American Spies: Espionage against the United States from the Cold War to the Present

15 The Spy for China

1 5 159 The Spy for China LARRY WU-TAI CHIN There is no place where espionage is not used. SUN TZU, The Art of War, 147 For millennia, Sun Tsu’s emphasis on the importance of espionage has been a pillar of Chinese military and political strategy. His advice about using spies everywhere would be applied relentlessly in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century. During that period, Chinese intelligence flooded the United States with students, scientists, businessmen , and émigrés from all walks of life to harvest America’s political, economic , and scientific secrets. The Chinese espionage tradition in the United States had its roots in the spying of a Chinese-born American who worked in the most overt part of the CIA and who spied for more than three decades for the PRC. Larry Wu-tai Chin’s espionage for the Chinese Communist regime lasted longer than that of any known American spy. He spied throughout decades that witnessed dramatic upheavals in China, the Great Leap Forward , the Cultural Revolution, the Sino/Soviet split, and the power struggles following Mao Zedong’s death. He spied throughout decades of similar upheaval in the United States, the Vietnam conflict, the 1960s’ revolution, Watergate, and the tensions of US–Soviet rivalry. Espionage was a key cornerstone of that rivalry, and US spy catchers focused considerable effort on The Decade of the Spy: Other Spies of the 1980s 160 ferreting out Soviet bloc spies inside the US government. James Angleton alone spent years searching for Soviet moles inside the CIA. Although Angleton was skeptical of the rift between the Soviet Union and China, he never appeared to worry about a Chinese spy in the CIA. Born in Beijing in 1922, Chin studied English and journalism at Yenching University in the Chinese capital. Because of his language abilities, he took a break from his university studies in 1943 and was hired as an interpreter, first at the British Military Mission and then at the US Army’s liaison office in China. After finishing his degree, he worked as an interpreter at the US consulates in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Inhiscollegeyears,Chinhadbeenavocalsupporterofclosetiesbetween the United States and China. Moreover, by the time Mao Zedong launched his communist revolution against Chiang Kai-shek’s government, Chin had already become a trusted employee of the US government. In 1948, a fellow student introduced Chin to a Chinese intelligence officer who played on his ego and patriotism, flattering him about his knowledge of the United States and claiming that China needed someone with his unique insights to forge bonds with the post–World War II superpower.1 The ploy worked, and Chin agreed to find a job in the US government where he would have access to secrets he would share with the land of his birth. When the Korean War broke out, Chin was frequently dispatched to South Korea by the Department of State to interview Chinese prisoners of war. He passed his communist spymasters’ locations of prisoner of war camps in South Korea and questions put to the captured Chinese prisoners. He also gave them the names of the prisoners of war who answered those questions, who undoubtedly met untimely deaths once they were repatriated after the war. Although Chin’s passage of these secrets occurred three decades before his trial, his spying during wartime became one of the major espionage charges against him: “Here was a clear act that damaged the national security of the United States in the midst of a military conflict. Americans were dying and Larry was spying.”2 In 1952, just three years after the Chinese communist revolution, Chin was hired to work as a translator by the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS).3 FBIS was unique among CIA units because its primary task had little to do with secrets. FBIS was the US government’s wire service, the equivalent of Reuters or the Associated Press, and was The Spy for China 161 solely dedicated to monitoring, recording, and analyzing foreign press and broadcast media. AttheCIA,FBISofficersscannedtheforeignpressandsnippedoutarticles of national security interest for translation. FBIS also established offices overseas and erected its radio antennas in friendly countries to capture television and radio broadcasts around the globe. Its overseas branches were run by CIA employees with security clearances who supervised linguists skilled in both English and their native languages who could provide timely and...