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The spy who was anything but
cold
By John Berthelsen
 There
are certain ironies, cognitive disconnects, floating up
from the arrest in Los Angeles on spying charges on
April 18 of Katrina Leung, a Chinese-born socialite and
fundraiser for the Republican Party. Leung is being held
without bail on charges that she had been a Chinese spy
and double agent for more than 20 years and had slept
with two of her Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
handlers - one of whom warned the other that she was a
spy - while remaining faithfully married to her husband,
Kam, a pharmaceutical distributor.
"I love my
wife, Katrina Leung, very much," Dr Kam Leung told
reporters outside the Los Angeles area courthouse where
she was charged. "We all know that she has high ideals
and was working for this country. We look forward to
welcoming her home very soon."
The Leung story
has all the knobs and switches of a classic spy drama.
She is said to have had two code names - one from each
side. She was allegedly assigned the name "Luo
Zhongshan" by Zhu Qizhen, the Chinese ambassador to the
United States, for her Chinese handlers at the Chinese
Ministry of State Security. She was known as "Parlor
Maid" to her US handlers, James J Smith, a 30-year
veteran of the FBI, and William Cleveland, Smith's
superior. Both are also said to have been her paramours.
Behind the headlines, there is plenty of
discomfiture all around. It is yet another monumental
embarrassment for the FBI and the Republican Party in
the United States, whose leaders for years delivered
blistering accusations of treason against the Democratic
administration of president Bill Clinton for allegedly
giving away state and military secrets to the Chinese.
Now, it appears, if the charges against Leung
are true, it was a highly placed Republican giving away
the secrets, and FBI agents who were witting or
unwitting participants. Certainly, with a Republican
administration in power in Washington, DC, federal
authorities and congressional leaders have gone
inordinately quiet, to Democratic glee, after calling
for a seemingly never-ending parade of public
congressional hearings into allegations against the
Democrats. "Will the FBI look into Leung's donations to
the Republican Party and her activist involvement with
the GOP [Grand Old Party, or Republicans]? Don't bet the
ranch on it," said a Democratic newsletter, Buzz/Flash
News Analysis. The newsletter and other Democratic
organs have repeatedly asked whether Leung had been
passing along Chinese government money to influence the
Republicans, as the Republicans, in a tit-for-tat, had
charged the Democrats with doing during the Clinton
administration.
Leung and her husband emigrated
from China to San Marino, once a nearly all-white,
extremely wealthy, conservative enclave of Los Angeles.
Since the early 1990s, it has increasingly filled up
with wealthy Chinese, particularly those betting against
a benign takeover of Hong Kong in 1997 by the Chinese
government. She describes herself as a "venture
capitalist" and owns a bookstore, Monterey Books and
Stationers, in nearby Monterey Park. She rose quickly to
the top of Los Angeles Republican ranks, giving lavish
parties at her US$2 million home, which is flanked by
four stone lions and features two swimming pools. A US
congressman named her to the California State Republican
Central Committee. Leung was spotted at the inaugural
ball of President George W Bush.
Leung was more
than just a spy and counterspy. She appears to have been
a fixer in China as well for individuals and companies
seeking guanxi with Chinese leaders. In an
affidavit filed in Los Angeles in the case, the Canadian
telecommunications company Nortel indicated it had paid
her a $1.2 million commission for her services. US
government documents indicate she maintained 16 foreign
bank accounts in Hong Kong and China. Making countless
trips to China, she operated a variety of companies in
Hong Kong under names such as "Right Fortune" and "Merry
Glory".
She accompanied former Los Angeles mayor
Richard Riordan to China seeking a multimillion-dollar
contract to get the Chinese to use Los Angeles'
underutilized seaport. With her help, Riordan met with
Chinese president Jiang Zemin. She also sought to aid
current Los Angeles Mayor Kenneth Hahn on a recent trade
mission to China.
On her trips to China, she
associated with the very top of the Chinese government.
The sensational reporting flowing out of Los Angeles
implies that Leung, a round-faced, bespectacled native
of Guangdong province, must have been absolutely torrid
in the boudoir. Several newspapers emphasized the fact
that Yang Shangkun, who was president of China from
1988-93, "liked her". She was also said to be a
"favorite" of other Chinese leaders. In papers filed
with the Los Angeles court, in addition to the $1.7
million she received from the US government for her
espionage services against the Chinese, she had also
received $100,000 from the Chinese government.
Leung, now 49, allegedly carried on a
relationship for 20 years with Smith, the FBI's top
expert on Chinese counterintelligence in Los Angeles
until his retirement in 2000. Smith had been warned a
full 12 years earlier by William Cleveland, his
superior, that wiretaps indicated Leung might be a
double agent. Smith defended her. Cleveland apparently
decided to check for himself and ended up in bed with
her, according to affidavits made available to Asia
Times Online.
Smith has been charged separately
with wire fraud and gross negligence and is free on
$250,000 bail, raising questions by Leung's lawyers why
he has been allowed out while she is being held without
bail. The court, however, said that Leung's overseas
wealth meant she could escape to China with her
classified documents. The US has no extradition treaty
with China. Her lawyers point out that she would hardly
flee to a country on which she had spied for the United
States for more than 20 years, even as a double agent.
After Cleveland left the FBI, he became chief of
counterintelligence programs at Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory, home of some of the most sensitive nuclear
weapons research in the US. He resigned from that
position after his relationship with Leung became
public.
The New York Times reported in April
that the Leung case "is part of a much broader
institutional problem that has led to the disciplining
of several hundred agents in recent years for improper
dealings with informants". This allegedly included
working out schemes to rip off tens of thousands of
dollars by padding expenses paid to the informants, the
Times reported.
An FBI spokesperson in Los
Angeles said she could not verify the figure, compiled
by the Office of Professional Responsibility for the
FBI, but said it is "probably accurate" although it
extends to investigations for transgressions other than
having improper relationships with informants. The
office's discipline records are confidential, she said.
Leung's lawyers, John Vandevelde and Janet
Levine, would not agree to be interviewed, saying the
case is too sensitive. In a series of printed
statements, they contend that she is innocent of all
charges despite the fact that FBI Special Agent Randall
Thomas, in a sworn deposition, said Leung "has actually
admitted that she had been passing information to the
People's Republic of China [PRC] without FBI
authorization". According to Thomas's affidavit, Leung
voluntarily consented to a search of parts of her
property, and provided what appeared to be incriminating
documents from her safe to the FBI during the search.
In an interview with two other FBI agents, Leung
acknowledged holding a variety of other documents, which
she said she had taken out of Smith's briefcase and
copied when Smith left the room to go to the bathroom.
But either he took long bathroom breaks, or she had to
be inordinately fast to do it.
Interestingly
enough, neither she nor Smith is charged with espionage,
which carries the death penalty. She is instead charged
with unauthorized possession of documents relating to
national defense and two counts of copying documents
connected with the US national defense with reason to
believe that they would be used to the benefit of
another country. "We are still investigating," said a
spokesman for the US Attorney's office in Los Angeles.
Certainly, there are questions about what
secrets she gave away. Some officials suggested that she
may have been involved in an incident in January 2002,
when Chinese officials said they had found 27 listening
devices aboard a Boeing 767-300 jetliner purchased for
then president Jiang Zemin's private use. The
$120-million aircraft was purchased in June 2000 and
delivered to the Chinese government in August 2001. The
Chinese said they had discovered the listening devices,
including some in the president's bed headboard and the
plane's bathroom, in October of that year.
However, lawyers for Smith deny Leung had
anything to do with the case. It seems more likely that
if anything the matters involved more spy-versus-spy
maneuverings. There is a distinct feeling that when the
case is complete, there will be less to it than
suggested by the sensational reporting.
"Katrina
Leung was a loyal and valuable citizen of the US and
truly an 'asset' to this country, providing information
that the FBI verified and then used at the very highest
levels of government," her lawyers wrote. They say the
information she passed on to the Chinese "was outdated,
useless and mostly unclassified pieces of paper that
were brought to her house by the FBI many years ago in
the first place, and were voluntarily given back to the
FBI recently by Katrina."
On the other hand,
both prosecution and defense agree, the part about the
quality of information she was providing to the US
government about the Chinese seems to be true. Her
lawyers say they believe her handler "was given awards
by the FBI and CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] based
on intelligence obtained from her". The Thomas affidavit
indicates that they had used her tips "in the conduct of
various foreign counterintelligence investigations,
including detecting efforts by the PRC to clandestinely
obtain technologies that have military applications".
Thomas indicates that "the FBI must now reassess all of
its actions and intelligence analyses based on her
reporting".
The story also highlights again
charges of racism by the FBI against Asian-Americans
that arose from the agency's bumbling in the
investigation of Wen Ho Lee. Lee is a Taiwan-born
nuclear scientist at the government's Los Alamos nuclear
facility who spent 278 days in solitary confinement
after being accused of passing on secrets of the W-88
nuclear warhead to the Chinese government. He was
charged with 59 counts of mishandling sensitive
information but was freed in September 2000 with an
apology from presiding US District Court Judge James A
Parker, who said the case "embarrassed our entire nation
and each of us who is a citizen of it".
It
remains to be seen whether this is going to be yet
another embarrassment for the country and each of its
citizens.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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