A Spy’s Motivation: For Love of Another Country
Washington — One day in February 2005, F.B.I.agents fished a pile of paper scraps from the trash of Chi Mak, anengineer for a California defense contractor. Painstakinglyreconstructed, the torn-up notes turned out to be what the bureaubelieved were instructions for Mr. Mak on what technical information tosteal and deliver to China.
Mr. Mak, who emigrated from China three decades ago and became aUnited States citizen in 1985, was sentenced last month to 24 years inprison for illegally exporting controlled information and lying aboutit. Addressing the judge who said he had betrayed the United States,Mr. Mak, 67, protested: “I never intended to hurt this country. I lovethis country.”
Mr. Mak’s case, described by prosecutors as involving a spy ringthat included four relatives, is part of a historic shift in the natureof spying against the United States. A new study by a DefenseDepartment contractor shows that divided loyalty, usually on the partof naturalized Americans with roots in a foreign land, has become thedominant motive.
From 1947 to 1990, the study found, fewer than 1 in 5 Americanscharged with spying were acting solely or primarily out of patriotic,as opposed to ideological, loyalty to a foreign country. Since 1990,according to the study’s author, Katherine L. Herbig, divided loyaltyhas been the sole or primary motive in about half of all cases.
“Dual loyalty is a problem we haven’t seen on such a scale since theRevolution,” when many colonists swore allegiance to the British king,said Joel F. Brenner, the top counterintelligence official in theoffice of the director of national intelligence.
The trend has come to light at an awkward time for the nation’sintelligence agencies. Admitting that they can hardly hope to penetrateAl Qaeda without greater expertise in Arabic or fend off Chinese espionage without more fluent speakers of Chinese, the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency are dropping old security policies that excluded many Americans with foreign relatives from high-level clearances.
But even as the government aggressively courts first-generation andsecond-generation Americans, the new statistics suggest, it must keep awary eye out for those whose real loyalty is to their native country orto militant Islam.
“The intelligence community has a particularly difficult risk tomanage,” Mr. Brenner said. “It’s difficult to do background checks onpeople from out-of-the-way places.”
Why do Americans betray their country? Counterintelligenceinstructors have long offered the mnemonic MICE, for money, ideology,compromise, ego. Perhaps it’s time to update that to MINCE, addingnationalism to the mix. Or MINCES, with a nod to the consistentcontributions of sex, as in the case of Donald W. Keyser, a StateDepartment official whose liaison with a Taiwanese intelligence officerled to a conviction last year for possession of classified documentsand lying to investigators.
In the complex human equation that produces a turncoat, rarely isonly one motive at play. But different periods have featured differentmotives in the ascendancy.
The first great wave was ideology, growing from an early fascinationwith the Soviet experiment, which promised freedom from the grindinginequities of capitalism. Julius Rosenberg,for instance, whose parents worked in New York City sweatshops, joinedthe Young Communist League as a teenager; he was one of dozens ofAmerican and British Communists who fed secrets to Soviet intelligencein the first half of the 20th century.
But by the 1970s, disillusionment with the crimes of Communismmeant that few took up the Soviet cause gratis. Money dominated thesecond wave: hundreds of thousands of dollars for the spy ring led byJohn A. Walker Jr., a Navy warrant officer; $4.6 million for AldrichAmes of the C.I.A.; $1.4 million for Robert P. Hanssen of the F.B.I., who once sent his handler a note seeking diamonds, saying cash was harder to hide.
Perhaps no would-be spy was so indiscriminately mercenary as Brian P. Regan, an Air Force master sergeant who worked at the National Reconnaissance Office,overseer of spy satellites, and was sentenced to life in prison in 2003after seeking to sell secrets to Iraq, Libya and China.
The third wave of spying shows much less greed. Money, the sole orprimary motive for two-thirds of spies who got their start in the1980s, was the main draw for just a quarter of spies from 1990 to date,Ms. Herbig’s new analysis concludes. No money at all was paid in the 11most recent cases.
The largest share was made up of naturalized Americans who spied outof devotion to another country: Cuba, the Philippines, South Korea,Egypt, Iraq. In a handful of cases, Muslims have been accused of tiesto Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups; these include Hassan Abujihaad,an American convert to Islam convicted last month of supplyinginformation on Navy ships to a suspected terrorist financier.
Then there is the rash of Chinese cases, notably that of Mr. Mak.Prosecutors called him a classic “sleeper” agent who worked for yearsin technical jobs before delivering military information to China,including three encrypted computer disks of data. Still, such casesseem murkier than those with a money trail. Mr. Mak, as well as hisfriends and some Chinese-Americans, argue that his prosecutionreflected anti-Chinese paranoia. They noted that the information heprovided was unclassified and had been presented at internationalconferences.
The complications are evident, too, in an indictment for economicespionage unsealed in February in California against another Americancitizen of Chinese birth, Dongfan (Greg) Chung, a 72-year-old engineerfor defense contractors. The indictment quotes a letter Mr. Chung wasaccused of sending to a technology institute in China in the late 1970swith an emotional offer of help.
“I would like to make an effort to contribute to the Four Modernizations of China,” he wrote.
According to the federal indictment, the Chinese were eager for hishelp. “We are all moved by your patriotism,” Professor Chen Lung Ku ofthe Harbin Institute of Technology wrote back in September 1979. “We’dlike to join our hands together with the overseas compatriots in theendeavor for the construction of our great socialist motherland.”
