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Chinese spy masters eschew secret meetings with agents, cryptic chalk signals on Washington mailboxes, or "dead drops" of money or documents on rural roads -- all the well-known facets of the Aldrich Ames and Walker family spy cases in the 1980s. The Chinese avoid clandestine contacts of any kind between agents and handlers, on U.S. or even their own soil, Moore said, preferring to elicit information in open contacts with U.S. scientists. Chinese spy handlers, he said, rarely even ask a source for a classified document.

That leaves nothing to be tracked or photographed by U.S. counterspies looking for proof of espionage, he said, as in the case of Lee. The FBI and its critics both miss the point of how China conducts spying operations, he suggested, by squabbling over whether Attorney General Janet Reno was right to decline warrants for wiretaps on Lee's home and telephones. The liklihood of finding a "smoking gun" was scant, Moore says: Beijing's spy masters "want what's between their ears, not what's in the briefcase." He added that he couldn't conceive of Chinese spy masters asking Lee or any other scientist, Chinese or not, to download classified documents and deliver them to Beijing: too much risk.

"It would not be the kind of thing anybody would ask them to do," Moore said. "If you're asking if someone would come along and give them the Rosetta stone of U.S. nuclear secrets, that's possible. Possible, but not probable. It doesn't fit the Chinese MO."

Beijing's spies don't target Chinese-Americans because they're susceptible to recruitment, Moore emphasized, but because they're more accessible. It's simply easier for Chinese spies and officials to meet and create rapport with Chinese-Americans, especially in the United States.

And they're willing to wait years for the opportune time to pitch a target for a sliver of useful information, bypassing a formal recruitment altogether. The target won't even know he's been "developed."

"What the Chinese are after is an indiscretion," Moore says -- usually after a scientist has had a full day and a few drinks. "It doesn't have to be classified, it just has to be helpful, and they want it to be more than what they would normally get, more than what they are entitled to get. That's the way they play the game: They want 'X-plus.'"

"I call it espionage by indiscretion," Moore says, and it's not even worth the time of U.S. counterspies to try to catch it. "The name of the game for the counterintelligence people, and even the security people, is not to try to stop Chinese espionage, because Chinese espionage in this model almost doesn't exist. It's a by-product of indiscretion."

"It's an essentially impossible counterintelligence task," Moore said, and "the U.S. is losing."

Despite the furor over the Wen Ho Lee case, Chinese-American scientists can still expect to be bombarded by Beijing's approaches for information, Moore and Brandon said. The only way to keep from being caught up in the spy and counter-spy game, they said, is to avoid situations where they might be vulnerable.

"Don't go into a room alone with them," Moore said. Stick with a friend on a junket to China. "Just like a school trip," he half-joked. "Hold hands with your partner."
salon.com | Aug. 26, 1999

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