Chasing Chinese Students (SPIES & TRAITORS Alert!)

NewsMax.com ^ | February 21, 2003 | Note Trulock

[HighRoadToChina]

Reprinted from NewsMax.com

Chasing Chinese Students

Notra Trulock
Friday, Feb. 21, 2003

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has finally acknowledged the threat of Chinese espionage against U.S. centers of advanced science and technology. At least, that’s what senior bureau officials are telling the New York Times.

The revelation comes as the bureau is trying to increase its budget on Capitol Hill and almost certainly represents an effort to repair the FBI’s tarnished image as the nation’s premier spy-catching agency. If true, however, the admission represents a dramatic turnabout from the bureau’s approach to Chinese espionage during the tenure of FBI Director Louis Freeh.

Bureau officials told the Times that China has stepped up its aggressive campaign to illegally acquire U.S. technologies. Consequently, the bureau says it is trying to recruit Chinese students at U.S. universities who may be working for Beijing. The bureau is concentrating its efforts on students in academic disciplines, like nuclear physics, that have military applications. "We’re not interested in kids taking history or English 101," one agent told the Times.

The bureau thinks that recruiting visiting Chinese students might help it better understand Beijing’s technology shopping list. FBI spokesmen told the Times that the bureau is paying for such information and that the program has been under way for about six months. It is particularly eager to get its hands on directives issued by Beijing that might reveal China’s intelligence priorities. Bureau spokesmen told the Times that the FBI wants to recruit Chinese students who may eventually return to the mainland.

The Chinese government dismissed the notion that it is collecting intelligence on U.S. technologies as "sheer fabrication and not worthy of comment." The Times produced the usual assortment of "outside experts" who were quick to dismiss the FBI program as impractical or doomed to failure.

One China scholar with the Rand Corporation claimed to be unaware of any increase in China’s efforts to acquire U.S. technologies. But at least he admitted that there might be some merit in trying to elicit intelligence from visiting Chinese students. This scholar must not be aware of the spate of recent indictments in California alleging illegal transfers of U.S. technologies to China.

One remarkable aspect of the Times article was the omission of the usual references to the dangers of "ethnic profiling." Over the past several years, the Times and other national media outlets would not have published such a story without inserting the obligatory allegation that the government was ethnically or racially profiling these students. The Times itself became hypersensitive to such allegations after it was criticized for its coverage of the Wen Ho Lee spy case.

At the very end of the article, the Times did quote Henry Tang, who runs the Committee of 100, a Chinese-American activist group. Tang rarely misses a chance to rail about ethnic profiling. But this time he told the Times that students should decide for themselves whether to cooperate with the FBI.

He did express his worry that the bureau’s new policy "could unfairly cast aspersions on tens of thousands of Chinese students, and Chinese-Americans more generally." But that was mild in comparison to past charges of racism hurled at anyone daring to bring up the topic of Chinese espionage.

Even more remarkable, however, was the willingness of the FBI to discuss such a program with a New York Times reporter. During the 1990s, FBI leaders systematically dismantled the bureau’s capability to counter Chinese espionage. The bureau "downsized" headquarters’ units targeted against the Chinese and forced dozens of experienced special agents into early retirement or alternative career fields.

Special Agent Ray Wickman, the bureau’s most experienced China hand, retired rather than bow to demands from Justice Department officials during the Chinese campaign finance scandal for the names of his sources. He got no support from Louis Freeh.

Freeh’s FBI shied away from espionage investigations of Energy Department scientists that would likely have led the bureau to Beijing’s front door. The FBI and the Justice Department opted for lesser charges against these scientists that shielded China from implication in a spy scandal.

Moreover, for the FBI to reveal details of its plans to target Chinese students, to recruit them to be U.S. spies in the event they return to the mainland, and to pay for their services would seem to be a security breach of the first magnitude.

The clue came early in the article, however. The reporter said the bureau had started the program in an effort "to revitalize its battered reputation as a counterintelligence unit in the aftermath of terrorist attacks."

By definition, clandestine programs were not publicized. This is simply an effort by the FBI to refurbish its image.

Notra Trulock is Associate Editor of the AIM Report.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

China/Taiwan

Editor's note:
Find out China’s role in terrorist attacks on America

[HighRoadToChina]

Commie Spy/Traitor Alert!

FRemail me if you want off my Commie list.

[holyscroller]

Does this mean they're finally going to go back and take another look at Wen Ho Lee and the stolen Los Alamos files?

[HighRoadToChina]

I sure hope so. This guy should fry if he is convicted of passing the W-88 technology to the Communist Chinese. If America gets MIRV'ed, thanks goes to this traitor and Clinton/Gore.

[nonliberal]

I attended one of the better universities of science and technology and we were absolutely crawling with Chinese students. Any info on how many of them are children of Communist Party officials?

[Lessismore]

This has been going on for many years. In the early '80s a friend of mine at Berkeley talked about a Chinese electrical engineering graduate student who spent hours at the copier.

[nanomid]

Great Topic, Kudos for keeping it afloat!

We can't forget China's role in Iraq, Pakistan, and N Korea.
They also insist that we don't build an ABM and litmus their nuke program on whether it can hit the US.
Anyone who doesn't want you to protect yourself is your enemy, plain and simple.
Are we blind and stupid!?!?
I don't buy things from China. Sure it costs me, but morals aren't free.

[Nucluside]

Now that the FBI, hopefully, is not anti-American, perhaps they could interrogate Bill Richardson, former Secretary of Energy, now Governor of New Mexico, who went to great lengths to shield the traitors in the Demorat Party. By causing attention to be focused on Lee, either innocent or a guilty scapegoat, the Clinton administration was enabled to give 10 years aid and comfort to the Chinese nuclear weapons programs in exchange for cash. The water is so muddied that Lee, in fact, who served a year in solitary confinement, could be innocent. If so, careers should be destroyed and time should be served by members of the Party of Treason and any federal agency and Department found culpable.

The problem with investigating a federal entity is that they NEVER admit wrongdoing, even if confronted with credible witnesses and irrefutable testimony. The problem with fighting them is that their legal representation is unlimited. Almost no individual or organization can afford to fight them. Inspector's General investigations are not convened to determine improper or illegal behavior on the part of the government, but rather to protect the government and eliminate the problem (cover it up). SOP is to promote and/or transfer the wrongdoers and gather information to destroy or neutralize the entity that would dare to confront the government. Check it out.

[PsyOp]

Giving them MFN trade status was a huge mistake.

[PhilDragoo]

Excellent article.

Freeh dismantled FBI counterintel.

John Millis called Deutch "the worst DCI for counterintelligence" and called traitorrapist42 "the worst President for counterintelligence".

Then Millis sucked a shotgun in the Breezeway Motel--damnedest coincidence.

The Lee case was obstructed for years by Sandy Berger, China's lobbyist at Hogan & Hartson, and Butch Reno, the Clintonista Universal Shill.

Of course they're here doing their anthill thing--duh.

For an early glimpse of what the FBI is capable of, read William Sullivan's The Bureau and how even over thirty years ago the Bureau was failing to follow up on foreign spies.

The name Hanssen comes to mind.

Freeh drove out O'Neill who died in the WTC.

And this business of the vaunted Federal Bureau of Investigation talking openly to the old gray drag queen about "rooting out Chinese operatives" among the student population--puh-lease.

And Daniel Pipes reports the FBI is just beginning to count the number of mosques here.

They couldn't get Koczyski without his brother, framed Richard Jewel and still don't have the Olympic Park bomber, failed to get Hanssen for years, covered up OKCBomb's Filipino and Middle East associations (viz. Jayna Davis, James Patterson, Jim Crogan), covered up TWA Flight 800 (continuing), and have made the superficial change of substituting Mueller for Freeh.

Wang Jun, John Huang, Charlie Trie--I remain underwhelmed.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!

[Yardstick]

This is a little off topic, but I recently had an interesting experience related to a Chinese grad student at my university.

I'm an engineering student, an undergrad, but I lucked out and landed a job doing research for the school, which means that I spend between ten and twenty hours a week working with grad students, the majority of whom are from other countries, and one of whom is a girl from China.

The lab where I work has an area of cubicule partitions which serve as offices for the grad students, but the largest part is a common area with lab benches and test equipment and several computers. Long story short, I was doing some work (read: logged onto FR) at one of the computers in the common area; she was working at the computer next to me. When she was through, she got up and left. I'm not one to pry, but I couldn't help noticing that she had left a Word document on the screen -- she had forgotten to close the window.

It appeared to be a report intended for whomever it was that was coordinating her stay here in the US. She opened by saying that she had written it as part of the requirement that students visiting the US study the culture carefully.

As part of her study, she had interviewed two young Americans -- a boy in his teens and a girl in her early twenties. Both disliked their parents and their family. Both were snotty, shallow, and rebellious. I wondered if she had just happened to get hold of two unusually rotten kids, or if they were really not such rotten kids but had just played up their snotty attitudes in order to make an impression on their reserved Chinese interviewer, or if maybe she had over-emphasized what may really have been a normal degree of snottiness on their part. In any case, the details she reported about them and their lives were without exception very unflattering.

Then I got to the final paragraph, a funny little paragraph in which, out of nowhere, she wrote that she had noticed a difference in the races, that blacks were treated "differently" than whites. Her report ended abruptly here with no elaboration on the racial differences theme, and she included no instances of having observed such different treatment. I don't deny that there may be some truth to this, but this girl lives on campus and has no car. She spends her life at the university, and at the university there are no such difference to be observed.

This put the the report in context. My theory is that she was regurgitating the anti-American propaganda which the Chinese government schools shovel into the heads of Chinese students from early on. Propaganda which no doubt characterizes Americans as decadent, disfunctional pigs with no morality and, especially, no respect for their elders -- an important cultural virtue in China. Oh yeah, and Americans are racists, too. She was writing to please her handlers back home.

I could be misinterpreting badly, but I take this report as a bit of further evidence that the Chinese government isn't exactly sending its students here with the best of intentions, even if it's not sending them as spies. I think they're poisoning the water by negatively shading the expectations of the students that they send here, and by reinforcing those shaded expectations even while the students are here.

[HighRoadToChina]

It also interesting that you posted this tidbit.

The comment about "blacks" being treated differently here in US is very interesting, because most if not all Chinese people (I speak as one of them) are racists towards blacks, and toward alot of other races. They don't openly say so, but in their psychology and psyche, Chinese people are very prejudice and racist.

The other unspoken question in your post is why are these students STILL brainwashed? I mean, here they are in the greatest country in the world with the greatest freedom and access to information, and they are stuck in what I call the "good Nazi Syndrome", i.e., they still believe in the lies of Communist China and that the current regime IS China (just as the good Nazis or Germans believed that Nazi Germany IS Germany and that it would last a 1,000 years). We all know where that thinking went.

I got an interesting answer from a Chinese student in the US. He said that most Chinese students are studying the sciences and engineering (he is an Art major), so they stick with her studies and don't venture into history or books like that. The Art students tend to read and they tend to explore history and topics like that. So, most Chinese students, I believe my Art student was trying to say, are rather lazy on one hand (just like the peaceniks) to explore real history and facts, and are too busy doing their engineering and science studies on the other hand.

But I am still very perplexed that most Chinese students don't realize that Mao and his Communist consorts killed, starved to death, etc. some 65 million Chinese people and killed 1.2 million Tibetans.

The Good Nazi Syndrome!

[GOP_1900AD]

HighRoad, very eloquent. Thanks!:)

[nonliberal]

What can be done about this? Here we have a gaping loophole in our student visa policy.

[Artist]

"But I am still very perplexed that most Chinese students don't realize that Mao and his Communist consorts killed, starved to death, etc. some 65 million Chinese people and killed 1.2 million Tibetans."

Are there any books you can suggest that a Chinese student would accept or be influenced by that would spell all of that out?

Also, if you have a ping list, please add me to it.

Thanks,

[HighRoadToChina]

a. Troublemaker by Harry Wu (Ballantine Books)
b. Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng (Penguin Books)
c. The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Dr. Li Zhisui (Random House)

[Artist]

Thanks very much. I'm putting them all on my personal reading list too.

[HighRoadToChina]

Also, a good analysis of the military implications of Communist China are:

1. The China Threat by Bill Gertz
2. Code Name Kindred Spirit: Inside the Chinese Nuclear Espionage Scandal by Notra Trulock

Also, check out these sites:

1. www.boycottmadeinchina.org
2. www.chinasupport.net
3. www.laogai.org/en/index-en.html
4. www.gertzfile.com
5. www.softwar.net

Are you Chinese?

[Artist]

Are you Chinese?

No, but both of our children were born in China and adopted as infants. They are now American citizens. As you can probably imagine, I'm very interested in all things Chinese.

Also, I occassionally have contact with students from China, and I've found that they are much as you described in #13. For instance, I know a student who claims that "Tibet has always been part of China." It's a bit daunting dealing with a entrenched worldview like that, so I really appreciate your reading recommendations.

Thanks very much.