America’s Dragnet for Spies Stirs Unease in Court of Public Opinion

As a federal jury trial for a Harvard professor indicted on crimes related to Communist Chinese espionage prepares to kick off, voices in the court of public opinion are rising in opposition to the DOJ’s counterintelligence strategy on the People’s Republic.The trial of Charles M. Lieber, which begins on December 14 in the United States District Court of Massachusetts, is ostensibly about spying. Yet the chemistry professor faces but two counts of “making false statements” to federal authorities and four charges of tax offenses related to his alleged ties with a Chinese university. On July 30, 2021, Mr. Lieber entered a plea of not guilty, with his lawyer, Torrey K. Young, calling the indictment, “flat-out wrong.”Meanwhile, critics in politics, academia, and the press are starting to question cases like Mr. Lieber’s. They denounce a DOJ counterintelligence program on China for its targets, methods, and alleged racial discrimination.Cases like Mr. Lieber’s have been sprouting in the last decade, with Communist China’s operatives demonstrating increased prowess in spycraft. The communist network has penetrated, to one degree or another, government agencies such as the CIA, DIA, and DOD, as well as major corporations including GE, Boeing, and Dow. And — as Mr. Lieber’s case suggests — Beijing’s agents walk the halls of academia.Even high-profile politicians like Senator Dianne Feinstein and Congressman Eric Swalwell have found themselves entangled within Beijing’s web.In what the DOJ has called an effort to “rob, replicate, and replace,” China’s intelligencers have looted technology on satellites and radar, rockets and space shuttles, and helicopters, as well as thermal imaging, stealth cruise missiles, missile guidance applications, and semiconductor chips. Faced with such national security risks, the DOJ decided to retool its espionage strategy on China.The seeds for Mr. Lieber’s 2020 arrest were sown in 2018, when Attorney General Sessions announced the China Initiative. In Mr. Sessions’s press conference, he described Communist China’s covert threat as, “not just taking place against traditional targets like our defense and intelligence agencies, but against targets like research labs and universities.”As Mr. Sessions saw it, the initiative could equip America with the legal toolkit needed to combat China’s unorthodox tradecraft.China’s mosaic style of espionage — what became known as “Thousand Grains of Sand” — had indeed proved something of a cipher for post-Cold War intelligence agencies grown accustomed to trench coats, rolling cars, and back-alley dead drops.In 2003, PBS interviewed multiple Chinese intelligence specialists, including the American ambassador to China, James Lilley, who described Beijing’s method thusly: “If the Russians want … sand from a beach … they’ll have a submarine come in at night … get a bucket full of sand, and they’ll take it back to the submarine…. The Chinese will have 500 people having picnics on the beach, each picking up the sand in a small can, and bring it back.”China “relied on a much wider range of potential agents: students, businessmen, visiting scientists, academic exchanges, and so forth,” a former intelligence director at the Department of Energy, Notra Trulock, told PBS, adding that many come here “with specific tasks from both their institutes and also Chinese intelligence services.”Thus, rather than spy versus spy, with agents hunting agents, the Chinese paradigm requires unprecedented emphasis on disrupting assets.“They rely on a large number of what they call ‘overseas Chinese’ and a few non-Chinese to provide them with information,” a former FBI special agent, Edward Appel, said in the 2003 interview. “Basically, it’s a game played on the use of assets … where that person actively goes out and collects things for you.”Yet, critics of the law enforcement initiative — such as a Stanford University faculty group — argue that the program has “deviated significantly from its claimed mission” and should be “terminated.”In the September 2021 letter sent to the DOJ supported by “1,113 faculty members, scholars and administrators from 218 institutions,” the Stanford group objects to what it sees as “a significant increase of investigations and prosecutions to researchers in academia.”DOJ records show the initiative’s investigative direction is a feature, not a bug. The DOJ specifically identifies “academia” as one of the nation’s most “vulnerable sectors,” explaining that “traditions of openness … leave it vulnerable to PRC exploitation.”In 2008, Communist China’s Thousand Talents Program was launched. While arguably related, this program is distinct from China’s Thousand Grains of Sand style of espionage. The FBI director, Christopher Wray, described the “Talents” program as an attempt to “entice scientists” to steal and deliver to China “proprietary information” from America. For their espionage, China would reward scientists with handsome pay, prestigious appointments, and custom laboratories.Significantly, Mr. Wray’s description closely resembles the charges brought against Harvard’s Mr. Lieber. In addition to his purported tax offenses, the professor — whose research group focuses “broadly on nanoscience and nanotechnology” — was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly signing a three-year contract with Wuhan University of Technology as a “High Level Foreign Expert” for the Thousand Talents Program. Thereafter, the DOJ claims Mr. Lieber “knowingly and willfully” misrepresented his relationship to authorities.The DOJ also alleges Wuhan University of Technology paid Mr. Lieber “up to $50,000” per month and provided him “approximately $158,000” to cover living expenses while furnishing him with “more than $1.5 million to establish a research lab.”Critics of the initiative take issue with the ways in which charges, like in Mr. Lieber’s case, are brought. “Most prosecutions are for misconduct such as failure to disclose foreign appointments or funding. While such problems should be addressed, they should not be confused with national security concerns,” Stanford’s letter reads.Here Mr. Sessions’s DOJ was again of a different mind, viewing the disruption of China’s spy network — wherever and however possible — as a top concern. A 2018 DOJ fact sheet described the initiative as specifically utilizing the Foreign Agents Registration Act — a 1938 statute that requires foreign agents to disclose their overseas entanglements — in order to target Communist Chinese operatives.The DOJ made clear the statute was integrated into the initiative as part of a broader strategy empowering Washington to prosecute researchers who “deliberately deceived authorities about their ties to China.” The DOJ deemed the statute an “enforcement strategy for non-traditional collectors,” or what colloquially might be thought of as a secret weapon in the fight against China’s vast network of compromised civilian assets.Yet, even the ethnic makeup of those indicted by the statute has riled critics: “We believe the China Initiative raises concerns of racial profiling,” reads Stanford’s letter.In July 2021, citing a small number of cases in which Asian defendants were indicted, but weren’t convicted, Congressman Ted W. Lieu and 90 members of Congress wrote to the DOJ protesting “the repeated, wrongful targeting of individuals of Asian descent for alleged espionage,” which the group labels “false accusations.”Similarly, a self-described nonpartisan Chinese American organization — the Committee of 100 — recently released statements purporting to show “racial disparities” in counterintelligence efforts against Chinese espionage. This group claims authorities “consciously” or “unconsciously” harbor “implicit biases” and therefore “disproportionately” “falsely accuse” Asian academics of espionage.It might be argued that in order to advance their claims, Mr. Lieu and other critics play a word game in which they “consciously” or “unconsciously” confuse “non-conviction” with “falsely accused.”More egregious still, the Committee of 100 further conflates “false accusation” with “possible innocence,” which in turn they equate with “exoneration.”An article in the Times cites as evidence Stanford’s faculty group, Mr. Lieu’s letter to the DOJ, as well as the Committee of 100’s statements in furtherance of casting doubt on whether American counterintelligence efforts against China’s espionage have “gone too far” in targeting academics. At best, the analysis by these critics is incredibly naive, while at worst it smacks of sophism.To be clear, while of course statistical analysis is legitimate in the pursuit of pattern recognition, these groups’ criticisms of “disproportionality” or “disparity” are inherently flawed as they rest on the assumption “unequal outcomes between two groups must be caused primarily by discrimination” rather than by any other “causal factors.” This specious argument is known as the disparity fallacy and is a perennial distraction from those who have succumbed to, or traffic in, modern society’s bane, i.e., woke identity politics.No matter that the threat of Chinese espionage emanates from Communist China, such critics as Stanford’s group lament that the initiative “disproportionally targets researchers of Chinese origin.” That more Chinese have been involved in Chinese espionage verges on tautology.Even so, since 2010 non-Chinese such as James Wilbur Fondren Jr., Bryan Underwood, Dejan Karabasevic, Robert Maegerle, Kevin Patrick Mallory, and Ron Rockwell Hansen have been convicted of crimes related to Chinese espionage. Their collective woes imply that the aim of the initiative is not the persecution of an ethnic group but rather the prosecution of criminal behavior.In the end, a jury will decide Mr. Lieber’s fate. If he is found guilty, America might still take solace in the fact that in Mr. Lieber’s stead the China Initiative will have been reaffirmed.________@LenczyckiPhilip.

America’s Dragnet for Spies Stirs Unease in Court of Public Opinion

America’s Dragnet for Spies Stirs Unease in Court of Public Opinion

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