The Scientist and the Spy

by Mara Hvistendahl

  As the trade war halted the shipment of hundreds of millions of bushels, grain elevators across the Midwest overflowed with corn and soy. Elevator managers held on to the crop until the spring, hoping that it would stay fresh long enough to be sold then. In the meantime, lower spending from farmers rippled across the economy, leading to an estimated $1 billion to $2 billion decline in Iowa’s $190 billion gross domestic product. That meant less money for schools, parks, and infrastructure. Even before the tariffs, farmers in the Midwest had struggled to stay afloat. The Trump administration unveiled bailout packages totaling $30 billion in aid, but when the bailout checks were issued, some corn growers got less than $5. Much of the money went to large agricultural companies.

  Soon Branstad waded in again, this time to turn attention back to the crime of Robert Mo. “Many Iowans remember the case in which a Chinese agent attempted to literally steal the seed corn from our fields,” he wrote in an op-ed in The Des Moines Register. It was true that industrial espionage was among the justifications Trump gave for placing tariffs on Chinese goods, and that the tariffs had spawned the retaliatory trade actions that led to Iowans’ suffering. Ultimately, though, the trade war affected farmers much more acutely than did the theft of a few Pioneer seed lines. Some began to worry that as Trump obsessed over winning the trade war, he had lost sight of the concerns that prompted the tariffs in the first place.

  There was talk of protracted conflict. As the Trump administration took on the Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei, pressuring U.S. allies not to partner with the company on construction of 5G infrastructure, some corporate executives spotted an opportunity to use the conflict to their advantage. On Capitol Hill, tech company representatives cited Chinese controls on information to argue against regulating them. If we don’t allow our tech companies to remain large and unregulated, this argument went, China will win the tech cold war. It was a race to the bottom.

  No one now talked of breaking up big agriculture. Dow and DuPont had clinched their merger in 2017, becoming DowDuPont. Soon afterward, Trump picked a former Dow executive to lead research at the USDA. In June 2018, meanwhile, Bayer closed a $66 billion deal to buy Monsanto. As part of the acquisition, executives decided that the Monsanto name would finally be ditched. That was an unusual move in the acquisition of an established firm, but for all the money Monsanto had spent on lobbying, it had long ago lost the battle for the public’s support. An already abysmal reputation had become worse in 2015, when the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a cancer agency affiliated with the World Health Organization, determined that Roundup was a probable carcinogen. The company was being hit with lawsuits by farmers and gardeners who alleged that exposure to the herbicide had given them cancer. A new name was probably an asset.

  More significant for the war on industrial espionage, the deal also meant that the company the Justice Department had worked so hard to protect was no longer even American. “Monsanto appreciated all of the efforts that were taken by the U.S. Government to protect intellectual property,” a spokeswoman for Bayer wrote me after the merger. “Innovations in the agriculture sector help provide abundant, affordable, and safe food for our growing world.”

  * * *

  • • •

  IN PRISON, ROBERT READ Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese classic. The winding twenty-eight-hundred-page epic details the Jia clan’s descent from wealth. Rife with power struggles, love affairs, and infighting among servants, it is like a Chinese Downton Abbey. Robert told me that he loved the vividness of its images, the playful double meanings.

  But one of the book’s themes is loss. A song that is central to the plot contains the lines:

  Like a great building’s tottering crash,

  Like flickering lampwick burned to ash,

  Your scene of happiness concludes in grief:

  For worldly bliss is always insecure and brief.

  If his case was a tragedy, Robert saw himself as the hero. He spoke of the irony in industrial agriculture: Soybeans originally came from China, but then due to accidents of history and trade, the major seed companies gained control of the crop and made money selling the seeds back to China. What was the soybean but another of the Middle Kingdom’s inventions for which it never collected royalties? Wasn’t corn, on the other hand, a public good? He talked of the imperial envoy Zhang Qian, who in the second century B.C.E. brought corn seeds back to China from overseas. In China he was celebrated. Perhaps in the United States he would have been vilified.

  I had heard from others that Robert had a flair for hyperbole, and in person he did not disappoint. The story surrounding his case was the work of an “evil mastermind,” he told me. Although he had never been one to decry racism in American culture, he now saw it everywhere. “No consequence for law enforcement personnel to lie, especially for serving the purpose of evilizing Chinese,” he said.

  The Trump administration helped reinforce this worldview. Months after we met, State Department director of policy planning Kiron Skinner warned that China was a special foe. “This is the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian,” she said. The Justice Department announced a project called the China Initiative, promising even more emphasis on economic espionage prosecutions. Meanwhile, a cast of right-wing Trump administration characters, including former adviser Steve Bannon, revived the Cold War group Committee on the Present Danger. In the 1970s and 1980s, committee members had railed against the Soviet Union. Now the enemy was China, and the group’s approach involved mingling national security concerns with xenophobia. The committee’s website warned of the Chinese Communist Party’s “control, domination and exploitation of Chinese diaspora communities,” a message with echoes of earlier national security alarmism. A vice chair of the committee, Frank Gaffney, had founded a think tank that argued that American Muslims are part of a “stealth jihad.”

  Justice in the United States was truly a qipa, Robert told me sarcastically, a rare and beautiful flower. Qipa is one of those words that has come to connote the very opposite of its literal meaning. People typically use it to describe something weird and repugnant.

  In the small visitation room at Butner, I asked Robert if he had any regrets. He said that if he could do everything over again, he would not have protested in the streets in 1989. The events of the preceding years had eroded his faith in democracy. Now more than ever, he was nagged by the feeling that he should have gone to work for DBN straightaway. This way he could have avoided his years in the United States. In this alternative vision of his life, he would have been a man firmly in one country. Instead, he became a pawn in an international struggle, pulled between two places.

  The correctional officer opened the door to announce that our time was up. I scribbled a few last notes and closed my notebook, then filed out of the room behind Robert. We said an awkward good-bye, and then he was led back through the yard, to the other side.

  In January 2019, Robert wrote me that his sentence was almost completed and he would soon be deported. In the weeks that followed, he sent me periodic updates. First, he was shuttled onto a bus to a federal prison in Atlanta. He stayed there for a week and was then taken to an institution in Tallahassee, Florida, closer to his family but still distant from the suburban comforts that had once characterized his life in America. He complained about the food. “Baloney almost a whole week long,” read one email. But he seemed resigned. He told me that he used the time to refine his poems. One titled “Snow” read:

  Lonely flowers braided from rain

  A lofty heart loathes how low the firmament stoops.

  Where once were white petals, innocent and pure,

  Now wither and fall, ground into the mud.

  That March, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appeared at the World Food Prize building, flanked by Terry Branstad, to speak to members of the Iowa Farm Bureau. He talked of agricultural breakthroughs that ha
d arisen out of American creativity, adding that China now threatened these innovations. “A few years ago,” he said, “an Iowa farm security guard saw something suspicious in a field and stopped to investigate. He caught a Chinese national digging in the dirt.” A few months later, Robert’s wife, Carolyn, told me that he was awaiting deportation at an immigration detention facility in Folkston, Georgia, operated by the private corporation GEO Group. Carolyn said she had no idea how long he would be there or when he would be deported. His only task was to wait.

  Maybe someday Robert will write me from the safety of Beijing. Once back in China, he told me, he planned to write a book about the qipa that was the U.S. justice system. The first time he was shackled to another inmate and transported across state lines, he was taken through an obscure section of Miami International Airport. In the distance, he glimpsed the terminal used by businesspeople and families, the one that he had flown out of so many times on his trips to Iowa and Beijing. He wanted to share with readers the way he felt on that day—the strange sensation that he was living in an underground world. He planned to call the book Catch That Chinese Spy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is built on the kindness and patient assistance of many people. First, I owe thanks to Robert Mo, Mark Betten, Jason Griess, and Kevin Montgomery for giving their time to answer questions about minute details. In addition to telling his own story, Kevin spent many hours explaining farming and corn breeding concepts to me. I also appreciate the assistance of the friends and family members of Robert and Kevin who spoke with me or otherwise assisted with the project, including Robert’s wife, Carolyn Li.

  I thank Ling Woo Liu, who early in my reporting shared her family’s story and suggested seeking more information about the FBI’s Chinese scientist program. The FBI’s response to my Freedom of Information Act request was incomplete, and I am indebted to the team of attorneys at Arnold & Porter who took on my case pro bono and helped me appeal it: Murad Hussain, Amanda Sherwood, and Stuart Turner. I am hopeful that we may still obtain more documents.

  Nelson Dong, Brian Sun, the Xi family, and Peter Zeidenberg helped me understand the issues at stake with prosecutorial overreach. I also thank Aryani Ong and Steven Pei for assistance in reporting on the NIH crackdown, and Peter Toren for help in understanding the history of the Economic Espionage Act. I spoke with many other attorneys on background, and I am grateful for their assistance.

  A special thanks to the experts who assisted me with the technical aspects of the manuscript: Abigail Coplin with the Chinese seed industry and Forrest Sondahl with the Navier-Stokes equations. A stroke of good luck came early on when Julian Snelder mailed me from Hong Kong a thick file of newspaper clippings that he had collected over the years. I also appreciate his comments on an early draft. Peter Mattis’s writing on economic espionage and Zuoyue Wang’s scholarship on transnational science in the Cold War era were indispensable. Zuoyue kindly provided me with primary source material on Tsien Hsue-Shen and carefully reviewed a draft of the manuscript. Any lingering errors are mine.

  Over the course of my reporting I spoke with many people whom I did not quote by name. These include a host of experts and businesspeople with invaluable China expertise: Greg Austin, Benjamin Bai, Huang Dafang, Cameron Johnson, Lu Chuanying, Jim MacGregor, Bill McCahill, Maxime Oliva, Caroline Pan, Carly Ramsey, Derek Scissors, and Shirley Zhao. I am grateful as well for the assistance of Ian Driscoll at the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai.

  I thank New America for supporting me financially for two years of this project. Awista Ayub, Peter Bergen, Albert Ford, Clarke Reeves, and Ian Wallace: thank you. The other writers and scholars in the National Fellows program provided early guidance and astute commentary. Emily Hunt taught me how to obtain court documents in PACER, and Chris Leonard shared his expertise on agribusiness. The food and agriculture reporter Leah Douglas and others at the Open Markets Institute shaped my thinking on food and power. I’m also grateful to Konstantin Kakaes, at New America and later Technology Review, and to Martin Enserink, David Malakoff, and Richard Stone, my editors at Science, for carefully editing some of the material that ended up in this book.

  Many friends, relatives, and experts reviewed chapters of the manuscript at various stages: Jason Albert, Mary Bergstrom, Frank Bures, Rebecca Catching, Mengfei Chen, Yangyang Cheng, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Candice Gillmore, Jason Good, Laurel Kilgour, Celina Li, Jessica Nordell, Megan Shank, Emily Sohn, William Souder, and Kim Todd. I am also grateful to Darwin Tsen and Lexi Yeh for help with early research, and to the writer and translator Celeste Ng, who provided a lyrical translation of Robert Mo’s prison poems on short notice.

  I thank my agent, Gillian MacKenzie, for believing in this project long before people in Washington were warning of a “new cold war.” My editor at Riverhead, Jake Morrissey, was indefatigably patient as the book evolved into something very different from what I initially proposed. I appreciate his flexibility and vision. I feel lucky to have worked with a stellar team at Riverhead: Molly Fessenden, Bruce Giffords, Kevin Murphy, and Shailyn Tavella.

  My mother, Laura Danielson, has edited my work since the beginning. She has been a tireless advocate for this project, and her experiences as an immigration attorney helped shape my understanding of Robert Mo’s case. Finally, I thank Aksel Çoruh and our two children, one of whom was born shortly after I conceived the idea for this book. I reported the project in snatches, sometimes with family members in tow, and Aksel never questioned why we were spending part of our summer vacation in an Iowa cornfield in ninety-degree heat. For the last year that I was working on it, our daughter regularly asked me, “Did you finish your book yet?” As a result of having Aksel at my side as my life partner, I can finally tell her yes.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES AND NAMES

  The following includes potential spoilers.

  This book is based on interviews with participants and witnesses, firsthand reporting, and extensive court and government documents. These include police reports, FBI files, property records, business filings, and more than 800 court documents—692 of them from the case United States v. Mo Hailong.

  I interviewed more than 150 people in the course of reporting this book. These include Justice Department officials, FBI agents, former CIA analysts, historians, scholars of innovation, seed breeders, activists, community organizers, cybersecurity experts, intellectual property attorneys, businesspeople, scientists, and farmers in both the United States and China. My interviews with Robert Mo were largely done by email, using the federal prison correspondence system CorrLinks, over a sixteen-month period beginning in 2017. I met with Robert in person on May 17, 2018, at Butner Low Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina. I also reached out to friends, family, and former colleagues of both Robert and Kevin Montgomery. Including all of their names in the text would have bogged down the story. They nonetheless provided useful background information that enriched the narrative.

  If a source is quoted directly, the remark comes from an interview I conducted, court documents, or publicly available news reports. When I did not personally interview the person, the source is provided in the notes. The government’s translation of intercepted Chinese dialogue in the Robert Mo case was often stilted, and I aimed to avoid halting or inexpert translations wherever possible. Dialogue in italics is adapted from incomplete or awkward phrasing, with minor changes to punctuation or syntax.

  In chapters told primarily from one subject’s perspective, I largely remained faithful to that person’s version of events. Whenever possible, I checked those accounts against documents and other external records or against the accounts of other sources. Kevin Montgomery, for example, provided me with copies of emails he exchanged with Robert Mo as well as an account he wrote of his initial FBI interview shortly after it occurred. The timing of events he related also lined up with other dates in the case. While there are inconsistencies in Robert Mo’s larger story, hi
s account of his arrest and of his experiences while in prison is broadly consistent with other defendants’ accounts of similar situations. In places where two or more subjects disagree over what transpired, I have indicated the discrepancy either in the text or in the notes.

  When the narrative follows subjects’ thoughts, they were either related to me directly or conveyed in court hearings, transcripts, or documents. Despite being settled before it could go to trial, United States v. Mo Hailong involved lengthy pretrial hearings in which subjects took the witness stand to answer questions about their motivation and intentions. The court record also includes whole conversations and instant message chats that were intercepted by U.S. intelligence. I included several of these in the book.

  For historical flashbacks, I relied on primary source documents and chronicles of specific periods, a selection of which are listed in the bibliography. In recounting FBI investigations of Chinese-American scientists from the 1950s through the 1970s, I was greatly aided by the work of historian Zuoyue Wang and the late writer Iris Chang. I also benefited from time spent perusing the archives of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, housed at George Washington University.

  Only two names were changed in the book: those of Lily Cheng and Michael Yao. While the FBI had suspicions about both individuals, neither was ultimately charged with a crime. Readers may notice some variation in the style used throughout the book for Chinese names. In China, a person’s surname usually appears first, but overseas Chinese or people who take on English names sometimes list their surname last. Typically, two-syllable given names are written as one word, without a hyphen, but outside of mainland China, some individuals choose to add a hyphen or render each syllable as a separate word. Often courts and journalists mix up defendants’ given names and surnames, adding to the confusion. In most cases, I have adhered to individuals’ personal preferences. When those were not possible to ascertain, I used the names that appeared in court documents.