At the field office level, the FBI was more receptive to dialogue, and individual offices started responding to requests to meet with Chinese-American community groups. In November 2018, I attended an FBI event on economic espionage in St. Paul, Minnesota, hosted by the local chapter of the Chinese American Alliance. A few dozen people sat on folding chairs in a gymnasium hung with giant red lanterns. Many kept their jackets on to insulate them from the Minnesota cold. Jeffrey Van Nest, chief division counsel for the FBI’s Minneapolis office, stood before the group, giving a lighthearted tour of FBI lore that glossed over the abuses of the Hoover years. Then he warned the audience members that they might be approached by people seeking industrial secrets for China. He went over what they should do: Tell their employers first, then go to the FBI. “We simply can’t do our job without your help,” Van Nest entreated.
His presentation was measured and respectful. He was careful not to suggest that audience members were in any way involved with technology theft. Instead, he stressed that they might find themselves approached by people with bad intentions.
But the FBI had not altered its messaging at the highest levels, and when Van Nest broke for questions, a man in the audience asked whether the bureau had played a role in rounding up Japanese Americans during World War II. More than 120,000 people had been interned in camps, the majority of them U.S. citizens. Van Nest claimed that the FBI had not been involved, eliding the bureau’s role in arresting nearly 1,300 Japanese Americans in the days after the Pearl Harbor bombing. But I was more struck by the man’s question, and the fact that he had asked it at this event. He seemed to be suggesting that internment could happen again, this time with Chinese Americans. As tensions between China and the United States escalated, I came to understand his apprehension.
By then the FBI crackdown had spread to universities and research institutions, as the bureau worked with the U.S. National Institutes of Health to address fears that China was taking advantage of federally funded research. For years, the Chinese government had tried to recruit ethnic Chinese scientists by offering lucrative grants and incentives for those who returned. The most well known of these programs was called Thousand Talents. Scientists often accepted the money and took short trips to China to visit friends and relatives while keeping their jobs at U.S. institutions. Some reported the Chinese grants. Others did not—a clear violation of NIH policy. In a handful of cases, grant recipients took technologies back to China, prompting the NIH and FBI to view the talent programs not as double-dipping vacation plans but as a path for U.S.-based scientists to set up “shadow labs” overseas. After working closely with the FBI to identify perpetrators, the NIH sent out letters to more than sixty institutions, asking them to investigate researchers who were suspected of violating agency policy. One of these institutions was MD Anderson, where Robert had received cancer treatment.
In November 2017, the center’s administrators gave the FBI access to the network accounts of twenty-three employees. A week later, two senior researchers were marched out of their offices and put on administrative leave. They lost access to their research teams, email accounts, and labs. More scientists were put on leave soon after.
Months of confusion ensued. The FBI installed a video camera near the office of one Chinese-born researcher. After investigators examined copies of his devices and found images they claimed were suspicious, he was charged in state court with possession of child pornography. But then, ten months later, the charges were dropped after his lawyer proved that the images in question did not in fact depict minors.
In the end, MD Anderson invoked termination proceedings with three researchers, two of whom resigned before they could be fired. Other scientists left under a cloud of suspicion or simply because the atmosphere had grown too toxic.
When I flew to Houston in the wake of the investigations, I found a campus roiled by fear. The lavender-hued halls labeled with flower names that Robert had encountered during his treatment did little to soothe researchers’ worries.
I placed public information requests seeking documents from MD Anderson connected to the FBI investigation. Weeks of wrangling ensued. In one surreal response, an MD Anderson lawyer asked me to define the word “between.” Instead of releasing the requested documents, administrators gave a handful of redacted investigative files to another reporter, Todd Ackerman of the Houston Chronicle.
Ackerman and I decided to team up. The files he had received suggested that several of the researchers had violated NIH policy, for example by sharing papers under review with people not authorized to see them. But they also showed that in carrying out the inquiries, MD Anderson administrators had wide discretion and seemed determined to find nefarious intent where there was none. In one case, a Chinese-born researcher kept up a flirtatious correspondence with a former postdoctoral fellow of his who had moved back to China. As a favor to her, he filled out a Thousand Talents application to work in Beijing. But he never completed the application process, nor did he receive any payment from the Chinese host institution. (Researchers at MD Anderson were allowed to participate in foreign research programs as long as they reported the income and affiliation.) The center’s ethics and compliance officer concluded that because the scientist had offered his services, it was “immaterial” whether he was actually paid.
After Ackerman and I published our stories, MD Anderson administrators called a town hall meeting for faculty. Someone later passed me an audio recording of the event. One researcher asked administrators whether “an increasingly xenophobic and isolationist” federal government was prompting MD Anderson to act rashly. “How can you—and I plead, please—reassure all of our employees that we as an institution and academia are not being manipulated as part of a centralized policy to practice and to act in ways that are diametrically opposite to our core values?” he asked.
“Really excellent point,” an administrator responded. “We follow due process.”
Ethnic Chinese researchers at other institutions soon lost their jobs as well. Some were deported. Scholars warned of a coming nationwide purge. Soon it emerged that the FBI was urging U.S. universities to monitor students from select Chinese research institutions, and even interviewing Americans on study-abroad programs in China.
The researchers who departed MD Anderson in the wake of the crackdown included tenured professors who made sizable salaries, along with the institution’s vice president for research. Several took jobs at elite universities in China. A number of affected scientists had technically violated NIH policy, but their punishments seemed out of sync with their offenses. The crackdown was also highly counterproductive. “These are the top talents that foreign countries have been trying to recruit unsuccessfully,” said Steven Pei, an engineering professor at another institution in Houston. “MD Anderson is helping foreign countries to accomplish what they could not do by themselves.”
In an effort to bolster its Chinese patient population, in fact, MD Anderson’s administration had spent years cultivating ties to the Chinese government. In 2015, China’s State Council gave the institution an International Science and Technology Cooperation Award, in a ceremony attended by Xi Jinping. In 2017, an MD Anderson vice president flew to Beijing to meet with the director of the State Administration of Foreign Expert Affairs, the very agency that administers the Thousand Talents program. But when the crackdown came, administrators purged ethnic Chinese scientists while offering little explanation to the broader academic community—a move that, in the global battle for talent, played neatly into the Chinese government’s hands.
* * *
• • •
INVESTIGATIONS OFTEN HAVE unintended consequences. The stress of seeing a son arrested for drug possession might propel a father to start drinking. In seeking justice in court, a victim of a violent attack might have to relive a horrifying episode. But the investigation of Robert Mo had a particularly ironic footnote. Brought in the name of protecting
agricultural innovation, it ended up hurting an American farmer.
After selling Robert six bags of seed, Iowa seed dealer Joel Thomas cooperated with the FBI, spending hours answering questions about the transaction at Crossroads Ag. Prosecutors prepped him to be a witness if the case went to trial. But then Pioneer management learned that Thomas had sold seed without a tech agreement on file. The company revoked his dealer permit. Without a license, he managed to remain in business only by cutting in a middleman, which meant giving another dealer a slice of his revenue.
“It’s a corporate deal,” he told me. We were in the warehouse behind Crossroads Ag. Thomas wore a Carhartt work shirt and jeans, and as he spoke he leaned on the bed of his pickup truck, a Big Gulp soda at his side. Once it came out that Robert had managed to buy Pioneer seed to send back to China, he said, the company needed someone to blame. “Everything goes downhill, and I’m at the bottom. They have to have somebody to throw under the bus.”
Thomas said that when Robert was arrested, an FBI agent called him to say that in the long run the investigation would prove its worth, by deterring trade secrets theft. Thomas didn’t buy it. He was a Trump supporter, and he wasn’t particularly attuned to arguments about racial bias. His comments were among the factors that prompted Judge Rose to ban unnecessary mention of Robert’s ethnicity and nationality at trial. But he was skeptical that the investigation would ultimately prevent the leakage of secrets. “The FBI thought they won,” he said. “I don’t think so.” He had heard that in China counterfeit Pioneer seed was still everywhere.
He added: “I’d hate to guess how much taxpayer money they spent on this.”
THIRTY-NINE
SPRING 2018
Plastic coyotes stalked the lawn at Butner Low Federal Correctional Institution, scaring away any geese that might contemplate making the prison their home. Two-dimensional and tinged a brownish orange, the decoys were frozen into position—backs arched, yellow eyes wide, mouths open in a menacing grin. To give some semblance of movement, they pivoted on stakes protruding from their bellies, swiveling frantically with every gust of wind. Before he ordered the fake predators from Amazon, the warden fought a constant battle against goose droppings in his quest to keep the lawn clean for visitors. Now the birds stayed on the other side of the towering barbed-wire fence, where stark institutional design gave way to the forested hills of North Carolina.
“Best forty dollars I ever spent,” the warden told me.
The warden walked on, and a correctional officer led me deeper into the prison. A heavy glass door thudded behind us, then another. I entered a large room filled with overturned chairs. To one side were vending machines stocked with overpriced soda and snacks. In the center of the room, a thick glass door opened onto a patio that held a cluster of picnic tables. In the distance, I glimpsed coils of razor wire.
A guard sat on a platform high above the space, inspecting her nails. I started to wonder about this uniformed woman in a prison full of men, but my thoughts were interrupted when a correctional officer escorted in Robert Mo.
He smiled weakly. The officer led us into a small room that held two tables and two plastic chairs. On one of the tables was an unplugged monitor, the screen turned to face the wall. The carpet was strewn with litter. A window in the door enabled guards to look in.
“Should I leave it open?” the officer asked. The subtext was Are you comfortable being alone with him, with this man who has stolen corn?
I said that he could close it.
We sat down. I had first made eye contact with Robert at his sentencing as he walked into court. He didn’t know me then, and yet he flashed me a smile. I remembered reflecting on how confident he appeared, given that he was about to receive a prison sentence. For months afterward we corresponded on CorrLinks, the federal prison email system. Now that I finally faced him, I could see that he was a slight man, with teeth stained a yellowish brown.
He wore khaki prison garb emblazoned with 04617–104. He had answered to several names over the course of his life. First the man born Mo Tian had become Hailong, then Robert. Now he was reduced to eight digits.
When Robert began serving his sentence in January 2017, he told me, he vowed to make the best of a difficult situation. The trial was finally behind him. So was the stress of working for Dr. Li. Prison entailed a lot of waiting—waiting in line for lunch, waiting in line for medication, waiting for the guards to complete the hourly inmate check. But the rest of the time he was unencumbered. Gone were the worries about ballooning medical and legal bills. Gone were the pressures that came with his job: sourcing swine feed at competitive rates, brokering international acquisitions and licensing agreements, breaking the law.
Butner Low is part of the Butner Federal Medical Center complex, and its inmates have either serious health conditions or lawyers powerful enough to argue persuasively that they are ill. Some call it Club Fed. The hedge fund manager Bernie Madoff was incarcerated at another prison in the complex, and for a while Matthew Kluger, a charismatic corporate lawyer convicted of insider trading, also served time at Butner Low. Robert won assignment to the institution because of his cancer. For his checkups he had access to oncologists from Wake Forest and Duke universities. As far as prisons went, it could be much worse.
Every morning he went for a jog around the yard. He played chess and ping-pong with other inmates, and he wrote poems about his incarceration in the Tang dynasty style. One poem, “Exile March of the Penal Battalion,” began: “Look back upon three years of wind and rain—dense and deep.”
At Butner Low there were two other Chinese inmates of around Robert’s age, both of them scientists who had also once led middle-class American existences. One was Greg Chung, the Boeing researcher convicted of stealing secrets connected to the Delta IV rocket. Chung was perhaps the most famous economic espionage perpetrator in recent history, and he and Robert had become fast friends. They talked about Chinese history and poetry, leaving the stories of their cases undiscussed. As Robert saw it, they were two men of culture, brought together far from their birthplace by the Economic Espionage Act.
* * *
• • •
THERE IS A FAMOUS SCENE in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in which Cary Grant’s character ends up in a Midwestern field, ducking between stalks of corn as a crop duster dive-bombs him from above. North by Northwest is about mistaken identity; the man in the field is either a government spook or a man for whom things have gone terribly wrong. As I wrapped up my research, I realized that Robert’s case embodied a similar ambiguity. It was a Rorschach test for views on the Chinese technology threat. In the inkblot of the corn seed case, one person might see an imminent national security threat. Another might see an instance of corporate influence gone awry. As tensions escalated, though, it became harder for some in the U.S. government to come away with anything except the most heinous interpretation.
In December 2016, shortly after he was elected as president, Donald Trump appointed Terry Branstad as ambassador to China. The appointment smacked of political favor trading. As the governor of Iowa, a crucial primary state, Branstad had stood behind Trump throughout his presidential campaign. Still, people in both parties saw Branstad’s appointment as a wise move. His decades-long friendship with Xi Jinping, they hoped, would help him advance American interests in China. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman hailed the governor as “an old friend of the Chinese people,” and at his confirmation hearing Branstad vowed to work hard to open up Chinese markets to more U.S. agricultural goods. But it wasn’t long before U.S.-China policy was pulled in multiple directions.
Soon after Branstad’s appointment, Trump appointed as trade adviser Peter Navarro, an economist who had authored books titled Death by China and The Coming China Wars. In March 2018, White House aide Stephen Miller pushed internally for a ban on all students from China, citing concerns about spying. According to the Financial Times, th
e plan was dropped only after Branstad faced off with Miller in the Oval Office, arguing that a ban would hurt states like Iowa, where universities needed large numbers of Chinese students paying full tuition in order to stay afloat. Trump nonetheless seemed to have internalized the message. Over dinner at his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, he told a group of CEOs, in a thinly veiled reference to China, that “almost every student that comes over to this country is a spy.”
Meanwhile, the White House announced plans for tariffs on $60 billion worth of Chinese goods. “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Trump tweeted in March 2018. “Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore—we win big. It’s easy!”
Beijing fought back with its own tariffs. A headline on Xinhua’s website read CHINA IS NOT AFRAID. Among the retaliatory tariffs levied by China was a 25 percent tax on soybeans and corn imported from the United States. When the measures finally took hold, it was clear that farmers in Iowa—the same people who helped to elect Trump—would be hard hit. According to a study from Iowa State University, Iowa’s corn and soy industries stood to lose hundreds of millions in revenue a year. On trips home to Iowa, Ambassador Branstad tried to quell anxiety, urging farmers to take the long view of the situation. But it was hard to stay calm when Corn & Soybean Digest warned that grain prices would continue to slide as China looked elsewhere for cheaper crops.
The Scientist and the Spy Page 21