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The spy who was left out in the
cold
By Gary Webb
SACRAMENTO,
California - As far as can be told, former Federal
Bureau of Investigation agent Lok Lau may be a genuine
American hero, the first agent in FBI history to
penetrate the top levels of the Chinese government. But
the US Department of Justice is doing everything in its
power - and some things that aren't - to prevent even
the tiniest detail of Lau's highly classified work from
becoming public.
As far as the Justice
Department is concerned, Lau is nothing more than a
lying, thieving malcontent who was fired for shoplifting
$15 worth of merchandise from a California supermarket.
And that's the way the US government would like to keep
it.
The full truth about Lok Lau and his
six-year-long foreign-counterintelligence mission may
never be known. But judging from information that
briefly became public as a result of an
employment-discrimination suit Lau filed against the FBI
- and the Justice Department's frantic efforts to purge
the public record of what it claims were
national-security secrets "illegally" divulged by Lau
and his lawyers - the 46-year-old Singapore native was
involved in some very heavy, very clandestine and very
dangerous work inside the People's Republic of China, on
behalf of US intelligence, for years.
It is also
clear that once Lau's highly praised undercover
assignment was completed, the FBI decided he was a
liability and began a concerted effort to get rid of
him, which it eventually did.
Why the FBI turned
with such vengeance against an agent its own director
had personally commended for heroism is not known, but
it wasn't because Lok Lau wasn't good at his job. If
anything, his problem might have been that he was too
good at it.
That Lau - who worked for the FBI as
a special agent (SA) from 1986 until 2000 - is the
possessor of powerful secrets is beyond dispute; it is a
matter that has troubled the FBI for some years, records
show. Lau was considered so hot that in 1998 the FBI
decided it could never put him on a witness stand
because of "the extremely sensitive nature of SA Lau's
assignment".
A year later, as the Bureau
contemplated firing Lau, FBI headquarters asked its
National Security Division in a secret memo "to conduct
an additional evaluation of the damage that might result
if, as seems likely, the circumstances of this Agent's
career are publically [sic] disclosed". One option the
memo raised was to buy Lau's silence with "a settlement
that would preclude litigation and require
confidentiality on the part of the Agent and his
attorneys". The FBI's Office of Professional
Responsibility agreed. "Significant damage would be done
if information related to his [deleted] work were
revealed," a 1999 memo stated. "It may be in the best
interest of the FBI to avoid litigation if possible."
The results of the FBI's damage estimate are
still secret and Lau is forbidden by law to speak of his
mission, which is also still classified. But in 2000 Lau
was fired and has since been publicly branded by the
Justice Department as a liar and a thief. Though the
shoplifting charge was eventually dismissed for
insufficient evidence, the FBI argued that Lau had been
dishonest and was therefore unworthy of being an FBI
agent. After losing his US$81,000-a-year job, Lau sued
the FBI, claiming racial discrimination, and the case
dragged through the court system unnoticed for more than
a year.
In mid-October, however, a reporter for
the San Antonio Business Journal called the US
Attorney's Office in Sacramento and asked for a comment
on a declaration Lau had made in the case. Within days,
the Justice Department stormed into federal court,
demanded a private meeting with the judge, and persuaded
him on national-security grounds to black out every
mention of Lau's work in China, both from his
declaration and in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by
the League of United Latin American Citizens, a Texas
anti-discrimination group.
Then it sought the
judge's permission to seize any computers that might
have a copy of Lau's secrets on their hard drives - and
to erase them. That order, which was declined, was
written broadly enough to have covered not only the
computers used by Lau and his lawyers, but those of a
Texas journalist covering the Lau story, the League of
United Latin American Citizens, and the California First
Amendment Coalition, a newspaper-industry advocacy group
that had publicized the Justice Department's strange
actions.
"What's extraordinary is that the
government, in this case, succeeded in sealing something
that had been on the public record for three weeks,"
said Terry Francke, the First Amendment Coalition's
general counsel.
Though the Justice Department
had asked for and been denied permission to seize all
paper copies of Lau's declaration from anyone who had
it, Lau's lawyers and his support group in Texas all
received phone calls from the Sacramento US Attorney's
Office asking for the papers back. Lau's lawyers
complied; the Texas anti-discrimination group refused.
"I said show me a court order," said Julie
Marquez, who handles criminal-justice issues for the San
Antonio-based organization. "Even though the judge
specifically told them they couldn't go out and get
these papers, they were still calling people up and
telling them to give them back."
The First
Amendment Coalition posted uncensored copies of those
documents on its website, prompting the Justice
Department to return to court and ask for an electronic
search-and-destroy order. And, coincidentally, while all
of this was going on, the offices of Lau's psychologist
were burglarized and computer equipment was taken.
The obvious question is: What is so explosive
about Agent Lau's work that, despite the passage of a
dozen years, its merest mention causes the Justice
Department to react so stridently?
Francke and
others believe the FBI may be trying to conceal the role
it played in a foreign intelligence operation, because
Lau's activities in China were either illegal or
unauthorized. While it is true that the FBI is confined
by law to domestic - not foreign - counterintelligence,
there is one specific instance in which it is perfectly
legal for FBI agents to be used as international spies:
when it's being done "in coordination with the CIA".
President Ronald Reagan authorized that in the early
1980s in an executive order, 12333, which is still in
effect today. That means Lau's mission was either
illegal or it was sanctioned by the Central Intelligence
Agency.
Lau says he doesn't know, nor does it
matter to him. "You're talking to one of the
footsoldiers here. I was out on the street all the time.
My assumption is that what I was doing was legal. When
the director of the FBI flies out to see you and
personally shakes your hand for something you've done,
then yeah, my assumption is that this was all approved."
Prior to becoming an FBI agent, Lau had been a
CIA operative, spying on and occasionally recruiting
Chinese students at the University of Michigan in the
early 1980s. "A former Bureau guy who was working for
the CIA spotted me," recalled Lau, who was a
communications major and fluent in Mandarin and
Cantonese. "They recruited me right on campus ...
because I could speak the language."
In 1984, he
was hired as an FBI "asset", working as a paid informant
and operative in foreign-counterintelligence
investigations. Within months, he scored a major coup.
"In July 1984, I was highly commended by my FBI and CIA
handlers for having recruited a valuable asset for the
US intelligence community," Lau wrote in a
now-classified portion of his court declaration. A year
later he cracked another big case, one that reportedly
involved the exposure of a Chinese double agent.
Believing he had more than proved his worth to the FBI,
Lau requested admission to the FBI Academy in Quantico,
Virginia. The Bureau demurred. But when Lau threatened
to quit and take a job with the Seattle Police
Department, a spot was quickly found in the May 1986
training class, and Lau entered the FBI Academy to begin
the process of becoming a full-fledged FBI agent.
At the time Lau was recruited, the Bureau was
reeling over the discovery of several Chinese moles
within its walls. "There had been a number of cases, and
the feeling inside the FBI was that if they were going
to do this to us, then we were going to do something
back to them, like put someone inside their intelligence
service," said a former law-enforcement official
familiar with Lau's work.
All Lau would say on
that score was that he "was supposed to avenge the
failings of the intelligence community".
John
Vasquez, the FBI's chief of training and research at the
time Lau attended the academy, knew Lau as a student and
said in a court filing that he was stunned to discover
that the Bureau - halfway through Lau's training - had
already assigned him to work on an undercover
foreign-counterintelligence operation, something that
struck the longtime FBI man as extraordinary. Rookie FBI
agents typically wait years before they are deemed ready
for undercover work. "The placement of an agent [into an
undercover operation] right out of the academy is very
unusual," Vasquez said. "Mr Lau had never seen a case
file, worked a case, arrested anyone ... No one had ever
taken an undercover assignment right out of the academy
as Mr Lau did, before he was even an agent." Vasquez,
who followed Lau's career, concluded that Lau "was
probably recruited by the FBI for a specific operation".
After graduation, Lau was assigned to the
Chicago FBI office, which houses one of the Bureau's
most active foreign-counterintelligence centers, and he
began working espionage cases undercover. He asked his
bosses to tell him how much danger he was in. "'Will I
get my tail shot off or will I get, you know, killed?' I
asked [about] all the dangerous scenarios. Do you know
what the answer was, ladies and gentlemen?" Lau asked an
FBI security committee in 2000. "Nobody knew, because
nobody had ever done it before ... I was told that I was
the second FBI agent in history then, back in 1986, to
attempt this project."
In five years, he saw the
inside of the FBI's office once. He was living another
life, that of a Chinese businessman and an associate of
Chinese organized-crime figures. He was so far
undercover that other FBI agents placed him under
surveillance.
"Then they'd get all pissed off
because nobody had bothered to tell them and they wasted
all this manpower doing surveillance of me," Lau
recalled. "Most of the time the right hand didn't know
what the left hand was doing."
"Mr Lau was in
deep cover. Mr Lau did not go home at night. He did not
see his family," former FBI training official Vasquez
said. "Mr Lau's credentials and badge were in the vault
in the field office. He did not get a chance to see or
hold his badge. When I visited him, he would ask to see
and hold my badge."
According to the statements
the Justice Department struck from the public record as
secret - which seems to confirm their veracity - Lau
twice went overseas, once in November 1987 and again in
September 1989, as an undercover FBI agent. Prior to his
first trip overseas, he was betrayed by a high-level FBI
asset. The country he revisited in the fall of 1989 was
then in turmoil, which accurately describes China at the
time. Also stated was the fact that he had briefed CIA
agents on his area of expertise, which happens to be
China.
"I don't think there's much mystery left
as to which country Lau was working in," newspaper
lawyer Francke said jokingly. "It doesn't sound like he
was in Denmark."
"During November of 1987, the
historic trip turned out to be very stressful, with
subjects giving me enhanced scrutiny during the visit,
personnel armed with machine-guns were a constant
reminder to me of my fate if something went wrong," Lau
wrote in one section that was deemed classified. Because
Lau was in China posing as a businessman instead of a
diplomat, which is the typical cover used by CIA agents,
he had no diplomatic immunity to spying charges. If
caught, he would have been imprisoned or executed, not
merely deported.
The month-long trip was a
success, Lau said in another classified section, "and my
accomplishments had exceeded all expectations. The
skeptics made me undergo an extensive polygraph test to
ascertain my loyalty and accomplishments."
According to the Justice Department, those bits
of information are state secrets because they have been
"deemed to describe intelligence methods and activities
that are used in the FBI's present intelligence,
counterintelligence and count-terrorism investigations".
They are such important secrets that even the lawyer
defending the FBI against Lau's lawsuit, assistant US
attorney Kristin Horn, isn't allowed to know them. "I
don't have a security clearance high enough," she
explained.
Declassified FBI documents suggest
that by 1991, Lau was deep inside the Chinese diplomatic
community. In his performance review for that year,
Lau's supervisor wrote: "SA LAU continues working in an
undercover capacity in a complex, sensitive
investigation of a major criteria country diplomatic
establishment. He has succeeded in becoming a trusted
confidant of numerous subjects of investigation and has
also penetrated the 'inner circle' of the subject
community. As a result, he obtains singular and
sensitive information ..."
Lau's undercover
mission was so productive, court records show, that
then-FBI director William Sessions flew to Chicago in
January 1988 to commend Lau personally and award him a
bonus check for his work. One of his supervisors, former
top FBI official Michael Waguespack - whose forte was
Soviet intelligence and Chinese industrial espionage -
described Lau's work in a 1992 report as an "exceptional
performance".
Asked why he thinks the FBI wants
to keep his highly lauded achievements secret after so
many years, Lau replied that in the world of
counterintelligence, there is often no such thing as
"too" long ago. "Counterintelligence work takes time to
produce results. It is like wine sometimes. The longer
it ages," he said, "the more valuable it becomes."
Sometimes, Lau suggested, double agents recruited at a
young age eventually end up as influential policymakers
or military officials.
There may be other
reasons for the Bureau's squeamishness about Lau's
career becoming public: it is likely he was committing
crimes as part of his undercover role, crimes the FBI
would have authorized Lau to commit.
"From a
reading of the record, it is not difficult to discern
that Lau was involved in espionage activities,
kidnappings, trading in human slavery, illegal
immigration, murder, torture, extortion, hostage-taking
and any number of other criminal activities that
involved crimes against humanity," claims a partially
classified brief filed in support of Lau by the League
of United Latin American Citizens. "Lau penetrated the
Chinese Triads, the Tong, and other Chinese Organized
Crime Organizations that trade in all of these things as
a way of life ... For six years Lau had to be on his
guard and had to participate in whatever these hostile
forces demanded of him."
Lau would neither
confirm nor deny that. "I'm not going to discuss that
issue without immunity," he said flatly. But he asked if
it made sense to imagine that an FBI undercover agent
could gain the trust of a hostile foreign power by "just
walking into some country and saying, 'Hi, I'm Lok Lau
and I'd like to be your friend.' It doesn't work like
that."
Lau's lawsuit against the FBI claims that
his undercover assignment left him emotionally scarred
and suffering from stress-induced disorders, but the FBI
rebuffed his requests for counseling, saying there were
no therapists with security clearances high enough to
hear those kinds of woes. Lau asked the Bureau to find
someone, and he was assured something would be done.
"The FBI failed to ... grant anyone the
authorization to listen to classified information
presented by Mr Lau," the FBI's Access Review Committee,
which decides matters regarding security clearances,
declared in a blistering 2000 decision. "The [committee]
cannot endorse the actions of the FBI."
Lau's
frustrations finally boiled over in a Sears store in Ann
Arbor, Michigan, on Christmas Eve in 1990. Pocketing
some paintbrushes, Lau tried to leave without paying for
them. He was stopped and charged with shoplifting, to
which he pleaded guilty. The FBI did an internal
investigation and concluded that the stress of Lau's
double life "contributed to your uncharacteristic
display of impetuous poor judgment" and was a misdeed
the Bureau could live with, given "the difficult and
challenging circumstances you encountered during the
first five years of your career". Lau immediately went
back undercover; years later he served a two-week
suspension. No one, apparently, thought an FBI agent
caught shoplifting might need psychiatric help; in any
event, none was offered.
A few months later, the
undercover operation ended and, after six years in deep
cover, Lau finally came in from the cold. He was through
with undercover work, and he asked to be transferred to
the Seattle office as a field agent so he could be close
to his family, none of whom were allowed to know where
he was or what he'd been doing since the mid-1980s.
His superiors in the Chicago FBI office, citing
his undercover performance, strongly backed Lau's
request, but FBI headquarters inexplicably rejected
their recommendation. "I feel very strongly that as an
institution the FBI mishandled SA Lau's transfer,"
former Chicago FBI official Waguespack complained in
1992. At the time, Waguespack was director of
counterintelligence for the National Security Council.
Instead, the FBI granted Lau his fourth and
final preference: the Sacramento office, where the
resident agent, Deborah Pierce, soon began "building a
book" on her slightly eccentric new hire, who had never
worked in an FBI office before. His employment files for
those years show he was assigned mostly mundane chores
and every bureaucratic misstep and social faux pas he
committed was duly noted and filed away:
"He
laughs and tells stories to fit in when he joins a
group, but his stories don't always fit the
circumstances and he laughs at inappropriate places."
"He appeared to be trying to gain favor from his
peers by being funny."
"Lau gave one of the
steno clerks a T-shirt for doing his typing ... Lau's
behavior resulted in this individual feeling
uncomfortable."
In 1995, Lau asked for a
transfer to the night shift because it paid more and
because he had been having trouble sleeping. When his
supervisor, Pierce, spoke to him about it, he "informed
me that he liked to do the midnight shift for other
people because then they would like him", she noted in a
report. Those statements were later used against Lau in
a fitness report - evidence, according to Pierce, that
he was "overly concerned about money" and trying to
"curry favor" with his co-workers. Those aberrations led
Piece to conclude that Special Agent Lok Lau was
"vulnerable to approach from a foreign government" and
she told her superiors she considered Lau "a potential
security risk" because of his poor attitude and his
dislike of his current job.
For Lau, a
naturalized citizen, it was his official death sentence
as an FBI counterintelligence agent, and the Bureau's
unkindest cut. "I risked my life for this country, for
this agency, for six years. I had a top-secret security
clearance," Lau complained. "I had a higher security
clearance than she did."
"We needed a record to
show poor performance and now have a year's worth,"
Pierce gloated in a handwritten 1995 memo to another FBI
supervisor. "Now we have to start on the poor
performance for investigations, which may take another
year or more. Maybe we can get HIM to make the move
out." Soon, the FBI took away Lau's gun, allegedly for
medical reasons, revoked his Top Secret clearance, and
confined him to working during daylight hours.
Meanwhile, his supervisors chided him for his "delusions
of persecution by management".
Assigned to copy
files for other agents and run background checks on FBI
job seekers, Lau began a mental meltdown and once again
sought psychiatric care. Once again, the FBI declined.
"The FBI clearly failed in its obligations to
provide Mr Lau with psychological treatment and
organizational support," the FBI's Access Review
Committee concluded. "The ARC unanimously agrees ...
that Mr Lau did not receive appropriate support or
psychological treatment." But it upheld the decision to
lift Lau's security clearance anyway.
During the
1996 holiday season, Lau went into a Raley's supermarket
in Sacramento and pilfered some toothpaste and a Master
Lock. He was caught by a security guard, wrestled to the
ground, handcuffed and hustled into a back room, where
he pleaded with the guard to let him go, saying he was
an FBI agent and would lose his job if he was
prosecuted. The store pressed charges anyway, but the
District Attorney's Office dropped them "in the
interests of justice". Lau never told the FBI about it.
And that was all it took for the FBI - which discovered
the shoplifting incident several years later - to kick
him out the door. Since then he has been fighting,
unsuccessfully, to get his job back.
Assistant
US attorney Horn, who succeeded in getting his
discrimination suit dismissed a few days ago, called
Lau's claims "ludicrous" and said the FBI had perfectly
good reason to fire an agent who steals and lies. His
years of undercover work, she said, "are irrelevant to
this case". To help ensure that, Horn got Lau's expert
witnesses - psychiatrists who diagnosed him as suffering
from post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression
- barred for failure to meet a filing deadline. "He
can't introduce anything pertaining to stress, or his
undercover work. He doesn't have much of a case left,"
Horn said in an interview shortly before the suit was
dismissed.
Former FBI official Vasquez believes
the travails of Lok Lau are a tragedy. "The FBI used Mr
Lau and then, when it was over, discarded him," Vasquez
stated.
"Everyone is disposable," Lau said
matter-of-factly. "No matter what."
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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