Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China (18 page)

Unknown to Jeff Wang and his wife, he had been under investigation by the FBI for more than a year.
The FBI had given the case the code name
ETHEREAL THRONE
. J.J. Smith, as the supervisor of the Chinese counterintelligence squad, was in charge. He had assigned Cordova and two other agents, Serena Alston and Brad Gilbert, to the case.

Jeff Wang did not know any of that, or that Special Agent Denise Woo had also been ordered to work on the case almost a year earlier, precisely because of her friendship with Wang and his family. Wang had reported to the FBI at noon and it was now 6
P.M.
and he was still sitting in the bureau's office on Wilshire. Cordova told him that the FBI wanted to search his house. Since Wang had nothing to hide, he called Diane, and she agreed to the search. Jeff signed a release allowing the bureau to conduct the search.

Denise Woo showed up and offered to accompany Wang to his house. He was relieved that his friend would be present, and Woo followed in her car.

At the house, Woo and another FBI agent sat in the living room with Jeff and Diane. It was getting on toward bedtime for the Wangs' two young children, Daniel, three, and Kiane, a baby girl, just one.

At 9:30
P.M.
more than a dozen FBI agents, led by J.J. Smith, arrived at the house. Jeff had not expected such a large group. The agents seized the Wangs' home computer. Diane protested, to no avail, because she had her own private files in the computer. As a practicing clinical psychologist, she specialized in treating children. The computer held confidential reports on the children who were her patients.

The agents searched the house from top to bottom. They took CDs and notebooks and floppy disks, and opened letters that were lying on the mail table. Three agents searched through toy boxes in the three-year-old's room, as three others rummaged through the one-year-old's toys.

Daniel was upset because his favorite Tonka truck game was in the computer. For days afterward, he asked his father, "When are those bad people going to bring my game back?" But the computer, with the Tonka truck game and Diane's confidential files, remained in the possession of the FBI.

As the search progressed, J.J. asked to talk to Jeff privately. They went into the master bedroom, and J.J. introduced himself. China's in turmoil, Smith said, it's the mother country. People are turning one another in. If people are naming you, you should name them.

Jeff was thinking, but didn't say it, "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

Think of who you know who has contacts with China, J.J. urged him.

Wang was more mystified than ever. His father had come from China before the Communist takeover in 1949 to study in New York on a scholarship. He became a radiologist and settled in Hawaii. Jeff's mother was a second- or third-generation Chinese American who grew up in New York. Jeff had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, and got a master's degree at UCLA in electrical engineering. He was hired in 1983 by Hughes Aircraft, which merged with Raytheon in 1997, and he had worked for the two companies for sixteen years.

He did not speak a word of Chinese, and felt no personal tie to China, which he had never visited. "Most of my friends are Japanese Americans," Wang told J.J.

He was baffled by what was happening. First the Air Force was investigating him, now the FBI. He had been told to stand up like a man and confess, but confess what? People in China were naming him, J.J. had implied, and he was supposed to name them. Name who? It was surreal.

Was it something to do with his family, Jeff asked? No, J.J. said. "That's not it." Whatever Jeff could think of, he got the same answer: "That's not it." The conversation was going nowhere.

Although it had not been said in so many words, it was clear to Wang that the FBI suspected he was a spy for China. While the search of his house was going on, Denise Woo also talked to Jeff. She encouraged him to think of anyone who might have accused him of passing secrets to China. Did he have any enemies?

Jeff racked his brain, digging back in his memory more than twenty years to high school, trying to think of coworkers, acquaintances, anyone who might have made such a horrendous accusation. He came up with a few names for Woo, but was not convinced that any of them were behind the terrible difficulty in which he now found himself.

The team of FBI agents continued to search the house. They combed through the Wangs' cars, and the attic, everywhere. It was 2
A.M.
when they finally left, fourteen hours after Jeff had walked into the FBI office on Wilshire to take a polygraph test.

The nightmare for Jeff Wang and his wife had only begun. The cloud of suspicion hanging over his head cost him his job at Raytheon. The contractor would not continue to employ an engineer under FBI investigation who worked on radar for the Air Force's most sophisticated fighter jets and the stealth bomber. Jeff was suspended from his job and lost his special access clearance. Without it, he was going to have a difficult time finding work in the aerospace industry.

For Denise Woo,
ETHEREAL THRONE
had become a different sort of ordeal. Intensely loyal to the bureau, she had been put in an impossible position. From the start, she was skeptical that Jeff had done anything wrong. Yet she had to conceal from her longtime family friend that she had been assigned to investigate him some eleven months earlier.

Worse yet, after Wang was called in to the FBI, she was told to renew their friendship, to take advantage of it, and become close to Jeff.
To spy on the spy, as it were. Denise Woo had never expected to be put in such a difficult situation when she joined the bureau in 1994. She had worked her way through college at UCLA, then graduated from business school at the University of Southern California.

When Woo joined the FBI, then in her midthirties, she was sent to Quantico, Virginia, for agent training, then assigned to the Long Beach, California, FBI resident agency to work white-collar crime. There she greatly impressed her boss,
Special Agent Jack Keller, a handsome, square-jawed Irishman and bureau veteran who helped to train her in criminal investigations. US attorneys and other government officials she worked with praised Woo as a top-notch agent.

From time to time, fellow agents had suggested to Woo that because of her Asian appearance, she should work in Chinese counterintelligence. Although her mother was Japanese American and her father half Chinese, Woo, a fourth-generation Californian, did not write or speak Chinese. She was not interested in following her colleagues' advice, partly because inside the FBI there was a belief, held by some agents, that if you were not good enough for criminal work, you ended up in counterintelligence. As a result, CI was not considered the best career path.

In September 1998 Gil Cordova sent a supervisor to meet with Woo. She was pressured to take a counterintelligence assignment. The bureau, the supervisor said, was aware that Woo knew Jeffrey Wang. The FBI had strong evidence that Wang was a spy for China, the supervisor went on, but it had not been able to prove the case and needed her help. The supervisor waved the flag: this is what it means to be an American, he said, this is why you joined the bureau.

Reluctantly, Woo agreed to help the three case agents working on
ETHEREAL THRONE
. She provided information on Jeff's family background and her own family's long friendship with the Wangs.

Early in 1999 Woo decided that she wanted to get out of Long Beach and try something new. In June her request was approved, and she was transferred to the Los Angeles division to work on child pornography cases, tracking predators on the Internet. Which is how she happened to be in the Wilshire office the day that Jeff was called in and polygraphed there.

By that time, Woo had gleaned some of the details that had cast suspicion on Jeff. But she did not know everything.

She was not aware of the backstory that had begun in San Francisco. Dave LeSueur was an FBI counterintelligence agent in that city, on the China squad. A bit on the heavy side, LeSueur spoke slowly and always seemed to feel underappreciated. But he had two attributes in his favor. He spoke Cantonese, and perhaps because of that he had developed a number of useful informants, including two women.

But LeSueur's prize informant was a man who, over the years, had provided a good deal of valuable information to the FBI. The source did not work in the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. But he appeared to be trusted by Chinese officials, because some of the tips he provided to the bureau were far too intriguing to have been picked up by someone just hanging around bars in San Francisco's Chinatown. The FBI concluded that the source, although providing useful information to the bureau, was being run by Chinese intelligence.

Sometime in the 1990s LeSueur's informant moved to Los Angeles. The reason remains murky, but perhaps romance called, because at some point during this period he appears to have married. Although the source had relocated, he continued to be run by LeSueur.

In September 1997 the informant told a story to the FBI that triggered the
ETHEREAL THRONE
investigation. He claimed to have met a Chinese intelligence officer, or IO, in a hotel in the San Gabriel Valley. The officer, the FBI source claimed, spoke no English but asked him to dial a telephone number in Torrance, California.

A man answered the telephone, the FBI informant went on, and said he had been expecting the call. As instructed by the Chinese IO, he told the man to come to the hotel. As the source related the tale, the person he called came to the hotel and exchanged envelopes with the IO. Although the informant could not see what was inside the envelopes, he assumed that cash had been exchanged for secret documents.

The envelope the man brought to the hotel was big enough to hold documents, the informant said. And the envelope given in exchange looked the same as one in which he himself had been given money. That was an interesting statement, because, if true, it meant that the informant, who was on the FBI payroll, had also been paid by China.

Investigating the source's story, Serena Alston, Cordova, and Gilbert were able to obtain toll records showing that a telephone call had been placed from a room registered to the supposed Chinese intelligence agent. The number called was the home telephone of Jeff Wang.

Now the FBI had a suspect. A FISA authorization was obtained and the bureau began wiretapping Jeff's telephones. Counterintelligence is a difficult and often complicated business. The FBI had no reason to doubt the informant's story. He was a longtime bureau source who had always provided useful information.

But there were problems from the start with
ETHEREAL THRONE
. Often the MSS recruited people by inviting them to China. Alston and the other agents could not find any connection between Jeff and China. So they started to investigate his relatives, to see if that might turn up any leads.

Jeff's father, the FBI learned, had emigrated from the Shanghai area in the 1920s. But the bureau was unable to locate his immigration file, which would have included a list of his relatives. His father's file was either lost or destroyed.

In the meantime, with help from Denise Woo, Jeff was trying his best to figure out who might have led the FBI to suspect him as a spy. He knew nothing of the story told by the informant, about a phone call from a hotel, or an exchange of envelopes.

Jeff's father had died at age seventy-two in July 1999, a month before Jeff was called in and grilled by the FBI. He asked his mother whether she knew of anyone who might have had reason to accuse him. She was able to shed the first ray of light on the mystery.

He learned from her that relatives of his father in Los Angeles were claiming that before his father died, he had promised he would help them out financially. There was nothing in his will, however. But the relatives contended that he had told them that if they needed money he would try to assist them.

By now, Denise Woo had become convinced that Jeff Wang was innocent. She had suspected as much all along. Now she had learned that there was a family disagreement over money, which might hold the key to the puzzle. Jeff gave her the name of a few relatives who he believed might have had a grudge against him over the money his father had supposedly promised them. Woo provided the names to her FBI superiors but was told that none of those individuals was the informant who had fingered Jeff.

Meanwhile, Woo found that although the hotel toll records showed a call had been made to Jeff's number, the duration was only thirty seconds. After six rings, there would be a record of the call even if it was not answered. It was not clear whether anyone had picked up at the Wang residence, or if so, whether the person who answered or the caller said it was a wrong number.

When the FBI examined the computer the agents had taken from Jeff's house, besides Daniel's Tonka truck game they found a few work-related documents from Raytheon, but none that were classified. And there was nothing in the computer to suggest that Jeff Wang was anything but a loyal American citizen.

The FBI investigation was stalled. It had been under way for more than a year, and the bureau was no closer to proving its case. Moreover, the investigation was split between Los Angeles, where J.J. Smith was Alston's supervisor, and Long Beach, where an agent named Linas Danilevicius was Cordova's supervisor.

On the wiretap of the Wangs' house, the FBI overheard Jeff discussing the investigation, trying to figure out who had cast suspicion on him, talking to his mother about his relatives, and mentioning various aunts and uncles. By now, the FBI had learned the names of a number of relatives, even though his father's old immigration file could not be found.

Checking out their names, Alston noticed that one of Jeff's cousins, his father's niece, owned a house and that the co-owner of the house, her husband, had the same name as the FBI informant. That seemed an odd coincidence. But there was a reason for this.

Her husband, the co-owner of the house,
was
the informant.