The Wen Ho Lee Conundrum

National-security “ethnic profiling” is, to say the least, morally unsettling. It bends, if not breaks, the idea of equality before the law, and it does so over the fact that, on occasion, ethnic fraternity has motivated American officials to betray their trust in favor of foreign powers. Jonathan Pollard, the Jewish-American spy for Israel, is easily the most famous of these “ethnic agents.” And Chinese Americans have been caught spying for Communist China. Larry Wu-Tai Chin, an analyst-linguist for the U.S. Army and the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, successfully spied for 30 years before he was arrested in 1985. Though Chin was a paid asset, the ethnic-cultural magnetism of the “motherland” also nudged him toward betrayal.

Nevertheless, our conception of equality before the law — the political sine qua non for a nation of immigrants — makes us rightly distrustful of counterintelligence officers who find equal treatment under the law compatible with unequal liability to suspicion of guilt. Ethnic profiling places U.S. security officials — not generally a well-educated, well-traveled, cosmopolitan lot — on a slippery slope where discreet suspicion about foreign affections can easily become a crude analytical tool guiding an investigation. It is not a large jump in bureaucratic logic to envision Chinese, Arab, Iranian, or Jewish Americans, suspiciously tagged for possible overseas ties, politely excluded from certain top-secret positions by fearful, “true-blue” security officials. There are a few counterintelligence-generated civil rights lawsuits now pending by Jewish Americans, in particular the case of Adam Ciralsky, a former lawyer in the CIA’s Office of General Counsel, that are disquieting.

That said, national-security ethnic profiling is inevitable. Such profiling is a critical element of espionage, and inseparable from its less glamorous twin, counterintelligence. Take ethnic profiling away from counterintelligence or from America’s own espionage activity overseas, which reflexively tries to exploit minority self-consciousness in much of its targeting, and you’ve deprived U.S. intelligence of a significant psychological avenue in its pursuit of would-be traitors.

For purposes of recruiting, the CIA abroad must be highly attuned to divisions that could conceivably move men toward treason. Without attention to what might possibly separate an individual from others around him — for example, a Christian from Muslims, a Sunni Muslim from Shi’ite Muslims, a Kurd from Turks, an Azari Turk from Iranians, a Protestant from Catholics, a Jew from Christians, a Chinese from everybody else — the CIA would be floating in the open sea on a cloudy day searching for a means of dead reckoning. The CIA is, in fact, usually lost overseas, because such psychological divisions often don’t exist, are hard to find, and are even harder to play with. But in theory, every foreign intelligence service is scanning, like a bottom-feeder on the ocean floor, for some elemental susceptibility that might make one man quietly separate himself from his own society. In those cracks, treason is born.

At home, too, the FBI and other counterintelligence services are looking for such cracks. First they do the obvious: check the bank account of a potential suspect, talk to his disgruntled wife or girlfriend or a nosy neighbor. And if that doesn’t reveal a nefarious intent, the art of counterintelligence can quickly devolve into necromancy. Usually, it is a surprise “walk-in,” often a member of the opposing intelligence service volunteering to rat on his own side, who informs you that you have a mole in your midst and sometimes even reveals the guilty party. In other words, counterespionage is a guessing game.

Let’s look at Wen Ho Lee. We know that China’s Communist government has run Chinese-American agents inside the U.S. government. Can we deduce that Communist China, one of the more ethnocentric societies on earth, might be inclined to encourage ethnic Chinese outside China — even those who emigrated because of communism — to secretly help the motherland? Certainly. The hubris of Beijing and the profundity of Chinese culture make this plausible. Moreover, we have seen official Chinese reports and manuals recommending espionage and contact with overseas Chinese as important means for collecting sensitive information. What do these facts and reasonable suppositions really mean?

Not much. A tenet of the American intelligence profession is the assumption that the more aggressive espionage operations are — the more case officers socialize with possible foreign targets — the more likely these operations are to succeed. Recruitment is the raison d’etre of a case officer, both in spy novels and in fact. It is the almost mystical allure of secret intelligence that prompts Congress to keep the CIA’s clandestine service rich but the overt and usually more knowledgeable foreign service of the Department of State poor. It is the fear of successful recruitment of agents by enemies that led Congress after Aldrich Ames was exposed as a KGB mole to flood the FBI, the CIA, and other agencies with counterintelligence funds and personnel.

Yet the truth of 50 years of American espionage overseas ought to lead us to be highly skeptical about the relationship between aggressive intelligence efforts and successful results. The CIA deployed thousands of case officers against the Soviet Union, yet the few great Soviet agents, the ones that may have made some difference in the course and conduct of the Cold War, were all volunteers. We did not recruit them. The most damaging spy working against America, the naval officer John Walker, who gave the Soviets critical information about the movement and capabilities of U.S. submarines and anti-submarine defenses, was a walk-in. So, too, Aldrich Ames. Ditto Ronald Pelton, the ex-National Security Agency official who volunteered his services to the KGB in 1979. All of these men just trotted into the Soviet embassy in Washington and cut deals.

If one examined internal CIA reports and training manuals throughout the Cold War, one could easily get the impression that the clandestine service had successfully sliced, diced, and penetrated just about everything of intelligence value in the world. The truth, however, was different. In most places, CIA case officers just spun their wheels, recruiting no really valuable spies. Less case-officer contact with potential recruits, and more of the soft, barely noticeable approach — virtually the opposite of the approach the Chinese and the Americans usually use to conduct their business — would have been much more productive.

There is no reason to believe that Chinese intelligence, which certainly would do us great harm if it could, has had or will have any greater recruitment successes against the United States than American intelligence had against the Soviet Union and other Communist countries and rogue states. The Chinese may well have scored a brilliant penetration of America’s nuclear laboratories, as the congressional Cox Report of May 1999 asserts, but it isn’t likely that any such success sprang from the well-executed seduction or blackmail of a Chinese-American scientist, which appears to be one theory behind the counterintelligence investigation of Lee.

Far more likely is a walk-in out of the blue, who might or might not be Chinese-American. Judging by the Soviets who offered their services to the United States and the Americans who offered theirs to the Soviet Union, the odds are good that such a walk-in would have had little to no prior contact with Chinese case officers. Lee’s travel to China and his contact with PRC officials were similar to those of thousands of U.S. citizens with high-level security clearances. They do not indicate a suspicious character. Neither does Lee’s failure to report a contact with, perhaps an approach by, a Chinese official: Unreported contacts happen all the time, since many U.S. officials consider them to be insulting and possibly detrimental to their careers if reported.

Inside the Soviet Union, though American successes included the recruitment of non-Russian “ethnics” who bore a grudge against the dominant people of the empire, most of the CIA’s agents were native Russians. As the names Walker, Ames, and Pelton suggest, white Anglo-Saxons have performed similar service to the enemies of the United States. And greed is the common denominator of mankind. It’s not unreasonable to guess that the Chinese, themselves apparently not averse to profit, may have recognized Americans’ fondness for money.

The Cox Report has, to some extent, accepted the conventional wisdom in intelligence circles worldwide that case officers have exceptional charms that draw recruits into espionage. Thus the report warns that Beijing poses an extraordinary intelligence threat. But we need to be crystal clear about the nature of this threat. The Chinese, no doubt, would dearly love to diminish us in Asia, the Middle East, the Balkans, and wherever else our interests and principles collide with theirs. Their aggressive use of commercial ventures to collect sensitive information brilliantly exploits America’s capitalist ethic and laissez-faire approach to world trade. In this domain, the Chinese have far surpassed the Russians.

But Chinese intelligence does not pose an extraordinary threat to Americans with access to top-secret information. We ought not ascribe to the Chinese powers that they probably do not possess, powers that if they existed would exceed ours throughout the Cold War and (except briefly between the 1920s and the 1950s, when the USSR still had allure for Western intellectuals) the Soviet Union’s. The People’s Republic of China simply doesn’t have the magnetism to draw left-wing spies to her side, at least not yet.

It is possible, of course, that Wen Ho Lee is a Chinese mole — either a brilliant recruit or, more likely, a cunning walk-in. His extensive downloading of nuclear computer codes provokes very serious questions. Perhaps the U.S. government has solid information fingering Lee provided by its own walk-ins. The United States has certainly had Chinese walk-ins in the past, notably the one in 1995 who sparked the Los Alamos investigation, as the Cox Report recounts. But walk-in intelligence would likely be worthless in an American court. Perhaps the U.S. government will show, probably through officially sanctioned leaks, what it had on Lee. So far, however, the investigation of Lee has revealed only that America’s counterintelligence is falling badly short — and that ethnic suspicion, not for the first time, got out of hand.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a fonner case officer in the CIA’s clandestine service and the author, under the pseudonym Edward Shirley, of Know thine Enemy: A Spy’s Journey into Revolutionary Iran.