Enemies: How America's Foes Steal Our Vital Secrets--And How We Let It Happen
It's the great untold story of the war on terror. Taking advantage of gaping holes in America's defenses, terrorist organizations and enemy nations like Communist China, North Korea, Russia, and Cuba--not to mention some so-called friends--are infiltrating the US government to steal our most vital secrets and use them against us. In his explosive new book, Enemies, acclaimed investigative reporter Bill Gertz uncovers the truth about this grave threat to our national security and America's harrowing failures to address the danger. Gertz's unrivaled access to the US intelligence and defense communities allows him to tell the whole shocking story, taking us deep inside the dark world of intelligence and counterintelligence--a world filled with lies, betrayal, and moles burrowing within the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, and even the White House.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Bill Gertz is geopolitics editor and a national security and investigative reporter for the Washington Times and the author of four New York Times bestsellers, including Treachery, Breakdown, and Betrayal. He has lectured at the FBI Academy and the National Defense University. He is married and has two daughters.
Chapter 1
PARLOR MAID
She's been a Communist since the day she was born. Her bona fides are impeccable. I gradually converted her--she's now a rock-ribbed Republican.
--FBI agent James J. Smith, introducing Chinese triple agent Katrina Leung to FBI China hands in 1993
On July 5, 2000, a brand-new, $120 million Boeing 767 jetliner flew from the Boeing corporation's airfield in Everett, Washington, to San Antonio International Airport. The Chinese military had purchased the jetliner for the leader of Communist China, Jiang Zemin. China Aviation Supplies Import and Export Corporation, which is run by the Chinese Communist state, purchased the aircraft for China United Airlines, which has been identified in declassified U.S. intelligence reports as a commercial entity operated by the People's Liberation Army. Once in San Antonio, the aircraft underwent a $15 million customization to outfit the plane with all the luxuries of a Middle Eastern sheik, including a special vibrating bed to help Jiang sleep.
On August 10, 2000, the modification work complete, the Boeing took off for Beijing's military airfield. Within weeks, Chinese security officials had found some twenty-seven sophisticated electronic eavesdropping devices in the aircraft.
How had the bugs gotten there, when the entire customization had been under the strictest, twenty-four-hour supervision by some twenty-five Chinese military intelligence officials? It turned out that clandestine operatives from the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) had covertly placed the devices in the plane in hopes of gathering intelligence from Jiang prior to a future summit meeting. (To this day, the details of the bugging remain secret.)
For the United States, there was a more pressing question: How had the Chinese uncovered the bugs so quickly? U.S. counterintelligence launched an investigation to find out. That probe led ultimately to the Los Angeles-based FBI counterspy James J. "J. J." Smith and his prized agent, Los Angeles businesswoman Katrina Leung--code name "Parlor Maid." A former FBI official, William Cleveland, would come under scrutiny as well.
The investigation turned up a revelation that would prove highly embarrassing to the FBI: Both of these officials, two of the Bureau's most senior counterintelligence officers, had had illicit, long-term sexual relationships with Leung. Contrary to the bed-hopping image of spies popularized in James Bond films, having intimate relations with a paid FBI informant violates one of the cardinal principles of the spy business, not to mention Bureau rules.
But to focus only on the soap opera element of the Katrina Leung story is to characterize the episode as something only vaguely resembling a spy case. And a spy case it is, without a doubt--a terribly damaging one at that.
The real story of Parlor Maid has never been told. The main reason the full account has not emerged is that the FBI and federal prosecutors mishandled the investigation from the beginning.
A small group of FBI officials did their best to keep the inside story from coming out. Rather than rage against the flagrant counterintelligence failures demonstrated in the Leung case, these officials focused on protecting the FBI's already-battered reputation from further damage. Later, prosecutors made poor tactical decisions that undermined the court case against Leung almost before it could begin.
Ultimately, prosecutors had to settle for a plea deal with Leung. The deal, reached on December 16, 2005, spared Leung from serving jail time or having to admit anything about passing illegally copied classified information to Communist China.
After the plea deal was finalized, Leung's lawyers--having safely escaped a trial that would have aired the overwhelming evidence of Leung's espionage--issued a statement professing that their client wasn't a spy and suggesting that she would have been glad to tell her story in court. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, Thom Mrozek, responded, "It's fair to say the government, by virtue of how this case moved along, was never able to tell its side of the story either."
Mrozek's statement was accurate, but it only obliquely hinted at the reasons the case "moved along" as it did and at the powerful evidence that Katrina Leung was indeed a spy for Communist China.
The real story of Parlor Maid will be told here for the first time. The Leung affair, like many cases from the dark world of intelligence and counterintelligence, is rife with lies and betrayals, half-truths and truths, myth and reality converging and diverging. But this account, based on court papers and on interviews with numerous intelligence and law-enforcement officials who knew the case firsthand, reveals the inside story of what really happened with Katrina Leung, Communist China, and the FBI.
Parlor Maid is the story of a Chinese spy who got away. And not just any spy. U.S intelligence officials close to the case insist that regardless of the outcome of the prosecution, the Katrina Leung case represents one of the worst spy cases in American history--and one of the worst U.S intelligence failures, as well. The evidence buried as a result of the FBI's mismanagement and the prosecution's failures bears this conclusion out.
Further confirmation came in May 2006, when Department of Justice Inspector General Glenn A. Fine issued his report on the Leung case. Fine's highly critical report identified scores of FBI failures. The first among them was the fact that the FBI ignored intelligence from an informant who said a senior FBI agent was being "run" by Chinese intelligence in Los Angeles. The spy running the agent was Katrina Leung, and the agent was J. J. Smith. "The FBI's failure to fully investigate Leung early on," the report stated, "was a lost opportunity to obtain information concerning the PRC's attempts to acquire technology and her contacts with persons of investigative interest to the FBI." The inspector general also made it clear that Leung was in fact a spy for China, not the FBI. The report stated clearly that Leung "provided classified U.S. government information to the PRC without FBI authorization." It revealed that at every step of the way in Leung's career as an FBI informant, for which she was paid $1.7 million, there were glaring signs that she was not who she claimed to be.
The extensive record makes it clear that the People's Republic of China--an emerging world power that poses a direct threat to the United States--penetrated the FBI. For more than two decades Communist China ran a spy, Katrina Leung, who stole valuable secrets from the U.S. government and intelligence community. More than that, this penetration agent, who had more than 2,100 contacts with Chinese officials over the course of twenty years, helped the Beijing regime exert enormous influence in the United States.
As revealed by the inspector general's report, by many declassified intelligence reports, by FBI documents, and by other documents submitted in court, Leung compromised all the FBI's foreign counterintelligence investigations on China. The FBI already struggled at aggressive counterintelligence, the vital technique that represents the best way to discover our adversaries' true intentions and, if necessary, to thwart dangerous plans before they are executed. The Chinese agent did incalculable harm by ruining the few successful counterintelligence operations that the United States had in place.
Adding to the damage, Leung's frequent reports on China apparently contained strategic disinformation about Beijing's plans and intentions. For many years these reports, intelligence officials told me, reached the highest levels of the U.S. government--including the Oval Office. The Chinese government could tailor its deceptive information to conform with U.S. beliefs and expectations because it had access to the deepest secrets from within the U.S. government and intelligence community. One legal document in the court case quotes U.S. government officials as stating that given the magnitude of the compromises, the FBI "must now re-assess all of its actions and intelligence analyses based on [Leung's] reporting."
Parlor Maid is a textbook case of how Communist China uses its intelligence services and agents not simply to gather intelligence but also to run aggressive counterintelligence operations, to manage its adversaries' perceptions of the emerging Chinese superpower, and to conduct disinformation operations against the United States. The Katrina Leung case provides a harrowing reminder that Communist China has made the United States its number-one target. But largely because of the effectiveness of China's penetration and disinformation campaigns, we have reached the point where top U.S. government officials dismiss a nuclear-armed Communist dictatorship in Beijing as "not a threat" to the United States.
And at the end of the day, Parlor Maid is a story of criminal negligence and cover-up on the part of the FBI. The truth must be revealed.
The Intercept
On November 26, 1990, a decade before China discovered the electronic bugs on Jiang Zemin's Boeing 767, the telephone rang at the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) in Beijing. MSS is the Chinese Communist equivalent of the FBI and CIA combined, with the political police aspects of Moscow's KGB added. The caller, a woman, spoke Mandarin and identified herself as Luo Zhongshan. She asked to speak to Mao Guohua, the head of the MSS Foreign Affairs Bureau, one of the units that runs China's intelligence-gathering operations in the United States. The conversation was intercepted and recorded by the NSA, the supersecret electronic spying and code-breaking agency.
mao:Who's this?
luo:Uh, greetings. Hey.
mao:I recognize you now.
luo:-There are two situations right now. I don't want to disclose it over the telephone.
mao:Uh.
luo:The matte...
PARLOR MAID
She's been a Communist since the day she was born. Her bona fides are impeccable. I gradually converted her--she's now a rock-ribbed Republican.
--FBI agent James J. Smith, introducing Chinese triple agent Katrina Leung to FBI China hands in 1993
On July 5, 2000, a brand-new, $120 million Boeing 767 jetliner flew from the Boeing corporation's airfield in Everett, Washington, to San Antonio International Airport. The Chinese military had purchased the jetliner for the leader of Communist China, Jiang Zemin. China Aviation Supplies Import and Export Corporation, which is run by the Chinese Communist state, purchased the aircraft for China United Airlines, which has been identified in declassified U.S. intelligence reports as a commercial entity operated by the People's Liberation Army. Once in San Antonio, the aircraft underwent a $15 million customization to outfit the plane with all the luxuries of a Middle Eastern sheik, including a special vibrating bed to help Jiang sleep.
On August 10, 2000, the modification work complete, the Boeing took off for Beijing's military airfield. Within weeks, Chinese security officials had found some twenty-seven sophisticated electronic eavesdropping devices in the aircraft.
How had the bugs gotten there, when the entire customization had been under the strictest, twenty-four-hour supervision by some twenty-five Chinese military intelligence officials? It turned out that clandestine operatives from the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) had covertly placed the devices in the plane in hopes of gathering intelligence from Jiang prior to a future summit meeting. (To this day, the details of the bugging remain secret.)
For the United States, there was a more pressing question: How had the Chinese uncovered the bugs so quickly? U.S. counterintelligence launched an investigation to find out. That probe led ultimately to the Los Angeles-based FBI counterspy James J. "J. J." Smith and his prized agent, Los Angeles businesswoman Katrina Leung--code name "Parlor Maid." A former FBI official, William Cleveland, would come under scrutiny as well.
The investigation turned up a revelation that would prove highly embarrassing to the FBI: Both of these officials, two of the Bureau's most senior counterintelligence officers, had had illicit, long-term sexual relationships with Leung. Contrary to the bed-hopping image of spies popularized in James Bond films, having intimate relations with a paid FBI informant violates one of the cardinal principles of the spy business, not to mention Bureau rules.
But to focus only on the soap opera element of the Katrina Leung story is to characterize the episode as something only vaguely resembling a spy case. And a spy case it is, without a doubt--a terribly damaging one at that.
The real story of Parlor Maid has never been told. The main reason the full account has not emerged is that the FBI and federal prosecutors mishandled the investigation from the beginning.
A small group of FBI officials did their best to keep the inside story from coming out. Rather than rage against the flagrant counterintelligence failures demonstrated in the Leung case, these officials focused on protecting the FBI's already-battered reputation from further damage. Later, prosecutors made poor tactical decisions that undermined the court case against Leung almost before it could begin.
Ultimately, prosecutors had to settle for a plea deal with Leung. The deal, reached on December 16, 2005, spared Leung from serving jail time or having to admit anything about passing illegally copied classified information to Communist China.
After the plea deal was finalized, Leung's lawyers--having safely escaped a trial that would have aired the overwhelming evidence of Leung's espionage--issued a statement professing that their client wasn't a spy and suggesting that she would have been glad to tell her story in court. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, Thom Mrozek, responded, "It's fair to say the government, by virtue of how this case moved along, was never able to tell its side of the story either."
Mrozek's statement was accurate, but it only obliquely hinted at the reasons the case "moved along" as it did and at the powerful evidence that Katrina Leung was indeed a spy for Communist China.
The real story of Parlor Maid will be told here for the first time. The Leung affair, like many cases from the dark world of intelligence and counterintelligence, is rife with lies and betrayals, half-truths and truths, myth and reality converging and diverging. But this account, based on court papers and on interviews with numerous intelligence and law-enforcement officials who knew the case firsthand, reveals the inside story of what really happened with Katrina Leung, Communist China, and the FBI.
Parlor Maid is the story of a Chinese spy who got away. And not just any spy. U.S intelligence officials close to the case insist that regardless of the outcome of the prosecution, the Katrina Leung case represents one of the worst spy cases in American history--and one of the worst U.S intelligence failures, as well. The evidence buried as a result of the FBI's mismanagement and the prosecution's failures bears this conclusion out.
Further confirmation came in May 2006, when Department of Justice Inspector General Glenn A. Fine issued his report on the Leung case. Fine's highly critical report identified scores of FBI failures. The first among them was the fact that the FBI ignored intelligence from an informant who said a senior FBI agent was being "run" by Chinese intelligence in Los Angeles. The spy running the agent was Katrina Leung, and the agent was J. J. Smith. "The FBI's failure to fully investigate Leung early on," the report stated, "was a lost opportunity to obtain information concerning the PRC's attempts to acquire technology and her contacts with persons of investigative interest to the FBI." The inspector general also made it clear that Leung was in fact a spy for China, not the FBI. The report stated clearly that Leung "provided classified U.S. government information to the PRC without FBI authorization." It revealed that at every step of the way in Leung's career as an FBI informant, for which she was paid $1.7 million, there were glaring signs that she was not who she claimed to be.
The extensive record makes it clear that the People's Republic of China--an emerging world power that poses a direct threat to the United States--penetrated the FBI. For more than two decades Communist China ran a spy, Katrina Leung, who stole valuable secrets from the U.S. government and intelligence community. More than that, this penetration agent, who had more than 2,100 contacts with Chinese officials over the course of twenty years, helped the Beijing regime exert enormous influence in the United States.
As revealed by the inspector general's report, by many declassified intelligence reports, by FBI documents, and by other documents submitted in court, Leung compromised all the FBI's foreign counterintelligence investigations on China. The FBI already struggled at aggressive counterintelligence, the vital technique that represents the best way to discover our adversaries' true intentions and, if necessary, to thwart dangerous plans before they are executed. The Chinese agent did incalculable harm by ruining the few successful counterintelligence operations that the United States had in place.
Adding to the damage, Leung's frequent reports on China apparently contained strategic disinformation about Beijing's plans and intentions. For many years these reports, intelligence officials told me, reached the highest levels of the U.S. government--including the Oval Office. The Chinese government could tailor its deceptive information to conform with U.S. beliefs and expectations because it had access to the deepest secrets from within the U.S. government and intelligence community. One legal document in the court case quotes U.S. government officials as stating that given the magnitude of the compromises, the FBI "must now re-assess all of its actions and intelligence analyses based on [Leung's] reporting."
Parlor Maid is a textbook case of how Communist China uses its intelligence services and agents not simply to gather intelligence but also to run aggressive counterintelligence operations, to manage its adversaries' perceptions of the emerging Chinese superpower, and to conduct disinformation operations against the United States. The Katrina Leung case provides a harrowing reminder that Communist China has made the United States its number-one target. But largely because of the effectiveness of China's penetration and disinformation campaigns, we have reached the point where top U.S. government officials dismiss a nuclear-armed Communist dictatorship in Beijing as "not a threat" to the United States.
And at the end of the day, Parlor Maid is a story of criminal negligence and cover-up on the part of the FBI. The truth must be revealed.
The Intercept
On November 26, 1990, a decade before China discovered the electronic bugs on Jiang Zemin's Boeing 767, the telephone rang at the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) in Beijing. MSS is the Chinese Communist equivalent of the FBI and CIA combined, with the political police aspects of Moscow's KGB added. The caller, a woman, spoke Mandarin and identified herself as Luo Zhongshan. She asked to speak to Mao Guohua, the head of the MSS Foreign Affairs Bureau, one of the units that runs China's intelligence-gathering operations in the United States. The conversation was intercepted and recorded by the NSA, the supersecret electronic spying and code-breaking agency.
mao:Who's this?
luo:Uh, greetings. Hey.
mao:I recognize you now.
luo:-There are two situations right now. I don't want to disclose it over the telephone.
mao:Uh.
luo:The matte...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherBlackstone Audiobooks
- Publication date2013
- ISBN 10 1441722688
- ISBN 13 9781441722683
- BindingAudio CD
- Rating
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Enemies: How America's Foes Steal Our Vital Secrets - and How We Let It Happen
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(2013)
ISBN 10: 1441722688
ISBN 13: 9781441722683
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