As he started the investigation, the FBI agent had only the vaguest notion of what corn breeding involved. His own state of Nebraska was home to the Cornhuskers football team, but his calling was not in agriculture. The Air Force had taken him as a young man to a base in Germany, and the various roles he assumed before joining the FBI—prison guard, military lawyer—had only led him further from the farm. Like most Americans, he could not explain the difference between inbred and hybrid seed. But in his research he soon learned more. Behind hybrid corn seed was a fascinating origin story—and one that closely tracked with the rise of industrial agriculture.
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IN THE BEGINNING, corn—Zea mays—was a uniquely New World plant, cultivated and in some cases worshipped for thousands of years by societies throughout the Americas. The Aztecs believed that the world was created five times. In the first four rounds, humans ate nuts and seeds, and the Earth was destroyed by a mixture of natural disasters and divine intervention. Then, in the final round, the gods gave man corn, and humanity endured.
When Christopher Columbus came across the remarkable New World grain, he, too, was in awe. Corn could be consumed without being threshed, milled, or kneaded, which counted for a lot in the centuries before processed foods. In 1493, Columbus wrote with excitement to Queen Isabella’s court about ears as thick as a man’s arm, with kernels “affixed by nature in a wondrous manner and in form and size like garden peas, white when young.” The settlers who followed brought wheat and apples and notions of vanquishing what came before them. But it was corn that ended up saving them from starvation. A botanical curiosity and culinary wonder, corn spread around the world nearly as rapidly as syphilis, another New World introduction.
Among grains, corn has the unusual feature of being monoecious, meaning that it has male and female sex organs housed separately on the same plant. In a young corn plant, the male is contained in the yellow tassel that crowns the stalk, and the female halfway down the stalk in the ear shoot, a nub covered with tiny ovules and soft silk. In the absence of human involvement, corn sex is a straightforward affair. When the time is right, the tassel sheds millions of grains of pollen, which are carried by the wind onto the ear shoot’s silk. The silk transports the pollen to the ovules, which in time grow into kernels.
For centuries, farmers simply left corn plants to wind pollinate and then harvested the results. Sometimes the pollen from the male tassel would drift to the silk of a neighboring plant. Other times it would fall downward to the female silk of the plant that spawned it, resulting in the corn equivalent of kissing cousins, or what’s called an inbred. Then, in 1926, in a Des Moines basement, Henry A. Wallace founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company, which would become Pioneer Hi-Bred and finally DuPont Pioneer. Researchers had by then shown that by crossing two inbreds, or pollinating the female part of one inbred with the male part of another, they could produce a crop that was both predictable and robust. It was these crosses that Wallace brought to market as hybrid corn—and versions of these crosses that were being bred in the Pioneer and Monsanto fields where Robert was found.
Traditionally, farmers had saved seed at harvest to replant the next year, a practice known as brown bagging. Sophisticated hybrids produced quality corn for only one season, so there was no use in keeping seed from one season to the next. But farmers might pay for it year after year, Wallace figured, if it improved their yields. There was precedent in the mule, a sterile animal that is nonetheless hardy and extremely useful.
Hybrid corn seed proved incredibly lucrative, at least for the executives who sat at the top of seed companies. As the Dust Bowl swept through America in the 1930s, the new hybrid varieties were more resistant to drought, and they produced a uniform height that made them much kinder on modern farm machines. Enthusiasts compared corn to a “self-building food-factory” that was “governed by advanced business methods.” Hybrid corn became one of the first true industrial foods. Wallace, meanwhile, became secretary of agriculture and later vice president under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in an early example of the revolving door between government and agribusiness. Reflecting on the changes he set in motion, Wallace later wrote, “No plant has changed so fast in so short a time as has corn in the hands of the white man.”
But more change was on the horizon. In the 1970s, scientists began experimenting with inserting small amounts of DNA from other organisms into seeds, producing varieties that could withstand certain weed killers or fight off pests. For DuPont and Monsanto, which were then primarily chemical companies, the new seeds were a potential gold mine. DuPont marketed a popular insecticide called Lannate, and Monsanto sold the weed killer Roundup. In 1997, DuPont purchased a 20 percent stake in Pioneer Hi-Bred, and two years later it bought the remainder for $7.7 billion. Around the same time, Monsanto acquired the seed company DeKalb. The companies soon controlled both the sale of genetically modified seeds and the products used to treat them.
In the years that followed, DuPont and Monsanto bought up so many small seed companies that people in the industry began passing around a bubble diagram in which the megafirms were represented by two large red circles, with spokes linking them to dozens of tiny acquisitions. Often the new owners kept the small seed companies’ names, so that many farmers did not even realize that their preferred brand had been acquired. Because the conglomerates also produced the pesticides that were sprayed on transgenic seeds, they had powerful incentive to insert genes into more and more seed lines. Soon nearly 90 percent of hybrid corn grown in the United States was genetically modified. Transgenic seeds might have been the product of American ingenuity, but they also became a symbol of corporate consolidation in agriculture. At the time of Mark’s meeting with DuPont Pioneer, the big four seed companies—Monsanto, Pioneer, Dow AgroSciences, and Syngenta—controlled 80 percent of the lucrative global seed market.
Monsanto was particularly aggressive. The company patented the gene that ensured resistance to Roundup, or glyphosate. Glyphosate kills a broad spectrum of plants, and the gene ensured that the corn survived while the weeds withered. Any competitors that wanted to use the gene to make so-called Roundup Ready seed lines needed to license it from Monsanto. Observers sometimes likened this to Microsoft’s licensing Windows to other PC manufacturers; Monsanto profited both from its own seed lines and from selling a gene widely used by its competitors. The tactic was so successful that by 2009 Monsanto genes, or traits, were inserted into 80 percent of all corn grown in the United States—a fact that enabled the company to raise prices at will.
That same year, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division launched a probe into Monsanto’s practices. Previous administrations had been too lax, declared chief antitrust enforcer Christine Varney, and “the ultimate result is that consumers are harmed through higher prices, reduced product variety, and slower innovation.” She added, “We must change course.” The investigation followed on independent probes of the St. Louis–based corporation by several state attorneys general, including Iowa’s. While the Antitrust Division began other investigations around the same time, the Monsanto inquiry inspired special excitement. “Of all the new scrutiny by Justice, the Monsanto investigation might have the highest stakes, dealing as it does with the food supply and one of the nation’s largest agricultural firms,” noted The Washington Post.
In 2010, the Justice Department and U.S. Department of Agriculture convened a workshop on competition in agriculture in Ankeny, Iowa. The town housed a Monsanto research facility, but that did not soften attitudes of farmers who showed up to complain of high prices and a lack of choice in seed selection. “When I started farming thirty-four years ago, there were fifty seed companies,” said Minnesota farmer Fred Bower, who worked as a seed dealer on the side. “At the present time there are four.” As a result, he added, people were made to pay “through the nose for seed.” Another lamented, “I agree we need GMO technology, but the products the companies are bringing to t
he marketplace are not the products needed to feed the world. They are all about company profits.”
Intellectual property protections are ostensibly about promoting innovation, but in taking on the Monsanto probe, the Antitrust Division signaled that such protections could also be used to drive out competition. Opponents of genetically modified seeds and environmental activists had long abhorred Monsanto. Now the company came under fire for its business practices as well.
But Monsanto’s cooperation was critical to another arm of the Justice Department: the National Security Division, which worked closely with the FBI as it developed economic espionage investigations. The FBI’s goal with such cases was to nail people who stole intellectual property, not expose extortionist business practices. And even if Monsanto bullied farmers and rival seed producers, when it came to Robert Mo, the company was the victim—if one unlikely to win sympathy from many farmers.
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TO SUCCEED AT DERIVING Monsanto’s and Pioneer’s seed lines, Mark learned, DBN would need to obtain both inbred parents for each seed line it targeted—the male and the female. To get the female, DBN could use a reverse-engineering technique called chasing the self. This depends on the fact that a small amount of female inbred seed makes it into each bag of commercial hybrid seed. To chase the self, a rival company could purchase a bag of seed, plant it out, and then scrutinize the crop for differences in growth. The stalks produced by rogue female inbreds are noticeably shorter. If the rival company could also find a way to obtain the male inbred, the seeds from the female inbreds could then be used to re-create the hybrid. If seed breeding is a code, chasing the self is a step toward cracking it.
But procuring male inbred seed is difficult, because there is no obvious way to do it discreetly. An aspiring industrial spy could either dig it out of the soil, as the DBN employees had been caught doing at the Pioneer field in the spring, or wait until harvest and roam mowed-down test fields looking for full-grown ears lying on the ground, as Wang Lei had apparently done at the Monsanto plot outside Bondurant.
Whatever method the men used, it was clear that they were busy collecting seed. In late September, after Mark had been investigating him for a few weeks, Robert hauled fifteen packages into a local UPS store and addressed them to his home in Boca Raton. The boxes weighed in at 341 pounds, and the shipping costs came to $1,152.97. He labeled the contents CORN SAMPLES.
SEVEN
FALL 2011
As the autumn days grew shorter and the nights longer, Robert drove Dr. Li and Wang Lei across the Midwest through forgotten towns with clapboard main streets. They passed diners that served sandwiches smothered in Thousand Island dressing, drinking establishments with neon signs in their windows that said simply BAR, and corn paraphernalia of all kinds. Iowa claimed the cornfield from the film Field of Dreams, the world’s second-largest popcorn ball, and a ten-foot-tall rotating sculpture modeled after an ear of corn. Normally Robert enjoyed Midwestern kitsch. On one slow day in Iowa he had taken a break to tour the bridges of Madison County, the second-rate tourist destination made famous by the 1990s novel and subsequent movie. He was no longer easily cheered, though.
His companions frustrated him. Somehow Dr. Li and Wang Lei knew everything back in China, and yet they were clueless once they set foot in America. Robert found himself easily losing patience.
And driving through farm country, it was hard not to notice the creative renditions of American flags everywhere—painted on the sides of businesses, adorning old packing crates, embroidered on denim jackets. They were part of the landscape, just like the billboards arguing that abortion was murder and that guns were a civil right. At one point, he drove near the town of Pekin, so named because its founders imagined that if they dug straight through the Earth they would get to China. Until 1980, Pekin High School’s teams were called the Chinks. Fans cheered to the sound of a clashing gong.
Robert was proud of his capacity to go anywhere and get along with anyone. He did not feel that his interactions with the people he met in Iowa and Illinois were marred by racism or xenophobia. But as tensions with China rose, ethnic Chinese living in the United States increasingly faced questions about their loyalty. Robert sensed that for some Americans, the people of China were inseparable from leaders in Beijing, and that when these Americans looked at him, they saw a stuffy Communist apparatchik rather than a suburban dad. At one point, a farmer asked Robert if he was working for the Chinese government.
Robert was offended. Although he had not bothered to get U.S. citizenship, he had two children who were U.S. citizens, and in some ways he felt fully American. And while DBN and Kings Nower enjoyed a close relationship with the Chinese government, on paper at least they were privately held businesses. His work for DBN was simply a job, he maintained.
And yet Robert admitted that his was a job with increasingly strange duties. As time passed, he grew superstitious about the forays into cornfields to collect corn. “If God wants you to go into the field, He will not put a man there,” Robert told Wang Lei one day. “If He doesn’t want you to go into the field, He will put a man there.” And now God had put a man there. Twice.
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OF ALL THE SPY FICTION Robert read as a child, his favorite stories were the ones starring Sherlock Holmes. Back then he knew the detective only as Xialuoke Fu'ermosi, which was a phonetic approximation of Holmes’s name in Mandarin. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales first came to China in 1896, when four of his stories were translated into Chinese and published in a popular newspaper. After the Communist Revolution, they were mostly spared from censorship by a Maoist reinterpretation: Holmes fought the evils spawned by rapacious foreign capitalists. As a result, translations of Doyle’s works were available even in remote villages like Daichi. Robert devoured the tales of the private detective using logic and forensic science to ingeniously solve crimes.
He dreamed of applying a similar empiricism to life, of perhaps one day becoming a scientist. To achieve that end, he spent long hours observing rabbits and studying flowers. He collected cement bags and copper debris and tied them to a Forever bicycle that was too large for his child’s body, then pedaled to the local recycling station to sell his haul. In the process, he learned about the properties of various metals.
Now here he was again, collecting specimens in the field, replaying scenes from his youth on a different continent. In a way, he had become Xialuoke Fu'ermosi: Robert versus the rapacious foreign capitalists.
In China, Pioneer and Monsanto were often the object of public ire. Not long after genetically modified crops were first unveiled in the United States, the Chinese government set aside funding for research, seeing the new grains as a possible answer to China’s food supply problems. By the 2010s, though, sentiment had shifted. A series of food safety scandals made consumers reluctant to accept genetically modified foods. Conspiracy theories about Monsanto and Pioneer lived large. Some believed the agribusiness companies’ seeds were biological weapons that the United States aimed to use against China. Others saw transgenic crops as a Pentagon-led effort to control the global food supply and jeopardize China’s food security. In 2010, a newspaper owned by the state news agency Xinhua alleged that Pioneer 335, the conventional seed the company had developed for the Chinese market, was in fact a genetically modified product that was killing rats and pigs. Because such misinformation bred suspicion of foreign companies, the Chinese government mostly allowed it to fester uncensored. Greenpeace, an anti-GMO organization that might otherwise have had a difficult time operating in China, set up a Beijing office and staged radical stunts that included stealing seed from research fields. The Chinese government had initially banned the sale of genetically modified seeds as a protectionist move, allowing the import from the United States and elsewhere of only a few select seed lines. But when disputes about foreign imports or market access arose, anti-GMO sentiment bec
ame a convenient crutch.
Many observers of the Chinese seed industry expected the ban to eventually be lifted, but no one knew exactly when. Food issues were so cloaked in secrecy in China that even the size of grain stockpiles was considered a state secret. In the meantime, Robert knew that the country’s dependence on imported grains was deeply troubling to Chinese leaders. China had close to the same number of acres of corn in production as the United States, but those acres yielded far less crop per acre, and its population was much larger. As a result, China was the world’s top importer of corn and soy, with much of its supply coming from the United States.
Leaders worried that as Chinese people grew wealthier, eating more meat and triggering demand for still more corn, the country would need to lean on imports even more. If tensions with the United States ever rose, American politicians could simply cut off China’s supply of grain. There were other countries that supplied corn, like Ukraine and Chile, but an American exit would drive up global prices.
The Chinese government also had urgent concerns about other technologies. Leaders did not want the United States controlling the 5G mobile communications network or the semiconductor industry. But anxiety about the grain supply was an existential concern that even the most geriatric member of China’s ruling Politburo could grasp. Economic growth in China had led to a yawning income gap that could spark rural unrest. Improving crop quality was critical to raising farmers’ incomes. Like the FBI, leaders in Beijing equated food security with national security.
For them, hope lay in China’s $16 billion domestic seed industry. If the country’s thousands of companies could be whittled down to a few industry leaders, and those outfits could rapidly improve their seed lines, perhaps they could compete with the likes of Pioneer and Monsanto—and the Chinese government could legalize genetically modified crops without handing over the market to foreign firms. In an effort to speed up the process, the agriculture ministry began encouraging mergers and acquisitions and favoring some companies over others.
The Scientist and the Spy Page 5