, the United States stole books; China steals libraries,” quipped James A. Lewis, an expert on industrial espionage at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It helped that China’s rise as a global economic power had coincided with a democratization of spy tools. The 160-kilobyte floppy disk, just small enough to slip into a purse, was replaced by the 128-gigabyte flash drive, with nearly 1 million times more storage compressed into a gadget as slim as a pinky. Clunky recording devices gave way to sophisticated spyware that allowed for commandeering the microphone and camera of a user’s smartphone. Unsophisticated cyberattacks could expose whole company servers to plundering. In 2009, as Mark Betten moved into his second decade at the FBI, the bureau created a dedicated Economic Espionage Unit.

  On May 2, 2011, President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed in an American military operation in Pakistan. The menace of terrorism, it appeared, had subsided. The emergence of Islamic State militants would later shake this sense of security, but in the meantime the national security establishment moved on to a different threat: economic espionage. The day after Obama announced bin Laden’s death, the Pioneer contract farmer spotted a Chinese man in a cornfield in Tama County, Iowa.

  * * *

  • • •

  MARK KNEW THAT it wasn’t just computer chips and aeronautic secrets that Chinese companies coveted. In 2010, the Justice Department had charged Kexue Huang, a researcher with Dow AgroSciences, with stealing secrets related to organic pesticide production. Accused of using Dow secrets to build up pesticide manufacturing facilities in China, Huang was sentenced to seven years in prison. It followed that seed breeding might be targeted as well. With the FBI on high alert for incidents of technological theft involving China, corn theft could be a high point in Mark’s career.

  But in taking on the case, the special agent was treading into a minefield. Analysts disagreed on how Chinese intelligence was organized and whether individuals found stealing secrets from American companies were necessarily emissaries of the Chinese government. A case involving an ethnic Chinese man was also apt to trigger accusations of racial profiling. FBI leaders often maintained that they were simply following Beijing’s lead—that Chinese intelligence agencies and companies were the ones who targeted Chinese nationals, and the bureau was obligated to respond. But when cases fell apart entirely, as sometimes happened, it was harder to defend this strategy. And even the most well-meaning agent could trip up on a case involving complex science.

  FIVE

  FALL 2011

  Kevin Montgomery sat in a booth at the Texas Roadhouse, in Forsyth, Illinois, with the three men from China. This was one of the stranger job interviews he had ever experienced. It was not what he had had in mind five years earlier when, out of a job at the age of fifty, he had launched a seed consulting business. In Kevin’s experience, clients either asked direct questions about his background—Tell me about your breeding work—or posed hypothetical questions: What will you do if you run into trouble licensing a strain? The men from DBN were doing neither.

  Robert Mo, Kevin’s principal contact, sat across from him in the booth and seemed the most at ease of the three. Years in Florida had worn the hard edges off his Chinese accent, and despite his lack of standing at DBN—he was the least senior of the three—he did all the talking. But his questions struck Kevin as oddly broad, as if he were conducting a survey about the state of the American seed industry rather than hiring someone to perform a specific task. “What are the top ten seed companies in the country?” he asked Kevin. “And who are the top ten breeders?” Robert wanted an actual list.

  Next to Robert sat Dr. Li Shaoming, the man Kevin figured had the real hiring power. Dr. Li wore a coat and tie and spoke halting English, though he seemed to understand most of what was said. Every once in a while he flashed a taut grin. Next to Kevin, facing Dr. Li, was Wang Lei, Kings Nower’s mousy vice president. Wang Lei had a receding hairline and, like Robert, was dressed more casually.

  Outside, drivers turning off Route 51 cruised by the steakhouse on their way to the Hickory Point Mall. Kevin had suggested the restaurant because in his experience Chinese guests liked places where animal protein—Kevin was the sort who said “animal protein” in place of meat—was the main event. The Roadhouse satisfied that requirement and then some. Rough wooden siding lined the walls, giving the restaurant the appearance of a gargantuan log cabin. Just inside the entrance, next to an enormous portrait of some appropriated Native American chief, was a long glass display case of steaks. The place was packed with families eating rolls by the basketful and washing down one-pound cuts of corn-fed beef with bottomless sodas. Now that they were here, though, Kevin was annoyed by the twangy country music blaring on the jukebox, which made it hard for him to hear the conversation. And there was no denying that the Chinese men looked out of place.

  From a distance Kevin could be mistaken for a typical Midwestern farmer: a face of indeterminate northern European heritage, ample waistline housed in loose-fit jeans. But a closer look would reveal a pen and a notebook neatly tucked into his breast pocket. Kevin approached most situations in life as the scientist he was: with cautious deliberation. He prided himself on what he described as his photographic memo
ry.

  It was this exactitude that explained Kevin’s confusion over Robert’s top-ten questions. Kevin worried that whatever answers he did give would provide no insight into his capacity as a consultant. He blocked out the music and the diners brushing past on their way to the bathroom and parsed Robert’s queries for hidden meaning. Was Robert trying to ascertain if there was a mismatch between the best companies and the best breeders? Or did he have a preconceived notion of the best companies and want to see if Kevin’s answer matched up? Did he mean top ten by size of research staff? Sales volume? And why did he want names of other breeders? Did Robert want Kevin to lead him to another candidate, meaning that a careless answer could put him out of a job?

  “I’ll need to think about it,” Kevin said finally.

  He had been corresponding with Robert for months, and he still had no idea exactly what Robert saw in him or what his duties would be if he was hired. Kevin was interested in China and had worked with a number of Chinese seed breeders over the years, but he knew little about DBN. The Taiwanese friend who had referred him for the position knew the company by reputation only. When Robert explained in his initial approach that DBN was interested in licensing innovative hybrids from the United States, it struck Kevin as a good idea. He knew that while Chinese science on the whole was rapidly developing, China remained a few decades behind in plant breeding. Because it had little arable land, the country needed corn that could be planted in dense rows. North American varieties fit the bill, and smaller American seed companies were often happy to license their hybrids for a share of revenue from sales. It seemed perfectly plausible that DBN would try to secure a few licensing deals. Such deals took time to broker, so for Kevin the project would bring in a steady flow of work at $55 an hour.

  Before he was laid off from the seed company Golden Harvest, Kevin spent decades working as a seed breeder. He grew up on a farm near Forsyth, living and breathing corn. For entertainment as a child, he sketched out baseball diamonds on his family’s pasture and took turns with friends hitting the ball into the cornfields beyond. By age nine, he was driving a tractor solo in the summer heat perched on the edge of the seat so that his feet could reach the brakes. In his spare time, he read his father’s discarded copies of Successful Farming and Prairie Farmer. That was a different era of American farming, when small family farms dotted the plains and farmers sold their crops to local grain elevators. Kevin wanted nothing more than to be a part of it.

  In high school, he snagged his first breeding job. He spent the summer of 1973 walking cornfields wearing an apron heavy with tools, transferring pollen from the tassel of one corn plant to the ear of another. Kevin went on to major in agronomy at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. Finally, he earned a PhD from Iowa State, the mecca for corn.

  Seed breeding was his job and his passion. Kevin loved seeds the way some people loved quilting or woodworking. Being both brutally honest and unconcerned with social niceties, though, he wasn’t a great fit for the corporate world. When people didn’t grasp something that was obvious to him, he would say that enlightening them was like trying to teach calculus to horses. At the series of seed companies where he worked, this directness sometimes undercut his talent for research. His friend Craig Davis, another seed breeder, had once sent him a quote from the philosopher Bertrand Russell: “I don’t know how anyone can advocate an unpopular cause unless one is either irritating or ineffective.” The quote, Davis thought, summed up Kevin’s troubles at work; he was an effective advocate of unpopular views, and as a result he was sometimes irritating.

  Then there were the larger shifts in the seed industry that were out of his control. Kevin’s career coincided with a period of rapid consolidation in food and agriculture, when grocery store sales and meat production came to be dominated by just a handful of companies. Even in a sector where consolidation was the norm, the seed industry stood out. Concentration in seed was more rapid than in any other area of food production.

  The FBI would later maintain that the big seed companies represented the best that American ingenuity had to offer, but for Kevin the industry shifts ran counter to the spirit of innovation that had attracted him to the discipline. The larger the companies got, the more ideas were generated from the top down, and the less willing management was to experiment. Instead, Kevin felt, huge sums were wasted on ill-advised projects, simply because no one had the courage to point out exactly how bad they were.

  Throughout the 2000s, as agricultural companies grew into leviathans and their revenue increased, the percentage of sales that they spent on research and development dropped. That trend had a direct impact on breeders like Kevin. He lost his job with Golden Harvest in 2005, after the company was acquired by the Swiss seed giant Syngenta.

  Cash poor but flush with spare time, he tried to make the best of his situation. Devoting himself to his dream of backyard breeding, he began creating his own seed lines on a section of the family farm that he’d inherited from his parents. As industrial agriculture became a question of squeezing the maximum yield out of vast tracts of land, Kevin focused his efforts in a space of five acres. He was happiest when out in the fields, a dirty Chicago Cubs cap perched on his head. But still he needed money.

  A few days before the meeting at the Roadhouse, thousands of people had gathered in Zuccotti Park in New York City to protest high unemployment and bank bailouts, spawning the Occupy Wall Street movement. The U.S. economy appeared on the brink of recession, and farmers in particular were suffering. As agribusiness companies consolidated, they also integrated vertically, buying outfits up and down the supply chain, a process that squeezed the farmers at the bottom. Antitrust scholars Diana Moss and C. Robert Taylor called this consolidation “likely one of the most troubling phases in U.S. agricultural history.” Farmers like Kevin now had to pay more than twice what they had paid for commercial corn seed just a decade ago. The seed yielded more crop, but not enough to make up the difference. To generate income, the meeting at Texas Roadhouse was crucial. Kevin had to convince Robert Mo to hire him.

  Small talk didn’t come naturally to Kevin, but as a waiter took their orders, he remembered something he had heard in a career counseling course. Ask about other people’s interests. Kevin knew from the friend who introduced him that Robert’s sister was married to DBN’s billionaire CEO, and that Robert had gotten his position because of his family connections. He knew little else about him, though. “Robert, I’d like to hear about your background,” Kevin said.

  “I’m in engineering and fluid dynamics.”

  For most people, this phrase was a conversational dead end. For Kevin, whose Facebook page was littered with Richard Feynman’s lectures and a post titled “20 Jokes That Only Intellectuals Will Understand,” it lit a spark of interest. “Tell me about that,” he said, leaning in.

  Robert alluded to having a PhD and to having worked at a university in Florida. He talked about solving a certain problem in dynamic flow, a field dealing with the behavior of fluids.

  Kevin perked up. “You solved the Navier-Stokes equations?” he asked. Although the equations were commonly used in fluid mechanics, the underlying theory stumped mathematicians. The equations worked, but no one knew exactly why they worked under broad conditions. The theory was so elusive that one mathematics institute had offered a million-dollar prize to the first person who could explain the mathematics involved.

  Robert stared at Kevin in silence, as if surprised that he even understood the reference. Later Kevin would say that this was one of the few times he saw Robert speechless. “How do you know about the Navier-Stokes equations?” Robert asked.

  “Well, one of the things I do for recreational reading is math problems,” Kevin said. It sounded like a boast, but no one who knew him doubted that in his free time he actually did sit around working through equations.

  “I solved one tiny little piece of them,” Robert said. In fluid mechanics,
it was common to solve the equations for specific problems bounded by clear conditions. Kevin was nonetheless impressed. He thought he glimpsed a kindred spirit. For both Kevin and Robert, life had not worked out as planned. They were two overeducated men in middle age whom fate had propelled toward unexpected work. Years of studying thermodynamics had ill equipped Robert to deal in corn, just as years of researching corn had little prepared Kevin for the business side of seed breeding. Charmed to find himself facing a potential intellectual equal, Kevin let his doubts about the job slide. When Robert later wrote him to invite him to visit DBN’s office in Beijing, he happily accepted.

  SIX

  FALL 2011

  At the FBI’s Des Moines field office in the weeks that followed Robert’s run-in with the Polk County deputies, Mark Betten devoted himself to the budding investigation. Out the window of the brick building, he could see a vast expanse of pristine grass, with only a handful of pedestrians in sight. In many parts of Iowa, hogs outnumbered people. The question for Mark was whether Robert would take a chance on all that open land again.

  The fall harvest for commercial corn was still a few weeks away, and for a short while longer, sensitive research fields would remain conspicuously cleared, unlike the commercial fields around them, making them easy to identify. That meant that Robert and crew could freely gather inbred ears—the so-called escapes—off the ground, with the towering stalks of nearby fields providing some cover.

  Mark worried that Robert had already managed to cover significant ground on his trips to Iowa. The Monsanto field outside Bondurant where Bollman encountered him driving the getaway car was seventy miles southwest of the Tama County field where a Pioneer contract farmer had found a Chinese man digging on his knees a few months earlier.