Tiger Trap

by David Wise

  Sex! Espionage! A Chinese dragon lady! Wiser's head was spinning when he walked out of the director's office in February 2002. He had just been handed a scorpion and he wasn't wearing gloves.

  It was one thing for Mueller to tell him what had been going on in Los Angeles. But how was Wiser going to prove it? He would have to gather solid evidence to break the case open, to prove that PARLOR MAID was working for Beijing, that the two FBI men had been having sex with their agent, and that they knew she had been recruited by China but continued to work with her anyhow. The task seemed impossible. It was even further complicated by the fact that both FBI agents, J.J. Smith in Los Angeles, and Bill Cleveland in San Francisco, had retired.

  And Wiser knew that he would face stiff resistance within the bureau, which always closed ranks to protect its own. In trying to build a case that involved the two FBI agents, Wiser would be seen as an outsider, a headquarters stooge. He would be violating the core precept of the bureau's culture, the old J. Edgar Hoover command, "Don't embarrass the bureau."

  Sure, Hoover was long gone, but the headquarters building in Washington bore his name, and the old edicts had not been entirely forgotten. Wiser was already a target of jealousy and criticism within the bureau's ranks because of his success and the publicity he received in the Ames case. It was Wiser, defying orders from his superior, who had dug out from Ames's trash barrel a yellow Post-it note that proved to be the smoking gun in the case. The note proved that Ames was an active Russian spy, and it was the evidence the FBI needed to arrest him.

  Wiser had made his bones in the Ames case, when he was thirty-eight, but it was nothing compared to the challenge that awaited him in Los Angeles. He felt a little like the lone sheriff in High Noon. But this wasn't a Hollywood western. If he screwed up, Mueller would know just whom to blame.

  Nor had he exactly volunteered for this job. In the FBI, agents usually hope in time to rise to the level of an assistant special agent in charge (ASAC) of a major field office, and then perhaps to the top job of special agent in charge, or SAC. Wiser, after nineteen years, was up for a SAC post. Now that would have to be put on hold. He would have to do as Mueller asked; he had no choice.

  Even before Special Agent Wiser had put Aldrich Ames behind bars for life, he had worked in counterintelligence for most of his years in the FBI. He had earned a reputation as quick, decisive, and discreet.

  Tall and thin, with graying brown hair and a wide mustache, Wiser, a former Navy lawyer, did not fit the stereotype of the laconic, square-jawed FBI agent familiar from movies and television. Wiser smiled a lot and could laugh at himself; in a serious and demanding job, he had a saving sense of humor.

  To preserve security, Wiser knew he would need a new code name for Katrina Leung, and the investigation of which she was also a target. He could not afford to have any documents generated by his investigation end up in the PARLOR MAID file, where other agents might see them. For Leung, the computer came up with a randomly generated new code name: POETIC FIT.

  J.J. Smith, and the investigation directed at him, were given a separate code name, RICH FOLIAGE.

  With four handpicked agents from headquarters, Wiser flew to LAX. Along with some two dozen carefully selected agents from Los Angeles, Wiser moved offsite into an office building in Santa Monica, well away from the FBI field office at 11000 Wilshire Boulevard. J.J. had retired, but he sometimes dropped by the office and it would not do for him to run into Wiser's team.

  Although Wiser had not wanted the assignment that Mueller gave him, if China had penetrated the FBI, and two agents had been compromised, he was determined to get to the bottom of the mess and let the chips fall where they may.

  By April 2002, Wiser was armed with another FISA warrant, and the FBI began wiretapping its own former agent, J.J. Smith. Agents on Wiser's team started tailing him as well.

  The FBI, meanwhile, had continued to run PARLOR MAID as an asset. A new handler, Special Agent Steve Conley, had been assigned to her when J.J. retired. Not long after Wiser arrived in Los Angeles, he discovered that the FBI office on Wilshire was still approving her payments. He considered whether stopping the money would tip off PARLOR MAID that she was under investigation, but decided it was a risk that could be taken. Wiser reasoned that with J.J. retired, Leung would simply assume the bureau had less need for her services. He ordered the payments stopped.

  To explain his presence in Los Angeles, Wiser told the field office on Wilshire that he was in town to do an efficiency study. His title of inspector helped his cover.

  Sooner or later FBI agents are tapped for a stint in the bureau's inspection division. They visit the field offices, poke around, and write a report on how well or badly the offices are working. Since nobody, as might be imagined, likes a visit from the inspectors, Wiser was not asked a lot of questions.

  And it became quickly clear from the wiretaps and surveillance on both J.J. and Leung that their romantic relationship had not ended with Smith's retirement more than a year earlier. In March, the watchers had seen them spending time together in a hotel.

  Meanwhile, the agents operating out of the secret office in Santa Monica were delving into PARLOR MAID's financial activities. The Leungs owned a Chinese bookstore on East Garvey Avenue in Monterey Park. In July, Katrina Leung filed a petition for Chapter 7 bankruptcy for the bookstore, which meant that the premises had to be closed and all business ceased immediately, unlike a Chapter 11 proceeding, where a company reorganizes and emerges to operate anew.

  According to an affidavit filed in federal court by FBI special agent Sharon Lawrence, Kam Leung called his wife on July 9 to say there was a "big problem" with their bankruptcy plan. "Mr. Leung explained to his wife that she could go to jail for filing a fraudulent bankruptcy petition since her name alone would appear on the petition, and she would be the person actually lying by stating that the subject business was closed for business when, in actuality, it was still operating."

  The FBI spent hundreds of man-hours watching the bookstore to see if it was indeed still open. Some of the events described in the dry, stilted language of the lengthy affidavit were unintentionally comical. The store was managed for the Leungs by Kwong Wai Li Tang and her husband, I. Kuo Tang. "On August 8, 2002," the affidavit relates, "FBI surveillance revealed the following: At approximately 8:57 A.M., Ms. Tang exited a vehicle and entered the back door of [the bookstore]. Tang carried several white plastic bags with her." Half an hour later, "At approximately 9:28 A.M.," an FBI employee entered the bookstore and found it bulging with magazines, newspapers, videos, and books.

  "The FBI employee told Ms. Tang that he was looking for a present for a friend. Ms. Tang told him that the store was closed." For the next forty-five minutes, the FBI sleuths watched as "several Asian people walked in and out" of the bookstore, and "one Asian male walked out ... with a newspaper which he apparently obtained while inside."

  No doubt tumbling to the fact that they were being observed, the bookstore proprietors knew just what to do. Two weeks later, the store had a "Closed" sign on the front door. "However the rear entrance door ... was (propped) open." For the next hour the FBI watched as "eight people, all appearing to be Asian," entered the store and later emerged happily with newspapers or shopping bags. The Leungs were doing business out the back door. The bookstore was only closed to the FBI.

  There was an extra irony in this, because when PARLOR MAID's contacts in China apparently suggested that she open a bookstore, J.J. had encouraged her to do so. The FBI was always greatly interested in Chinese bookstores on the West Coast, regarding some as propaganda outlets or fronts for the MSS. Eastwind Books in San Francisco, for example, had figured on the margins of the TIGER TRAP case. So when Leung opened the bookstore in Monterey Park, Smith regarded it as another successful move by PARLOR MAID for the FBI.

  At the bankruptcy hearing in August, Katrina Leung had a great deal of difficulty explaining how the minutes of a meeting approving the bankruptcy petition by the bookstore's
board of directors had been signed by Xie Shanxiao, the CEO, and Peter M. Chow, a director, since the minutes also showed that she was the only one present. Somehow, the store managers "probably have, uh, faxed them," she said.

  The perplexed bankruptcy judge wondered how it was possible that Xie had signed the minutes, since Leung said she had not seen him in ten years. In fact, both Xie and Chow were in China, a long way from Monterey Park.

  On September 5 PARLOR MAID was interviewed about the bankruptcy by two FBI agents and claimed that her attorney had told her to forge the signatures. She was still worried about those signatures a week later, however; in a phone call to Ms. Tang, according to the FBI document, she said "she had been losing sleep over the fraudulent signatures of the directors, because she stated that 'if one forges a signature, that's a very serious crime.'"

  By now, PARLOR MAID must have realized something was up. She had been taken off the bureau payroll. She surely knew from the Tangs that FBI surveillance agents were skulking around the bookstore. And why were her good friends in the bureau asking about such an inconsequential matter as the bankruptcy of a small retail store in Monterey Park? There was no point in fretting any further; whatever it was would probably blow over, and J.J., although retired, still had plenty of friends in the bureau.

  In July, Katrina Leung, unaware of the fact that she was being wiretapped and followed by Wiser's team, had contacted Ron Iden, the Los Angeles FBI chief, and asked to meet with him, ostensibly about "outreach" by the bureau to the Chinese community. More likely, the FBI investigators assumed, she wanted to be able to boast to the MSS on her next trip to Beijing that she knew and had personal access to the assistant director of the FBI in charge of the Los Angeles division.

  As the top bureau official in Los Angeles, Iden had been told of the investigation being run out of the Santa Monica office. Wiser asked Iden to go ahead and meet with Leung, which he did on July 22. It was arranged to have Randall Thomas, one of Wiser's key agents, secretly monitor the meeting via audio piped in from an adjoining office.

  Four months later, on November 5, 2002, the FBI videotaped J.J. Smith and PARLOR MAID in a Los Angeles hotel room. Technicians placed a hidden camera in the room after the FBI on a wiretap heard the two arranging to meet. That in turn required the cooperation of the hotel, to ensure that the couple was given the right room. Randall Thomas, who participated in the operation, reported in a court document: "The electronic surveillance revealed Smith and LEUNG having sexual relations."

  The videotape provided in graphic detail confirmation of the fact that almost two years after J.J. had retired, his relationship with PARLOR MAID was still ongoing. Only a week later, on November 11, the bureau learned that he was also continuing to provide her with information about FBI agents.

  Wiser's team covertly searched Leung's luggage at LAX as she prepared to leave on a trip to China. They found a fax from J.J. with six photos taken at a meeting of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI the previous month. Two of the photos were of agents still on active duty.

  Two weeks later, when PARLOR MAID returned from China, Special Agent Peter Duerst was at San Francisco International Airport, waiting backstage as her luggage came off the plane. When he searched her bags, he found a piece of paper with handwritten notes in English and Chinese. One of the notes said, "Visited Ron Iden 7/29/02 re: community outreach." On the same paper, he found names and information about the FBI agents who worked with Leung.

  PARLOR MAID continued her journey, flying on the same day to LAX, where Thomas took part in a second clandestine search of her luggage. All the searches had been authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. When the FBI went through her bags they noted that the six photographs of FBI agents they had seen in her luggage on the outbound flight on November 11 were gone.

  Now Wiser was ready to move. On December 9 J.J. was interviewed by FBI agents in a room at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Century Boulevard, as Wiser watched from his office in Santa Monica on a closed-circuit video feed. It was not a good day for J.J., who had retired two years earlier with the plaudits of his colleagues and a medal from CIA director George Tenet.

  It was in fact a very bad day, the first of many that would follow for Smith. Over two days of interviews in the hotel room, J.J., according to the Thomas affidavit, said that "he had probably told LEUNG too much." Several times J.J. conceded that any information PARLOR MAID had obtained about FBI operations and sources must have come from him.

  Interrogators are always happiest when they already know the answers to the questions they ask. Their hand is even stronger if the person being interrogated does not realize that his questioners know the truth. In this case, Wiser's team had the videotape made the previous month of J.J. and Katrina's hotel room tryst.

  Asked whether he was having a sexual relationship with Leung, J.J. at first refused to answer, "and then denied having a sexual relationship." For J.J., it was to prove a costly denial.

  At another point in the interview, when asked about any trips abroad, J.J. said he had traveled to Hong Kong in February 2001, soon after he retired, and had gone there again in 2002. Each trip lasted about a week, and J.J. said he had traveled alone each time and had not met with anyone in Hong Kong. Later in the interview, he again said he made the trips alone.

  One of the agents then asked J.J. point-blank if Leung had gone with him to Hong Kong. Smith replied, "She's, she was there."

  But J.J. insisted he had never traveled with Leung to any place overseas except Hong Kong. When the interrogators pressed him, Smith conceded he had met Leung in London and flown back to the United States with her. That was the trip he had taken in 1992, when J.J. and Bill Cleveland had flown to London to interview Hanson Huang about TIGER TRAP. Afterward, J.J. and Leung had gone on their sightseeing trip around England, and on their return were spotted in the customs area at LAX by Dot Kelly, his supervisor, who had decided to surprise Smith by picking him up at the airport.

  On December 11, after two days of intensive interrogation of J.J. Smith, it was PARLOR MAID's turn. She consented to being interviewed, and the FBI questioned her at a hotel in the San Fernando Valley. Once again, Wiser was watching via closed-circuit television. What happened then, and in several days of later interviews, was described in a court document by Randall Thomas.

  Bruce Carlson, the assistant chief of the China section at FBI headquarters, had flown to Los Angeles to conduct the questioning. Carlson, tall, slim, and smooth, fluent in Mandarin, got PARLOR MAID talking far beyond what he could have imagined. In the hotel room, Leung began describing classified documents she said she had secretly taken from J.J.'s briefcase and copied.

  It was a stunning admission. Why Katrina Leung confessed to taking the documents is something of a mystery. Perhaps, after twenty years as an FBI asset, of working closely with the bureau, she felt she had nothing to fear. These were FBI agents, her friends, they would understand the Byzantine ways of double agents, the subtleties of counterintelligence operations. She could talk her way out of any trouble.

  Asked whether she had an "intimate" relationship with J.J., she first described their association as a "business relationship" and said she was no more than "a good family friend." She was unaware, of course, of the videotape that the FBI had made of their hotel room liaison only a month earlier. She also denied traveling overseas with J.J.

  As the questioning continued, however, Leung finally admitted that she and J.J. were more than friends. She said she had first become intimate with him in the early 1980s, "Very long ago, but I cannot tell you what year."

  PARLOR MAID readily agreed to meet with the FBI at her home in San Marino and show them documents she said she had removed from J.J.'s briefcase. The interview adjourned to her house.

  With Carlson and another FBI officer, Special Agent Edgar Del Rosario, watching, Leung opened a locked safe in an upstairs bedroom and took out a five-page document that was an even bigger surprise. It contained excerpts of
transcripts of her conversation, using the code name Luo, with Mao—Mao Guohua, her MSS handler in Beijing.

  Leung now admitted that Mao was her MSS control and Luo her MSS alias, and that the code name Luo Zhongshan had been assigned to her by none other than Zhu Qizhen, the Chinese ambassador to the United States. She recounted the story she had told to J.J. Smith eleven years earlier in their kitchen confrontation. She claimed that Mao had obtained the notes about a defector that had been taken from her luggage, and because they were more detailed than what she had told him, she admitted to Mao that she was working for the FBI and agreed from that point on to tell the MSS whatever she knew of FBI operations.

  The transcript the agents found in Leung's safe was, of course, the 1990 conversation intercepted by the National Security Agency in which PARLOR MAID had tipped off the MSS that Bill Cleveland was planning a trip to China under State Department cover. The intercept that led Smith and Cleveland to fly to Washington to persuade headquarters to let J.J. continue to run PARLOR MAID.

  Wiser was stunned, furious to learn of the intercept, which had now turned up in Leung's house. He had been dispatched by the director of the FBI to investigate the mess in Los Angeles, but, astonishingly, headquarters had never told him about the conversation between Luo and Mao. An essential part of his job was to find proof of whether PARLOR MAID was an agent of Chinese intelligence. But no one in Washington had seen fit to tell him of the key piece of evidence in the case, the phone conversation that clearly tied her to the MSS.

  Asked how she had obtained the transcript of the intercept, Leung replied, "I think I sneaked it."

  She said that J.J. "would leave his briefcase open, and that the file folder pockets in the briefcase often contained documents, with the text facing out." That way, she said, she could see the documents she wanted and "remove them and copy them without Smith's knowledge when he left his briefcase unattended."