USA
CHINA CONNECTION
The forgotten 'spy' case of a rocket scientist
By Peter Grier (grierp@csps.com)
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON
Bornin China, he perfected his scientific skills in the United States,working on secret military projects. Though a model figure to hisco-workers, the FBI was suspicious - agents thought him a spy, threwhim in jail, and tormented him by flicking on lights throughout thenight. Freed for lack of evidence, he complained bitterly ofharassment. He'd been targeted, he said, solely because of his Asianethnic heritage.
But he wasn't Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamosscientist whose arrest roiled Washington this year. He was TsienHsue-shen, US Air Force colonel and a pioneering jet-propulsion expert.Today he is alive and well - and living in Beijing as the most lionizedmilitary scientist Communist China has ever had.
Viewed fromafar, the McCarthy-era case of Tsien Hsue-shen stands as an eerieprecursor to the Wen Ho Lee storm. Yet neither Dr. Lee's proponents norhis prosecutors can draw easy lessons from this chapter in history.
Tothis day, public evidence that Dr. Tsien had communist leanings whilein the US is, to put it charitably, thin. Co-workers defended him, ashave many of Lee's. Some fought for years to clear Tsien's name.
Butthe fact remains that after a lengthy legal struggle Tsien gave up andwas deported. He eventually became what the FBI suspected he alreadywas: the father of China's ballistic-missile program. Thus if there isany conclusion for today to be drawn from the Tsien affair, it isperhaps that the greatest US security losses can be self-inflicted.
"It'sa fascinating parallel to the Lee case," says Steven Aftergood of theProject on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.
Chapter 1: Missile wunderkind
Tsien Hsue-shen grew upin Hang-zhou, a provincial capital in east China, in the early years ofthe 20th century. A precocious student, he eventually won a scholarshipto study engineering in the US, at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology and the California Institute of Technology.
AtCaltech in the 1930s, Tsien became a protégé of the renownedaeronautics professor Theodore Von Karman. He was part of the "SuicideSquad," a group of students whose experiments with rockets weredangerous enough to be banished to desert arroyos. Colleagues rememberhim as formal, a touch elegant, and fond of classical music (as is WenHo Lee).
Colleagues also remember Tsien as brilliant. VonKarman persuaded authorities to grant him a security clearance, thoughhe remained a Chinese citizen. He developed into one of the mostimportant rocket scientists in the US, a founding member of what is nowNASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Commissioned a colonel in the US ArmyAir Forces, he helped study Germany's V-2 ballistic-missile programafter the war.
Meanwhile, Tsien's native land was riven bycivil war. In 1949, as the Communists consolidated their victory overthe Nationalists, Tsien decided it was finally time to become a UScitizen. "What he had not counted on was that at this time the UnitedStates was entering a period of cold-war hysteria. Many scientistswould be caught in its whirlwind," writes author Iris Chang in herbiography of Tsien, "The Thread of the Silkworm."
Chapter 2: A knock on the door
OnJune 6, 1950, FBI agents paid Tsien a surprise visit. They charged thatsome grad-school parties he had attended decades ago were in factmeetings of Unit 122 of the Pasadena Communist Party. His securityclearance was revoked. Never again would he work on a US militaryproject.
Two weeks later, to the astonishment of his friends,he decided to return to China. Perhaps he really was a spy, fearful ofdiscovery. Colleagues had a different interpretation, Ms. Chang writes.They saw the decision as a result of a mix of "pride, anger, confusion,and fear, all emotions consistent with the person Tsien had become."
Authoritiessearched Tsien's luggage. They found material they deemed suspicious,such as a scrapbook of clippings about US nuclear espionage andmaterial they deemed classified (including Tsien's own papers).
Expertshad widely varying opinions as to the value of the seized data - asthey would decades later in the Lee case. Tsien was imprisoned,although briefly. An INS trial eventually found him guilty of being aCommunist and subject to deportation. The key evidence against him:association with convicted Communists and testimony from two LosAngeles cops who said they had seen his name on a 1938 party membershiplist.
Five years of limbo followed. The US could deport Tsien,yet it didn't, presumably because officials felt he knew too much. FBIagents shadowed him and his family. Eventually the pressure becameunbearable. In early 1955, he escaped FBI surveillance and didsomething that in hindsight appears suspicious: He scribbled a noteintended for the People's Republic of China, asking for help leavingthe US.
Tsien and his family were repatriated on Sept. 17,1955. They sailed from Los Angeles aboard a passenger liner. Fellowtravelers said they mostly kept to themselves.
Chapter 3: Spy or scapegoat?
WasTsien a spy? Circumstantial evidence points in that direction. But muchof the government's case against him might have been ripped apart by atough defense lawyer. The membership list the cops talked about - couldthey produce it? Was it a list of active members, a list of targetrecruits, a reading list?
At American universities in the1930s, it was hard to avoid attending parties with "reds." What aboutthe influence of Tsien's wife - the daughter of a top Nationalistmilitary strategist? How could Tsien be a Communist if he had lived inthe United States since before Mao seized power?
McCarthy-era paranoia certainly played a part in Tsien's downfall. He was never charged with espionage, after all.
Manyof Tsien's colleagues could not see a spy or even a party member in theself-absorbed scientist. Chang, his biographer, has said she believesthe government's charges against him remain unproven.
When hereturned to China, he was lionized by the new Communist government.Given all the resources at the state's disposal, he eventually createda Chinese jet-propulsion industry. His work led to the development of awide range of native missiles. He lives today in quiet retirement. Herefuses to speak to Westerners.
Recently, a congressional panelweighed in on whether Tsien was always a Communist Party member, orforced by expulsion to become one. Last year the Select Committee on USNational Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People'sRepublic of China - known as the Cox Committee, after ChairmanChristopher Cox (R) of California - included a section on Tsien in itsreport about China and presumed loss of current US secrets.
Tsienis the father of China's ballistic-missile force, noted the report."The allegations that he was spying for the PRC are presumed to betrue."
Chapter 4: Parallel universe
The CoxCommittee report helped spread concern in Washington that the US waslosing "crown jewel" military secrets to Chinese espionage. Itconcluded, among other things, that China had stolen design data on themost advanced US thermonuclear weapons.
It was against thisbackground that the Wen Ho Lee case exploded into public view. Dr. Lee,a Taiwanese-born Los Alamos lab scientist, was a primary target of thefederal probe into a leak of warhead secrets. Eventually he was chargedonly with mishandling classified data. A plea bargain freed him afternine months in solitary confinement.
Yet some contend that theCox report exaggerated the danger of Chinese espionage and helpedcreate an anti-Asian attitude in security circles. They point to whatthey feel is the study's cavalier treatment of the Tsien Hsue-shencase. "They had a story line, and they followed it," says LewisFranklin, co-author of a critique of the Cox report by the StanfordUniversity Center for International Security and Cooperation.
TheCox report says spy allegations against Tsien are presumed to be true.Yet Tsien was never charged with spying, says Mr. Franklin. He wasinvestigated primarily for Communist connections. And "presumed" bywho? Why?
The Cox report says that Tsien "emigrated" to China,without mention of his long fight to avoid deportation. Cox reportauthors cite Chang's "Thread of the Silkworm" as the source of much oftheir information about Tsien's life. Chang has repeatedly complainedthat the committee drew unwarranted conclusions from her work.
Coxauthors had a modern purpose in distorting this historical record,claims Franklin. "It seems to be primarily an attempt to show that thePRC has taken missile secrets from the United States over a 40-yearperiod and to characterize its progress in missile development asmainly derived from espionage against the United States," says theStanford critique.
Such critics are entitled to their opinion -but that opinion is wrong, according to Nicholas Rostow, staff directorof the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Critics do "not know all the classified details" of Tsien's case, wrote Rostow last year.
Asfor Lee, investigators have begun debriefing him. As part of his pleabargain with the government, he agreed to tell more about what happenedto 17 computer tapes that contained downloaded nuclear data, some of itsecret. Lee has filed a civil suit against the government claimingunfair prosecution, while Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson hasannounced new DOE security rules intended to guard against racialprofiling.
In his heyday, Tsien Hsue-shen was one of the mostfamous people in China, appearing on podiums with Mao, and today theBeijing leadership still occasionally calls on him to lend his prestigeto their purposes. He recently issued a statement denouncing the bannedspiritual movement Falun Gong. So far, he has given no publicindication of interest in the Wen Ho Lee case - something at leastreminiscent of his long-ago past.
