![]() That’s not to say Lee never behaved suspiciously. For years, the Cox Report would become shorthand in the government for the threat of China, even after its most alarmist findings were thoroughly debunked. Notra Trulock, the DOE intelligence officer, provided star testimony for the House’s doomsday Cox Report, declassified two months after Lee was named, which suggested that every person of Chinese ancestry was a potential sleeper agent for the United States’ greatest rival. Lee had visited China in the ’80s (for the first time in his life), filling one of the DOE’s criteria, but so had many other non-Chinese scientists from the national labs who were never investigated. A (rejected) FISA surveillance application by the FBI explicitly listed “ethnic Chinese” among its reasons for tapping Lee’s phone. When the Department of Energy opened its operation to hunt for the supposed W-88 spy in the mid-’90s, investigator Dan Bruno penned a memo that said, “An initial consideration will be to identify those US citizens, of Chinese heritage, who worked directly or peripherally with the design development”-race as a factor to whittle the field. Former FBI chief of Chinese counterintelligence Paul Moore describes the Chinese approach as “grains of sand,” in which the recruitment pitch is made to as many targets as possible and begins simply, “Are you a friend of China?” Moore has argued that since China’s strategy targets more ethnic Chinese by number than non-Chinese, racial profiling in U.S. A version of this theory can be found in A Convenient Spy, the fair and deeply reported 2002 book on the Lee case by Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman. The FBI has long held that China is unique in its intelligence-gathering methods, that instead of relying on trained operatives, it accumulates as much information as it can, in bits and pieces, from anywhere-public sources, overseas students, scientists visiting China, and, yes, by appealing to the sympathies of Chinese Americans. ![]() The theft of industrial and trade secrets has been referred to as the single largest loss of American wealth, guesstimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Other recent suspects of Chinese ethnicity, it should be said, have been found guilty.
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