Greg Chung was at home on February 1, 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia fell from the sky. His son Jeffrey called to tell him the news: the ship had broken apart while returning to Earth, and all seven astronauts on board had died. “That’s not a good joke to make,” Chung said. An American citizen who was born in China, Chung lived with his wife, Ling, on a cul-de-sac in Orange, California. Until his retirement, a few months earlier, he had worked on NASA’s space-shuttle program. Among other things, he had helped to design the Columbia’s crew cabin. When he realized that Jeffrey was telling the truth, he hung up the phone and wept.
In 1972, NASA outsourced the design and development of its space shuttles to the Rockwell Corporation, which was later acquired by Boeing. For three decades, Chung was a structural engineer in the stress-analysis group. The work was repetitive, but he was well suited to it. He rarely left his office, even for coffee; instead, he sat at his desk, running computer models that predicted how the fuselage would hold up under various intensities of heat and pressure.
After the Columbia accident, NASA asked Boeing to improve the design of the next shuttle. Chung had been one of the best analysts in his group, and his former supervisor called to hire him back as a subcontractor. Though he was seventy, he was glad to postpone retirement. He returned to his former habits, coming home late for dinner and then working until midnight. He was driven not by the prospect of a promotion or a raise but by the pleasure of the work. “He’d tell me how much money he had saved for Boeing,” Ling told me later. “I always teased him: ‘your Boeing, your Boeing.’ ”
In April, 2006, two F.B.I. agents visited Chung at home. He had designed the house in Orange, and it included a deck that he and Ling had built themselves. In the large front yard, Chung had planted lemon trees and a tomato patch, which he sprinkled with water recycled from the shower. Their two sons—Jeffrey and his older brother, Shane—lived nearby with their families.
Chung, a tall man with a lean, impassive face, invited the agents inside. They asked him about Chi Mak, an acquaintance of Chung’s, who had been arrested several months earlier. Mak had moved to California from Hong Kong in the seventies, and had worked as an engineer at Power Paragon, a company that builds power-distribution systems for the Navy. For years, China had been trying to modernize its naval fleet, and the F.B.I. suspected that Mak had been trained by Chinese intelligence services and sent to the United States as a spy.
For more than a year leading up to Mak’s arrest, F.B.I. agents had tapped his phone and followed him on his errands. Once, while Mak and his wife were on vacation in Alaska, agents entered their house in the middle of the night. They were careful to leave no trace—even the cobwebs in the living room remained intact after the search—as they photographed hundreds of Mak’s documents, including his address book, in which they found the names of several Chinese-American engineers. One of the names was Greg D. Chung.
Chung, whose given name was Dongfan, had gone by Greg since arriving in the United States, forty years earlier. He told the F.B.I. agents that he and Ling went out to dinner with the Maks once or twice a year, but that, because Chi Mak was an electrical engineer, not a structural engineer, the two men never discussed work. The agents thanked Chung and left. They had learned a few useful pieces of information, but nothing that implicated him in any wrongdoing.
A few weeks later, F.B.I. agents conducted another search of Mak’s house. In a stack of old bank statements, they found a photocopied letter, written in Chinese on the stationery of a Beijing hotel, from Gu Wei Hao, an official in the Chinese aviation ministry. It was dated 1987, and it was addressed not to Chi Mak but to Lingjia and Dongfan Chung.
In his letter, one of several documents that the F.B.I. recently shared with me, Gu asked Chung to collect information that would help China develop its space program. The Chinese government had embarked on a plan to build an Earth-orbiting space station, and Gu was looking for any relevant technical knowledge. “For all the expenses that you incur in collecting or purchasing information, I will find a way to pay you cash in person, and you will be allowed to carry it outside the country,” Gu wrote. He invited Chung to Guangzhou, where they could discuss technical matters “in a small setting” that would be “very safe.” Because Chung was an American citizen, Gu advised him to apply for a tourist visa; on the application, he should claim to be “visiting relatives in China.” Gu concluded, “It is your honor and China’s fortune that you are able to realize your wish of dedicating yourself to the service of your country.”
Chung was now an espionage suspect. The F.B.I. opened a new investigation, under the direction of an agent named Kevin Moberly, an athletic man in his early forties with cropped hair and a neat goatee. One night in August, 2006, Moberly woke up at 2 A.M. and got dressed. He and another agent, Bill Baoerjin, drove to Orange and parked on Grovewood Lane, less than a hundred yards from Chung’s house. They sat in the car for twenty minutes, scanning the neighborhood and letting their eyes adjust to the darkness. Then, using flashlights covered with red filters to make the beams less conspicuous, they rifled through two trash cans outside Chung’s gate. They found a bundle of Chinese-language newspapers, which they took back to the office.
Slipped between the newspaper pages were several technical documents from Rockwell and Boeing. Moberly, who had been an intelligence officer in the Air Force before joining the F.B.I., recognized the abbreviations: “O.V.,” for Orbital Vehicle; “S.T.S.,” for shuttle transportation system. There was no evidence that Chung was attempting to make a dead drop. He seemed simply to be getting rid of sensitive documents, possibly as a reaction to the Mak case, which had been in the news for months.
Moberly and Baoerjin returned the next week for another search. This time, a neighbor’s car passed by at 4 A.M., and the agents had to duck behind the trash cans. Moberly decided that curbside rummaging was too risky. He made an arrangement with the trash collectors: after the garbage truck left the Chungs’ neighborhood but before it reached a processing center, it would stop at an agreed-upon spot; F.B.I. agents would remove the trash they needed without divulging which house was under investigation.
The following week, shortly after sunrise, Chung wheeled out a large recycling bin and placed it next to the two trash cans, which he had put out the night before. He then stepped behind the bushes in his front yard and waited for a minute, watching the street, before he returned to the house. When the investigators retrieved the contents of the recycling bin, they found more than six hundred pages from Boeing, full of graphs and line drawings. The words “proprietary” or “trade secret” appeared on several of the pages.
In September, Moberly and Gunnar Newquist, an agent with the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, went to Chung’s house to conduct another interview. The two agents sat on a white sofa; Chung sat on the other side of a wide coffee table, looking relaxed. Moberly began with casual questions about Chi Mak. An hour into the interview, he steered the conversation to Gu Wei Hao, the Chinese aviation-ministry official. Chung said that he’d met Gu during a trip to China in 1985, and then again in the early nineties.
“Did he ever ask you for anything?” Moberly asked.
“No,” Chung said.
Chung went to the kitchen for a glass of water. When he sat down again, Moberly pulled out the letter from Gu and placed it on the coffee table. He asked Chung to read it aloud, in English. Chung translated in a faltering voice.
“Do you have any other documents in the house that you shouldn’t have?” Moberly said. He handed Chung a consent form allowing a search, and Chung signed it.
Moberly called in a team of agents that had been waiting outside since morning. Ling had returned home with their grandson, and the three watched in silence as more than a dozen agents searched the house and the one-acre property.
Under the deck at the back of the house, an agent found a small door, which was blocked by a piece of wood. He opened it, descended a few wooden steps, and found himself in a crawl space that extended the length of the house. At first, there was enough room to stand up straight, but, farther in, the dirt floor sloped upward. The space was not accessible from inside the house. It looked like an unfinished basement, and was lit by bare bulbs. One side was filled with junk—old mattresses, tricycles, lumber. Toward the front of the house, behind a particle-board partition, was a small room with crude wooden floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, crammed with binders.
The agent led Moberly into the crawl space. The binders contained thousands of documents, including many design manuals related to U.S. military aircraft—the B-1 bomber, the C-17 military cargo plane, the F-15 fighter jet, and the Chinook 47 and 48 helicopters. “It was like walking into King Solomon’s mine,” Moberly told me later. He did not know if Chung had broken any laws, but he was confident that a line had been crossed.
Moberly grabbed a binder, rushed upstairs, and dropped it on the coffee table. “Why didn’t you tell us you had these?” he said. Chung looked away, saying nothing.
The phone rang, and Chung went into the dining room to answer it. Moberly’s colleague Jessie Murray, the only agent on the search team who knew Mandarin, overheard Chung’s end of the conversation. He was talking to his older son, Shane. “They are coming to talk to you,” Chung said. “They are going to ask you about the school trip to Beijing”—the 1985 trip, during which Chung had met with Gu Wei Hao. “Tell them you forgot. Just tell them you don’t know.” Murray grabbed the phone and hung up, warning Chung that he could be charged with obstruction of justice.
The search went on all day. The agents found partially burned documents in the fireplace and more files in an office upstairs. By evening, they had removed more than a hundred and fifty boxes of paper. As Moberly was leaving the house, he says, he met Shane Chung in the driveway. “Dad hangs his heart out too much for China,” Shane told him. “He needs to realign his loyalties.”
Chung was born in a small town in Liaoning, a province in northeastern China. He was a shy boy who liked collecting things: stamps, rocks, toothpaste caps. His parents were Buddhists who taught him to respect nature. He was fascinated by flowers and trees, and expressed disapproval when he saw other children squashing ants.
During the Second World War, as the Japanese Army advanced through the eastern provinces, the Chungs, along with millions of other Chinese, were forced to flee. At one point on their journey south, they encountered machine-gun fire, and they hid in a cornfield. A farmer sheltered the family and fed them cakes of corn flour, refusing to accept payment in return. The farmer’s kindness made a strong impression on Chung, who was eight years old.
Chung’s father, a civil engineer in the railroad ministry, was a Nationalist. In 1946, with Maoists fighting for control of mainland China, the Chungs were forced to move to Taiwan, where the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, was forming a government in exile. There were now two Chinas—the People’s Republic of China, ruled by the Communist Party, and the Republic of China, on Taiwan—both of which claimed to represent the interests of the Chinese people. Chiang Kai-shek, Taiwan’s military dictator, encouraged anti-Communist propaganda. Like all Taiwanese schoolchildren, Chung was taught to despise the Maoist regime, but culturally and ethnically he still felt Chinese.
In high school, Chung underwent compulsory military training. He briefly considered enlisting in the Taiwanese Navy, to help liberate mainland China from Maoist rule. “Our father thought it would be a better use of his talent to study engineering,” one of Chung’s brothers told me. So Chung enrolled at National Taiwan University, the country’s most prestigious college. After graduating, he took a job working on a dam project in northern Taiwan, where he met Lingjia Wang, a painter who was working as a kindergarten teacher. They soon married.
Chung loved engineering, and he was one of the top students in his class, but his professional prospects within Taiwan were limited. Like many of his peers, he dreamed of pursuing a career in the United States. While working on the dam, he learned English from the wife of an American adviser.
In 1962, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota. He earned a master’s degree in civil engineering and accepted a job with Boeing, in Philadelphia, as a stress analyst in the Vertical Takeoff and Landing Division. Ling took painting classes. At the time, the People’s Republic of China did not allow its citizens to emigrate. The Chungs had a few American-born acquaintances, but most of their friends were expatriates from Taiwan. They spent vacations with these friends, travelling to New York to visit museums or to the Delaware shore to go crabbing.
One childhood friend, Thomas Xie, at that time a student at New Mexico State University, wrote to several friends, including Chung—Xie had been admitted to a graduate program at the University of Chicago, but needed two thousand dollars to enroll. Chung had little more than two thousand dollars in the bank, but he wired the full sum right away. “Greg always liked to help people,” his brother told me.
Ling, an extrovert, wanted to expand her social circle, and the couple joined a local Taiwanese association. At chapter meetings, the Chungs spoke in favor of reunification, the notion that Taiwan and mainland China should become one country. They seemed to oppose the very idea of national borders. Ling later told me, “We thought the whole world should be more harmonious. Every conflict just seemed like nonsense to us.” Their views offended some members of the association, who accused them of being insufficiently loyal to Taiwan.
In 1972, Chung joined the Rockwell Corporation, which had just won a contract from NASA to build the first shuttle orbiter. He moved with his family to Southern California. By this time, Chung and Ling had successfully applied for American citizenship. Chung’s career was advancing quickly, and Ling was fulfilled socially and artistically. They planned to stay in the U.S. for good. Like many of their expat friends, they were comfortable balancing three national identities: Chinese, Taiwanese, and American.
Throughout the late seventies, as the Communist Party underwent a series of economic and political reforms, the Chungs’ hostility toward the regime softened. “Suddenly, the doors opened to China,” Ling told me. “We were curious and searching for self-identity.” They came to believe that the Nationalists were no more democratic than the Communists. Ching Wang, a high-school classmate of Chung’s who is now an emeritus professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, told me that such shifting allegiances were not unusual among Taiwanese of their generation, especially those who settled abroad. “We started rebelling and pooh-poohing what we had been taught,” Wang said. The Taiwanese media had always portrayed the People’s Republic of China as a squalid backwater, but in televised images of Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing the city looked clean and prosperous.
Chung’s practice of Buddhism helped him to forgive the trespasses of the Maoist regime. “Our close relative was killed by Communists,” Chung’s brother told me—but that generation died long ago. “We cannot just keep that hatred always in our mind. Greg probably felt the same way.”
In their late thirties, the Chungs longed to understand their Chinese roots. “You have to,” Ling told me. “Otherwise, you are just a pumpkin—big but with no heart.”
In 1976, after attending a performance by visiting Chinese musicians in Los Angeles, Chung bought an erhu—a traditional Chinese instrument with two strings—and taught himself to play it. He and Ling began to collect P.R.C. literature—leaflets from the Cultural Revolution, magazine clippings mourning Mao’s death—and made notes in the margins. Since the fifties, most mainlanders had written a simplified version of Chinese. Most Taiwanese still used the traditional characters, but Chung and Ling adopted the new style.
Mao’s death, in 1976, marked the official end of the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s efforts at modernization. China sent delegations of scientists and engineers to Western nations. Chinese intellectuals spoke of kexue jiuguo, or “saving China through science.” Chung followed China’s scientific progress with pride, pasting newspaper clippings about Chinese satellite launches in his journal, and he began to attend events for visiting Chinese diplomats and scholars. At one forum, in 1979, he met Chen Len Ku, an engineering professor from the Harbin Institute of Technology. Chen was looking for instructional materials on stress analysis. Chung photocopied his notes from a course he’d taken at Minnesota and sent them to Harbin by sea freight.
“I don’t know what I can do for the country,” he wrote in a letter to Chen. “Being proud of the achievements by the people’s efforts in the Motherland, I am regretful for not contributing anything.”
Chen shared Chung’s letter with colleagues in Harbin. Presumably, Chinese government officials heard about it as well. The next year, Chung was invited to a meeting at a hotel in Los Angeles. The main speaker was Gu Wei Hao, of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China. The state-owned company, founded in the nineteen-fifties with help from the Soviet Union, had languished since the breakdown in Sino-Soviet relations in the sixties, but was now hoping to modernize. Gu said that China was determined to acquire advanced technology, especially in the field of aerospace. After the lecture, Chung spoke to Gu at length. China needed to improve its airframe design, which was one of Chung’s areas of expertise. At the gathering, Chung also met Chi Mak, who had already begun collecting information for China, though Chung did not know it at the time.
In the nineteen-fifties, the Communist Party of China began to amass strategic information from abroad. The Institute of Scientific and Technical Information, founded in 1958, acquired thousands of foreign documents and translated them into Chinese. Officials and academics attended conferences in Europe and the U.S.; they took notes at panel discussions, chatted with other attendees, eavesdropped, and, occasionally, pilfered unpublished reports. By the mid-sixties, the government had access to eleven thousand foreign journals, five million foreign patents, and a few hundred thousand research reports, including conference proceedings and dissertations.
Mao’s government was primarily interested in information with direct military applications. After Mao’s death, the focus broadened. In March, 1986, Deng established the National High-Tech Research and Development Program—code-named 863, for the year and month of its founding—which identified seven target areas for development: space, biotechnology, laser technology, information technology, automation, energy, and new materials. The government sponsored research in those areas and founded state-owned companies to develop or import relevant technologies.
When possible, these companies acquired new products by collaborating with Western firms, by purchasing the intellectual property they wanted, or through reverse engineering. When none of those methods was possible, the government resorted to espionage. The Ministry of State Security and the military intelligence service trained spies and sent them to the U.S. and Europe. They also recruited Chinese-born scientists, engineers, and other professionals who happened to be living abroad, especially those with security clearances or access to trade secrets. Sometimes these scientists were asked to procure specific information, but often the government employed a “thousand grains of sand” approach: they waited for disparate details to accumulate, more or less at random, until a picture emerged.
Wang, the emeritus professor of pharmaceutical chemistry, was a researcher at Merck in the seventies. After studying soil microbes for many years, he and his colleagues patented an antiparasitic medication called ivermectin. Not long after they published a paper about the discovery, Wang got a phone call from an employee at a government-owned pharmaceutical company in Manchuria. He asked Wang to travel to China with a sample of the microbe that’s used to produce the drug. “He didn’t think he was asking me to do anything horrible,” Wang said. “To put salt on the insult, they even asked me to fly over to China on my own money. I said I’d think about it, and I put the phone down.”
Chung, by contrast, was eager to help. By the early eighties, the Chungs were thriving financially—they owned a rental property in Alhambra and a profitable auto-repair shop in Long Beach—yet they remained thrifty, giving each other haircuts to save money. During the 1984 Summer Olympics, in Los Angeles, the Chungs were among a select group of expats invited to a dinner honoring the Chinese athletes. Several times, at the behest of the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, the Chungs helped newcomers from China get settled in California, giving them rides to the grocery store or donating kitchen supplies.
In February, 1985, Chung got a letter from a Chinese official named Chen QiNan, inviting him to China for a “technical exchange.” Chen suggested a short list of topics that he hoped to discuss, including fatigue testing—evaluating how an airframe might break down after repeated use.
“The coming July would be the most proper time,” Chung responded, a few days later. “I can arrange a vacation of several weeks and I’ll take a good look at the Motherland with my own eyes.” He requested a seven-week vacation from Rockwell.
Chung saved the letters he received, as well as drafts of his replies. Reading them, it is unclear who felt more grateful. In a letter to one of Chen QiNan’s colleagues, Chung wrote, “It is a great honor and I am excited if I can make some contributions to the modernizations of the Motherland.” His primary motivation appears to have been a sense of duty. “He’s very loyal,” Ling said. “He has a big heart.”
Chen and Chung continued to exchange letters. Chen asked about aircraft and helicopter design, and Chung, perhaps hoping to impress, offered to discuss his work on the NASA space-shuttle program as well. “My suggestion is still for you to introduce the conventional flight design mainly,” Chen wrote. However, not wanting to dampen Chung’s enthusiasm, he wrote that a presentation on the shuttle would also be welcome.
In late June, 1985, Chung and Ling flew to China with their teen-age sons. While Shane and Jeffrey attended a language-immersion program in Beijing, Chung and Ling went on a tour of half a dozen cities, including hubs of aircraft manufacturing—Nanchang, Chengdu, and Xi’an. The aviation ministry arranged and paid for the trip. Chung gave presentations at publicly funded factories and universities, using slides he’d prepared back in the U.S. In one, he discussed the design of NASA’s space shuttle, describing how the shuttle was oriented relative to Earth during flight. Technologically, the factories that Chung saw were decades behind the Boeing facility where he worked. In many cases, the equipment had not been updated since the nineteen-fifties.
It was Chung’s first experience of China as an adult, and he relished it both professionally and personally. Between factory visits, the aviation ministry arranged sightseeing excursions, and the Chungs visited landmarks they had wanted to see since childhood—the huge Buddha carved out of a mountain in Leshan, the terra-cotta soldiers and the Dayan Pagoda in Xi’an. As they drove through the countryside, they saw villagers harvesting lotuses from the mud. Ling told me that Chung, while meditating, had had a vision of himself from a past life, as a monk in a Chinese temple. During the trip, they speculated about where that temple might have been.
At the end of the summer, Chung brought home a tie clip from Xi’an Aircraft Industrial Corporation, a tiepin from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and an eight-page list of questions—what intelligence agents call a tasking list—from the engineers at the Nanchang Aircraft Manufacturing Company. Chung spent several months researching the engineers’ requests, and, in December, he drove to the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco to deliver materials to Nanchang by diplomatic pouch. What Chung sent would have alarmed U.S. authorities, had they seen it: twenty-seven book-length texts, most of them engineering manuals from Rockwell about the design of the B-1 bomber.
“This is the Holy Grail for an aircraft company, to figure out how to do what the U.S. is able to do,” Moberly told me. Chung was giving away knowledge that had taken Rockwell several decades and cost tens of millions of dollars to develop. “The whole atmosphere was friendship,” Ling told me. “In China, everybody would ask for help. ‘Oh, you are an engineer? You can help our country.’ ”
During the next year and a half, the Chungs acquired more real estate. In October, 1986, they bought a single-family home in Cypress, California. Five months later, they paid nearly six hundred thousand dollars, in cash, for the one-acre lot in Orange, with enough money left over to have a house built from scratch. Still, their taste in cars and clothing remained unassuming, and their colleagues and neighbors were unaware of their growing wealth.
Gu Wei Hao visited the couple, and they accompanied him on trips to Disneyland and to the beach. The Chinese government provided Gu with a paltry travel budget—four dollars a day for incidentals—so either the Chungs paid for the excursions themselves or Gu came up with the funds through other means.
The family moved into the new house in 1989. In the evenings, Chung used a telescope to study the night sky, identifying constellations from ancient Chinese astronomical maps. Ling, who had earned a graduate degree in fine arts from California State University, Long Beach, turned the garage into a painting studio. She taught painting at a nearby community college, specializing in neo-expressionism, an abstract style developed in the U.S. and Europe in the late nineteen-seventies. “She had a following of people who really enjoyed her style of teaching,” a colleague told me.
In 1998, two years after Boeing acquired Rockwell, the new management decided to relocate the office. Employees were given moving instructions: reference materials that they wished to keep were to be placed in dedicated boxes; burn bags were provided for the rest. During the next few weeks, Chung took home dozens of boxes of documents and stored them on the bookshelves in his cellar. His contacts in China had asked him to collect anything that might be of use; now he had enough to feed them for years.
In 2002, as Chung approached his retirement date, he printed documents from Boeing’s database at a frenzied pace. On each printout, he whited out warnings that prohibited sharing the documents outside the company; he also redacted the names of engineers who had worked on them, and indications of who had printed them out and when. He photocopied the printouts so that he could send documents to Chinese officials and keep the originals for his records. The volume of the material was so large, Moberly told me, that Chung “must have gone through hundreds of bottles of whitening fluid.”
In 2007, during a six-week federal trial in Santa Ana, California, prosecutors argued that Chi Mak was a spy employed by the Chinese government. They alleged that the information Mak gathered had helped China build its own version of Aegis, an American radar system used to protect combat ships. The jury convicted Mak of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, and he was sentenced to more than twenty-four years in federal prison. It was the most significant conviction of a Chinese spy in the United States in decades.
One of Mak’s brothers and his wife had been caught at Los Angeles International Airport with a CD full of sensitive information, some of which was classified. In the Chung case, however, investigators reached an impasse. F.B.I. agents had spent months examining the three hundred thousand pages recovered from Chung’s house, and determined that none of the documents were classified. Chung could not be charged with conveying national secrets to a foreign power. And though prosecutors could show that he had shared trade secrets with Chinese officials in the eighties, the five-year statute of limitations for export-control violations had long since passed. “It was very clear that he was doing something wrong,” Moberly said. “I just had to figure out whether he was breaking the law.”
While flipping through a federal-statute book, Moberly came across a paragraph titled “Economic Espionage,” which had become a crime in 1996, when Congress passed the Economic Espionage Act. Moberly recalled a thirty-minute class that he’d taken on the topic during his counterintelligence training. The class had been so short because no one in the U.S. had ever been convicted of economic espionage.
The statute defined an economic spy as anyone who “takes, carries away or conceals” or otherwise “misappropriates” a trade secret with the intent of aiding a foreign government. For Chung to be charged under the statute, prosecutors would not have to show that he had transmitted information to China within the past five years; the fact that he had concealed trade secrets in his cellar might be enough.
The Chung case went to trial in June, 2009, before the same judge, Cormac J. Carney, who had sentenced Chi Mak. During his testimony, Ronald Guerin, a former F.B.I. counterintelligence expert, described how Chinese intelligence officers recruited informants. “What they try to do is work on the China aspect—‘You are not so much hurting the United States; you are helping China,’ ” he said. “You can just stroke the person and tell them they’re doing it for the good of the Motherland or the good of their country. You give them awards, give them letters, give them plaques, whatever. . . . Or you pay them a lot of money.” In Chung’s case, it was clear that the Chinese handlers had used flattery to great effect. The prosecution did not show any evidence that cash had changed hands.
The defense conceded that Chung had done some “foolish things in the past,” but denied that he had planned to share the information. He was simply a pack rat. “He’s not a pack rat,” the lead prosecutor, Greg Staples, said in court. “He’s a pack elephant.”
Chung became the first American to be convicted of economic espionage at trial. He was sentenced to fifteen years and nine months in prison. Since then, federal prosecutors have brought four more economic-espionage cases, resulting in the convictions of five individuals.
Moberly later told me that, under questioning during the Chung trial, he had acknowledged the existence of classified evidence indicating that Chung had been paid. To protect the F.B.I.’s sources and methods, he could not reveal, even to a judge, what this evidence was. But the allegation was consistent with the letter that Gu Wei Hao had sent to Chung in 1987, in which Gu guarantees that Chung will be allowed to take cash out of the country. Also, even accounting for Chung’s frugality, it is not clear how his salary at Rockwell—less than sixty thousand dollars a year during the mid-eighties—would have allowed him to own an auto-repair shop, a triplex of rental apartments, and two houses, all at the same time. “I never believed he did what he did for money,” Moberly told me. Even so, payments from the Chinese government, perhaps on the order of tens of thousands of dollars, might have been an additional incentive.
Chung did not respond to my requests to visit him in prison, but Ling, who was never accused of a crime, reluctantly took my phone calls. One afternoon, I parked at the end of Grovewood Lane and walked to the iron gate in the Chungs’ driveway. There were cobwebs on the buzzer. The front yard was full of weeds, and an overturned wheelbarrow near the garage apparently hadn’t been used in years.
When I rang the bell, Ling Chung came out and waved from the front step. She was wearing a green nightgown and her hair was dishevelled. She invited me to sit on the white couch in the living room. Sunlight slanted in through the windows, lighting up patches of the carpet.
Ling got me a glass of water and sat across from me. With a forlorn smile, she recalled applying for U.S. citizenship with her husband. On one of the forms, they were asked whether they would be willing to bear arms for the United States. Chung had left the space blank. The interviewer asked Chung whether he would fight against China in the event of a war. Ling recalled Chung’s answer: “If this happens, I will grab a gun and shoot myself.”
We walked from the living room to her studio, which opens onto the front yard. Large abstract paintings lay on the floor or rested against the walls. Ling told me that she had been working on many of them for years. She pointed to one that looked like a violet cross superimposed on a purple night sky. “The title of that one is ‘45436-112,’ ” she said—her husband’s inmate number at a low-security federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. She visits him there every few months.
There were tears in her eyes. “The first day we met, we decided to get married,” she said. The tenderness lasted throughout their time together. Even in their sixties, a family friend told me, “they were like college sweethearts.” Ling said that when Chung worked at Boeing he sometimes napped in his office, and he would complain about being woken up by the illusion that she was singing. “He would say, ‘I always tell you, “Don’t sing around me—I cannot go to sleep,” ’ ” Ling told me. “In his mind, he thought I was singing behind him.”
I asked her whether Chung felt the same loyalty toward China that he felt toward her, and whether Chinese officials had taken advantage of that loyalty. She remained silent. I asked whether her husband was innocent. “I cannot answer that question,” she said.
She suggested that the prosecutors had looked at his actions too superficially to understand the motives behind them. “They just stayed on the surface,” she said. Later, she elaborated: Chung’s intention was to help China, not to hurt the U.S. “It’s not that complicated,” she said. “You make a friend, and they ask you, if you are an engineer or an artist, ‘Do you know this?’ And you tell them what you know. Simple as that.”
Before I left, she showed me a sheet of paper taped to the wall near the studio entrance. It had several neat rows of Chinese characters on it: a list of Buddhist precepts that Chung had copied for her by hand. I wondered whether the Buddha’s teachings had helped Chung resolve any conflicts he might have felt between his loyalties to the U.S. and to China. I asked Ling if she thought it was possible to hold two national identities at once. Her eyes brightened. “I’m Chinese, I’m American,” she said. “How beautiful is that! Why make it a confrontation?” ♦
