by Ha Jin
“We should, but how?”
“Speak to him.”
“I’m afraid his phones are tapped.”
“By email then.”
“That might not be safe either. Perhaps I should go to Boston next week.”
“No, you should go as soon as you’re done teaching for this week. Let him know of the danger he’s already got himself into. He must quit working for the Communist government.”
I thought to explain that Ben might have a spying mission and that I might not be able to sway him, but I checked myself and agreed to go see him that very week. There had to be something I didn’t know about Ben, and I’d better talk with him in person again.
1980
In 1975, Chairman Mao had once burst out at his lying and bickering staffers, “Damn it, I know more about what’s going on in Nixon’s Oval Office than in my own quarters.” Those words were leaked and set many heads in the U.S. intelligence community spinning with questions and speculations. Did Mao really mean what he’d said? Or was he just bragging, too senile to be cognizant of Nixon’s resignation? Or was the U.S. government already infiltrated by the Chinese Communists? That seemed unlikely. Still, there couldn’t be smoke without fire. Even if Mao’s remark had only a grain of truth, it might imply that the Chinese had compromised the communications channels of the White House. To ensure there was no mole in their midst, the CIA required all its employees who had access to classified materials to take a lie-detector test. Gary had no choice but to follow his colleagues through the procedure. Over the decades, he’d taken the test several times, and now he passed again. He was shaken nonetheless. The instant he was unwired from the machine, he’d broken into a cold sweat, fearing he might have flunked it and be dismissed.
Ever since he’d wrangled seventy thousand dollars out of China, Gary had been anxious that his superiors might change their opinion of him. They’d given him the money because they believed his career at the CIA would last many more years. Then, as soon as he got the cash, he submitted his request for an early retirement. The higher-ups must have been caught off guard by his maneuver. Now, they might even have doubts about his loyalty, and some might suspect he was corrupted by the capitalist society and the American way of life, valuing money above everything. That might account for the long silence after he had sent off his request.
Meanwhile, Gary’s diabetes had taken a turn for the worse. He was thirsty all the time and had to drink water constantly. As a result, he had to empty his bladder every hour. He felt dizzy and sluggish at work, unable to concentrate. At the end of the day he feared he might conk out while driving home. Worse yet, he had grown insomniac and could sleep for only two or three hours at night, which aggravated his symptoms during the day. His doctor prescribed insulin, which helped a lot—after a few injections, his forehead wasn’t numb and tight anymore, his legs stopped itching, and even his taste buds were keen again. From then on, he would carry a syringe and some ampoules with him whenever he left home. He had mentioned the possibility of an early retirement to Thomas and his other colleagues, who had all noticed the sleepy look in his eyes. There’d be no problem with the CIA, much as it valued his linguistic expertise and his insights into Asian affairs. Yet he couldn’t make up his mind, because the insulin injections seemed able to control his symptoms and because there was still no word from China.
He had also talked about his plan to Suzie, who urged him to go back and join his original family. To her mind, the sooner he quit espionage the better—she just wanted him to get out of danger. She even said she might retire to Taiwan eventually, and if so, she’d go visit him from time to time, since now American citizens could travel to China without restriction. Her words made him more inclined to quit the CIA.
Finally, in late July 1980, came the reply from Beijing: an early retirement was deemed inappropriate. Gary’s superiors urged him to stay at the CIA as long as he could. They said the United States had the best medical technology and facilities, and diabetes was not a fatal illness, completely manageable with insulin and a proper diet, so he should string out his mission. He was only fifty-six and should be able to continue working at the CIA for a long time. Meanwhile, they’d make arrangements for his final return. They too would love to see him retired to their homeland, but he should give them time to arrange for his successor, for whom he too should cast around—ideally he could recruit someone within the CIA. They sounded reasonable and firm. The reply made Gary regret having asked for an early retirement. To make amends, he knew he’d have to pull himself together and bear his miseries for a few more years. Perhaps he’d have to outlive his usefulness here.
Yet lately he got homesick all the more. His mind could not escape wandering to a public bathhouse in his hometown, in which, three decades ago, he had often snoozed for an hour or so with a warm towel over his naked body after a hot bath. When he woke up, he’d drunk jasmine tea served by a teenage boy and conversed with an acquaintance or two. If only he could again lie in the steaming pool and then repose on a long bed, free from any care. He knew that most of the traditional bathhouses might have disappeared, but he couldn’t curb his reveries. At the same time, his vision of home had grown cloudy, and it was no longer his village or hometown but somewhere vaguely in China, virtually any place his superiors might assign him to live. Nevertheless, his longing had been growing stronger and more tempestuous day by day.
He had no idea that ever since the hefty sum of money had been transferred stateside from Hong Kong, the FBI had been following him. They launched a thorough investigation, and all the findings enabled them to connect the dots: now they realized that Mao’s remark about the Oval Office was by no means a joke or brag. The ghost spy had finally revealed his shadow. All attention was now focused on Gary Shang, and he was kept under strict surveillance, his mail and phone calls monitored and his bills examined. They also installed a secret camera near his home, in a neighbor’s house across the street, whose top floor they had rented. The longer they followed him, the more amazed they were by his simple, casual fashion of conducting espionage. In many ways he seemed unprofessional. For instance, few spies would go to East Asia in person year after year and write to their handlers directly in the regular mail. His disregard for the general practice of spycraft, however, singled him out as an expert mole, who had succeeded in staying below the radar and concealing his trail for three decades. They concluded that he had to be stopped without delay; the damage he’d done already was unimaginable. If they didn’t act now, Gary Shang, holding a U.S. passport, might flee abroad the minute he sensed danger. He could even bolt into the Chinese embassy.
They obtained an approval from the Justice Department for “interviewing” the suspect, and without informing the CIA, which they feared might interfere with the mole hunt, they went ahead. Three agents arrived at the Shangs’ one afternoon in September, and Gary answered the doorbell. His wife was in Seattle to visit her sister, who’d just had cataract surgery, and their daughter was in Boston, a first-year grad student at BU. Gary appeared calm and let in the agents, as though he’d been expecting them all along. He must have assumed they had accumulated enough evidence against him, so this was the final hour he had to face, a scenario he had played out in his mind often enough that he was almost familiar with it. It was good he was home alone. He led the three men into the dining room and sat them at the table, while he took the seat at its head. He looked meek but undaunted.
One of the men started “the interview,” speaking politely, as if out of respect for a senior colleague. But before answering, Gary said, “I will tell you all the truth on one condition.” It was neither a demand nor a request, as though he was certain this should be the way for them to talk.
“What’s that?” asked a man who had a pink face.
“My family and my girlfriend, Suzie Chao, know nothing about what I’ve been doing. Leave them out of your investigation.”
They looked at each other. The pink-faced man, who must have b
een the head, smiled, drumming his fat fingers beside a pocket tape recorder on the table. He told Gary, “We’ll do that as long as you cooperate.”
Their agreement further convinced Gary that they possessed enough evidence against him, because they appeared to believe the truth that his family knew nothing about his real profession, that Suzie had never been involved in his espionage activities.
So the interrogation began. It lasted seven hours with a dinner break. (After asking about Gary’s preference, the agents ordered from a Chinese restaurant sesame chicken, mapo tofu, and two seafood dishes, plus a platter of assorted appetizers. Gary meant to have a hearty meal like this in spite of his diabetes, believing he wouldn’t be able to eat Chinese food again for a long time.) His answers were so clear and straightforward that the agents were amazed time and again. It never occurred to him that they might not have possessed enough evidence to incriminate him, partly because one of the agents had lied, saying they’d been following him for a good many years. It was also because Gary had never been fully trained as a spy, not knowing how to take advantage of legal protection.
Around ten p.m. the interrogation was over, and the suspect held out his wrists to let the agents cuff him. They did. They took him away in a cruiser and put him in the county jail in Arlington. From there they went to Baltimore to arrest Father Murray, but the man wasn’t in when they arrived. Seeing that everything was neat in his room at the parsonage—even his teapot was still warm and two-thirds full, they waited for him to return. They stayed there for a good hour until they realized Murray was gone.
GARY’S ATTORNEY ADVISED HIM to plead guilty, and Nellie urged him to do the same, so that he might get a lighter sentence, but he refused and wanted to go through the trial, convinced that he’d done a significant service to both China and the United States. He might also have hoped against hope that the trial would end in a hung jury, giving China enough time to rescue him. The jurors, seven women and five men, were selected, and Gary was intent on fighting in court, not for escaping a life sentence but for the justice he believed he deserved. Everyone could see that he was deluded, but he couldn’t be dissuaded.
The trial turned out to be a disaster. He was accused of spying for the People’s Republic of China, selling intelligence for cash. His betrayal had done great damage to national security and caused the deaths of numerous people. God knew how much secret information he had funneled to the Chinese and what the long-term ramifications might be. Gary denied most of the charges, emphasizing that he was a patriot of both the United States and China. “The two countries are like parents to me,” he said. “They are like father and mother, so as a son I cannot separate the two and I love them both. I can’t possibly hurt one of them to promote the well-being of the other. It’s true that I passed information to China, but it helped improve the Sino-U.S. relationship, from which both countries have benefited. As a matter of fact, I seized every opportunity to improve the mutual understanding and cooperation between the two countries. God knows, over the decades, how much vital intelligence I gathered for the United States through gleaning Chinese-language publications and reports. Sometimes I put in more than sixty hours a week. For my hard work I have received several commendations.” In short, it was he who had helped bring the two countries together to shake hands like friends. For that kind of diligence and dedication he should be recognized as a valuable citizen, if not decorated with laurels. “I am an American and love this country like every one of you,” he concluded in a strident voice.
In his testimony George Thomas, his domed forehead beaded with sweat, said, “To my mind, Gary Shang did help the United States reestablish a diplomatic relationship with China. In a perverse fashion he served both countries.” While saying that, he avoided looking Gary’s way, his dappled hands trembling a little.
David Shuman, his face still babyish at age forty-three in spite of his thick blond mustache and beer belly, told the court that he felt Gary might be a patriot. Blinking his camel eyes, he said, “I remembered when President Kennedy was assassinated, Gary Shang collapsed in the office blubbering like a small boy. He was more heartbroken than the rest of us, you know. You can ask anyone in the CIA about him, and I can assure you that they’ll all say he was a gentleman, easygoing and friendly. Of course, reflecting on the whole thing now, it gives me the creeps to think of Gary Shang as a Communist mole among us. You know, this really freaks me out.”
Nonetheless, the jurors looked unconvinced, some shaking their heads, furrowing their brows, or scowling at the CIA officers. The government’s attorney, a middle-aged man with cat eyes and scanty brows, began to cross-question the accused. The man straightened up and said in a smoky voice, “Mr. Shang, did you provide the names of more than a dozen defected Chinese POWs for the Communist regime in 1953?”
“That was due to—”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“How much did you get paid for that?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
“So for that paltry amount of money you sold more than a dozen lives to Communist China?”
“It didn’t happen like that. I didn’t know the consequences of the intelligence. I assumed those men would go to Taiwan anyway. That was the first time I passed information to China. Perhaps I might be guilty of an accidental act. But I never did that kind of thing again after I came to know about those returnees’ incarceration and deaths.”
“So you were aware that some of them had been executed?”
“Yes, later I was informed of that.”
“Mr. Shang, did you reveal to Communist China the communications plans and the code names of the secret agents dispatched to destroy China’s nuclear facilities in 1965?”
“Yes, I did. I had their mission stopped on purpose, because it might have started the Third World War. That prospect terrified me. What could the United States have gained from such a war? Nothing but destruction of lives and property and a waste of taxpayers’ dollars. So I would do my damnedest to prevent that mission from being carried out. For that I don’t feel one iota of guilt.”
Some in the audience chuckled and a few cheered. The judge, his face turning puce and his goatee tilting up a little, banged the gavel for order. When the room was quiet again, the flat-cheeked cross-examiner went on to ask about the information on missiles and aircrafts that the accused was charged with stealing. To the question of the technological secrets, Gary answered in a haughty tone, “I was interested only in strategic intelligence. I am not a petty thief—that sort of information is beneath me.”
A pregnant silence filled the courtroom. It was drizzling outside, rivulets running intermittently down the windows, beyond which the pointed tips of cypresses swayed a little. The sky was so saturated it looked as though it was about to collapse in a downpour.
Without difficulty the jury reached their guilty verdict unanimously, and the judge gave Gary 121 years in prison and more than three million dollars in fines. The jurors also stated that they took umbrage at the attitudes of some CIA officers, who seemed to have stuck up for the Red spy, the monster of deception, but not for the truth or for the interests of our nation. One of them, a fortyish black woman with arched eyebrows, even voiced her suspicion of complicity.
The convicted man was stolid, his face expressionless, though his tired eyes appeared narrower and his temples were throbbing. He was biting his lip in order not to cry. For a brief moment everything went blurry around him. He leaned forward and clasped his head in his hands.
Afterward, in the lobby of the courthouse, when a woman reporter asked Gary what he’d like to say to the Chinese government, he cried out, “I appeal to Deng Xiaoping to intervene on my behalf. President Deng, please bring me home!”
Those words were published in several major newspapers the next day. But at a news conference, the Chinese ambassador to Washington responded negatively to the question about Beijing’s connection with Gary Shang, insisting, “Let me reiterate, I never
heard of that man. China has no spy in the United States at all, so we have nothing to do with him. All the accusations against the Chinese government are baseless, fabricated by those people hostile to our country.”
“Did you go see your father in prison?” Ben asked me, his hands in his jeans pockets. We were strolling on Wollaston Beach with Boston’s skyline in view, a bunch of skyscrapers partly obscured by the dissipating mist in the northwest. An airliner was descending noiselessly toward Logan Airport. The drizzle had let up, the clouds opening and revealing patches of blue.
I said, “I visited him once, in late November of that year, but I had to rush back to BU. I was teaching a course and had to meet my class. Dad didn’t say much to me because a guard was standing beside him and there was glass and steel wire between us. We spoke over a phone. He kept saying ‘I’m sorry’ and was tearful. I went through the visit as if I were drugged, unable to find words. That was the first time I’d ever seen him in tears, and at the end of the meeting he blew me a kiss and forced a smile. My mother saw him more often and made sure that he received proper medication and also had his ulcerated gum treated. I wished I could have stayed home longer so that I could visit him again.”
“He must’ve died miserably.”
“I was devastated when I heard about his suicide. I had a breakdown and couldn’t help my tears whenever I saw an older man.”
Ben had read that Gary smothered himself with a trash bag tied around his neck with two connected shoestrings. (He had skipped breakfast so that his body might not be messy. He lay on his bed in the solitary cell and died without making any noise.) We had talked about his death the previous night, when Ben finally confessed he was indeed a Chinese spy, though a minor one.
The ebbing tide kept the bay flat. Ben continued, “What touched me most is this sentence he said to his cross-examiner: ‘I am not a petty thief.’ I wept when I read that. It reminded me that I was a petty thief. Recently I acquired a pair of new night-vision goggles just issued to the U.S. Marines, an F-18 manual, a list of the public radio frequencies, and some other stuff. I’ve been stealing technological secrets—a petty thief indeed.”