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To Steven
INTRODUCTION
THE FBI GOES TO COLLEGE
On an April morning in 2009, Dajin Peng shaved and dressed for a normal day
of teaching. Then the University of South Florida professor of international
studies sat down at the desktop computer in his bedroom and began surfing the
Internet for the best way to kill himself.
Peng was reeling from an abrupt tumble down the academic ladder. With
little warning or explanation, South Florida had placed him on leave as director
of its Confucius Institute, a China-funded language and cultural program. He
was trying to find a painless poison, and one he could buy without attracting
attention, when he heard his father calling to him from another room. Somebody
was knocking on the front door.
Visitors seldom climbed the outside staircase to Peng’s second-floor
apartment in the drab, rust-colored roadside complex. He opened the door to a
tall woman with an athletic build and shoulder-length brown hair, who was forty
years old but looked younger. Although sunny, the weather was cool for spring
in Florida, and she wore a coat over an off-white blouse.
Giving him a reassuring smile and a business card, she introduced herself as
Dianne Mercurio, a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Although she grew up in South Carolina, where she had been a high school track
star, her voice bore little trace of a southern accent. Peng briefly feared that the
FBI intended to arrest him, but her friendly demeanor indicated some other
purpose.
As they shook hands, she said, “Nick Abaid sends his regards.”
With a jolt, Peng recognized the name from his days as a graduate student at
Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Abaid,
an FBI special agent, had cultivated Chinese students at Princeton who might
become useful informants. He had identified Peng, who had gone to a university
run by China’s spy service and had ex-classmates in the highest reaches of its
government, as a potential prize. Abaid had taken him to lunch several times,
usually just before or after Peng’s trips home to China. Explaining that he was
worried about theft of American technology, Abaid had asked Peng if he had
noticed anything suspicious about other Chinese students. Peng said he hadn’t.
Mercurio’s reference to Abaid convinced him that she did indeed work for
the FBI. It also put him on his guard. His last conversation with Abaid had been
in 1994, when Peng joined the University of South Florida’s faculty. Abaid had
asked him to stay in touch with the FBI’s Tampa bureau, an offer Peng politely
declined, hoping he had seen the last of U.S. intelligence. For the next fifteen
years, Peng and the FBI had gone their separate ways. Now the bureau was
hounding him again.
When Mercurio asked if he had time to talk, Peng suggested a walk outside.
He wanted to avoid disturbing his father, a frail widower, who lived with him.
As they strolled up and down a corner of the parking lot, Mercurio told him she
was aware of his predicament at the university.
Glad to have a sympathetic audience, especially an attractive woman, Peng
recounted his tale of woe in fluent but heavily accented English. Funded by an
affiliate of China’s education ministry, Confucius Institutes had sprung up in the
past five years on campuses worldwide. As founder and director of South
Florida’s branch, he deserved credit for its expanding array of courses,
community outreach, and new cultural center. He had even arranged for the
director of all Confucius Institutes to schedule a trip to USF, and he had
expected her to lionize him and proclaim his institute a model for the world.
Instead, weeks before her visit, he was ousted. Peng’s boss at USF handed
him a curt notice that he was not allowed to return to the institute or have any
contact with its staff, “pending investigation into allegations of inappropriate
management of the Confucius Institute.” He could still teach his regular courses
in international political economy and business, but that was scant consolation.
The dean provided no details of the accusations against him, nor did she name
his accusers. He would have expected such injustice in the China of his youth,
but not in America.
As if worried that Peng might connect her visit with his downfall, Mercurio
volunteered that she had no influence over the university, and nothing to do with
his difficulties. He accepted her statement at face value. Later, he would wonder
how she knew about his troubles, and would suspect the FBI of instigating them
to gain leverage over him.
Mercurio’s next comment disturbed him. She wanted to know more about the
Confucius Institutes, she said, because they harbored Chinese spies. Since the
Chinese government funded them, and Chinese universities supplied most of
their staff, they made ideal listening posts and recruiting stations, she explained.
Left unsaid, but as unmistakable as a tabloid headline, was the accusation that
Peng himself was a Chinese agent.
“You’re wrong,” Peng told Mercurio. She asserted her opinion as fact, but
where was her evidence? “China would never use the Confucius Institutes for
spying,” he said. “They are too important. The government wouldn’t want to risk
the U.S. shutting them down.”
She didn’t argue with him. For Mercurio, who had recently taken over the
China beat on the counterintelligence squad, an informant of Peng’s prominence
and connections could make her career. Later, as their relationship ripened, she
would ask him to spy on the Confucius Institutes and their Chinese government
sponsors, as well as Tampa’s Chinese community and his Chinese colleagues at
South Florida. Her CIA counterparts would have plans for him as well. In return,
she would be prepared to protect his professorship and, if necessary, keep him
out of prison. The FBI had pressured mobsters, drug dealers, and loan sharks to
cooperate; why not a Princeton-educated professor?
But first she needed to assess his enthusiasm for espionage. Peng was a U.S.
citizen now, she reminded him. He understood her meaning. He’d been a
Chinese national when he spurned Abaid’s request to stay in touch. Now he
owed his patriotic allegiance to his adopted country, not his homeland. She
asked him directly whether he would serve his country. Despite inner
misgivings, he had little choice. He agreed.
They had walked for almost an hour.
As she said good-bye, she arranged a lunch date with him, and told him that
she would set up an email account where he could contact her. She cautioned
him not to mention her visit to anyone at South Florida.
Afterward, a neighbor dropped by his apartment. She and her husband, both
Chinese, were among his closest friends; he had used his university position to
help them obtain visas to study in the United States. They shared his fury over
his ouster from the institute, and fretted about his bleak mood.
She had seen Peng with Mercurio, and her curiosity was aroused. Peng’s
female friends were usually Chinese.
“Who was your visitor?” she asked.
“An FBI agent,” he blurted out. Distracted from suicide, his mind raced
ahead, groping to understand why the bureau had reentered his life and what it
meant for his future.
*
THE WORLD THAT we encounter in our adolescence tends to entrench itself
permanently in our minds. In the time and place where I grew up, FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover was a bigger villain than the thugs on the bureau’s “Ten Most
Wanted” list. In the 1960s and early 1970s in Amherst, Massachusetts, where
my parents and most of my friends’ fathers taught at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst College, or Hampshire College, the FBI’s snooping on
the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements had sullied its reputation.
The CIA, which sabotaged Marxist regimes popular with many intellectuals,
ranked even lower in academic esteem. Protests and sit-ins greeted campus
recruiters. As late as 1986, demonstrators against CIA recruiting occupied a
building on the UMass campus. Fifteen people, including Amy Carter (daughter
of former president Jimmy Carter) and ex-Yippie Abbie Hoffman, were arrested
and charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct. During their jury trial in
Northampton, Massachusetts, just across the Connecticut River, they admitted
breaking the law but argued that protests were needed to raise awareness of CIA
crimes in Latin America and elsewhere. Emblazoned on their T-shirts was the
slogan “Put the CIA on Trial.” Left-wing icons such as Daniel Ellsberg, leaker
of the Pentagon Papers, and former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark testified
