China Doll
Katrina Leung was a temptress, beguiled by the world of intrigue, but was she an agent of influence for Beijing, as prosecutors now charge?
Circus. The feds, evidently, are in a bit of jam with Cleveland. They found no documents in Leung's safe that trace back to him. And they may need him as a potential witness, albeit one with some major credibility issues. "They think they need him to get Smith or Leung," a counterintelligence source says. Whatever the reasons for the government's decisions to date, "there's no doubt," says a veteran counterintelligence official, "that the brotherhood is trying to help Cleveland and throwing Smith to the wolves." The Justice Department's inspector general, meanwhile, sweeping up behind the elephants in this three-ring circus, is examining the seemingly endless series of management failures and will, eventually, issue a report.
The Leung saga may offer the trappings of a dime store spy thriller, but beneath the sordid details is one very sobering prospect: Katrina Leung and her two G-man lovers might just possibly have blown two decades of intelligence work on China sky-high. The mandatory damage assessments are already underway, nearly a dozen in all, by the FBI and a handful of other alphabet-soup agencies. Among the classified documents FBI agents found in Leung's home was a journal written in Chinese with English words interspersed, such as "military double agent," "rocket knowledge," and "U.S. Airforce." In court papers, FBI Special Agent Randall Thomas explained that the FBI conducts "double agent" operations with the U.S. military and Air Force to assess the capabilities of foreign militaries like China's. In such operations, the United States "feeds" a knowledgeable military member to the MSS and controls his or her actions. Thomas quoted a senior FBI official, Bruce Carlson, as saying the bureau used information provided by Leung to deter China's efforts to steal U.S. military technology. If Leung's "information" actually came from Chinese security agencies, the entire FBI exercise was, in all probability, a sham. "The FBI must now reassess all of its actions and intelligence analysis based on her reporting," said Carlson, adding that Leung may have "thwarted or compromised" many other national security programs by passing on to her Chinese handlers information she obtained about them. The other side of the coin, sources say, is that whatever disinformation Leung fed her FBI lovers could have been passed up the national security chain of command, perhaps even to the White House. "Every double-agent operation we ran," says Larry Wortzel, a retired military counterintelligence official and longtime China hand, "might have been compromised and a failure."
Unlike espionage cases involving at-the-office traitors like the CIA's Aldrich Ames and the FBI's Robert Hanssen, the Leung case raises some unusually delicate issues. It doesn't involve just classified documents that may have been stuffed in a briefcase and smuggled home but secrets that may have been spilled during the nearly 20 years of pillow talk Leung allegedly conducted with Smith and the seven years' worth with Cleveland. The possible ramifications have sent intelligence veterans into fits of apoplexy. "This is just perfectly ghastly," says James Lilley, former ambassador to China. "These two FBI case officers were fools. And she made a monkey out of them and fed them a lot of tainted information, which they fed straight into the White House." Lilley, once the CIA'S station chief in Beijing, doesn't believe that Cleveland and Smith, despite their lapses, did all that much damage. "My own sense," he says, "is these guys couldn't operate against a bull fiddle."
advertisement
