Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China (20 page)

By then, rumors of the romance between
PARLOR MAID
and J.J. had reached headquarters. Once the wiretap and bugs were in place in the house in San Marino,
PARLOR MAID
's affair with J.J. was quickly confirmed. The "special techniques" used by the FBI discovered, as the Justice Department inspector general's report put it delicately, that the relationship between J.J. and Leung was "more than friendship."

Sex is not a federal crime, for which everyone can be grateful. But the electronic surveillance of the Leungs' home provided graphic evidence that there was a major problem in the bureau's Los Angeles field office. What the bureau now had to contemplate was the horrendous possibility that China had penetrated the FBI.

Early in January 2002 Horan briefed Robert Mueller on the situation. A veteran bureau agent, Horan had been sent to Africa by the FBI to take charge of the investigation into the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people and wounded 4,000.

Because the FBI director had taken over just before 9/11, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington had occupied most of his attention. When he heard what had been going on in Los Angeles, he went ballistic.

Early in January 2002 Mueller held a flurry of meetings with Horan, Geide, Iden, and Lance Woo, the China squad supervisor in the Los Angeles field office. The atmosphere was beyond tense.

The Los Angeles and headquarters officials blamed one another for the slow progress of the investigation into the Chinese counterintelligence program in Los Angeles. "Who's in charge?" Mueller demanded.
No one offered an answer.

At one point, Iden left FBI headquarters for Dulles International Airport, and was on a flight en route to Los Angeles when he was reached by Mueller, who ordered him to return to headquarters for another meeting. As soon as Iden landed at LAX—there was no time for him even to run home and change his shirt—he turned around and boarded the redeye back to Washington.

Sheila Horan, an experienced career agent with twenty-nine years in the bureau, was caught in the fallout. As acting chief for national security, she was in the bull's-eye and received the full fury of Mueller's wrath.

"I'm removing you," Mueller told her.

Swept aside in the turmoil over
PARLOR MAID
, and with no other good options open to her, Horan transferred to an administrative post in the bureau and retired later that year. Many of her colleagues in the FBI felt she had been unfairly blamed for the debacle in Los Angeles.

After Mueller had been briefed, he ordered a full field investigation opened of J.J. Smith. He also appointed Randy Bellows, the same federal prosecutor who investigated the FBI's handling of the Wen Ho Lee case, to review the situation in Los Angeles and recommend what should be done. Bellows, who had prosecuted Robert Hanssen, the KGB mole in the FBI, moved quickly. He urged that Mueller appoint an FBI agent with the rank of inspector to take charge of the investigation.

Mueller knew what he had to do. He sent for Les Wiser.

FBI agent James J. Smith and Katrina Leung, code name
PARLOR MAID
, watch the 2001 inaugural parade of President George W. Bush in Washington, DC. For years Leung secretly passed FBI secrets to the MSS, the Chinese intelligence service.
©
2001 Michael Lutzky
/The Washington Post

The FBI's William V. Cleveland Jr., like Smith a top Chinese counterintelligence agent, worked with Leung on the
TIGER TRAP
case. The central figure in that case, Gwo-bao Min, a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory, was forced out after the FBI suspected he had leaked details of the neutron bomb to China. ©
2002 Robert C. Bain/San Jose State University

Hanson Huang, a Harvard-trained lawyer and friend of Katrina Leung, met clandestinely with Min, the
TIGER TRAP
suspect, and according to the FBI passed nuclear weapons information to Beijing through the Chinese embassy in Washington.

Chien Ning, a prominent Chinese geophysicist, introduced Gwo-bao Min to Hanson Huang when the Livermore scientist visited China. The FBI believed she was sent to California to handle intelligence assignments for the MSS, which Chien denied.
South China Morning Post

Veteran FBI agent Dan Grove was able to intercept a letter from Beijing that provided key evidence in the
TIGER TRAP
case, revealing China's efforts to steal US nuclear secrets.

"It was a nightmare come true." FBI director Robert S. Mueller III was furious when he learned that
PARLOR MAID
—the double agent the bureau relied on as its best spy against Beijing—had actually been passing secrets to Communist China for more than a decade, and that the FBI's two top agents handling Chinese counterintelligence had both carried on long-running sexual affairs with her.
FBI

Leslie G. Wiser Jr., the FBI's ace counterintelligence agent, was called in by Mueller to investigate the
parlor maid
debacle. With a team of some two dozen carefully selected agents, Wiser set up a secret office in Los Angeles and broke open the case. In April 2003 both Leung and Smith were arrested by the FBI.

A Chinese "walk-in" turned over a document to the CIA revealing that China had somehow acquired the ultra-secret details of the W-88, America's most sophisticated nuclear warhead, which sits atop the missiles on the Navy's Trident submarines. Despite Beijing's knowledge, details about the warhead are still secret in the US. Enough information was learned about the Chinese document, however, to make this artist's rendition fairly accurate.
Ian Cunningham

This unusual photograph of the W-88's cone-shaped reentry vehicle reveals the warhead's small size. The man in the photo is Bob Putnam of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the weapon was designed.
LANL

September 13, 2000: Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee leaves federal court in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with daughter Alberta and attorneys Mark C. Holscher (right) and John D. Cline after pleading guilty to one felony count of mishandling classified documents and receiving a dramatic apology from a federal judge for the harsh conditions in which he was jailed. Lee was originally suspected, but never charged, with leaking the W-88 to China. The government produced no evidence he had. Unknown to the public, however, Lee had been the subject of two previous FBI investigations for suspicious actions—contacting the
TIGER TRAP
suspect and concealing a meeting with China's top bomb maker.
AP Images