Free Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China by David Wise Page A

was pressured to talk about his work at Livermore. And it certainly could have occurred to him that answering the questions he was asked might help him in his efforts to do business with China.
    There was, perhaps, another factor. In Chinese culture, when people receive favors, they are expected to reciprocate, a deeply rooted tradition known as guanxi. Min was treated well in Beijing, as though he was an important and respected visitor. In more than one instance, China has successfully extracted information from visiting American scientists who felt they had to be polite to their hosts and ended up revealing more than they should have.
    But Min seemed to know in advance what would be expected of him in Beijing. There was no other reason for him to have checked out so many classified documents from the Livermore technical library in the weeks before his trip.
    The bureau had maneuvered Min out of the lab, but Cleveland and the FBI continued to pursue the case for a decade more. Now Hanson Huang offered the best hope of a break in the case. In March 1981, one month after Min was forced out at Livermore, Huang flew to New York and then booked a flight back to Hong Kong through Seattle. At the airline counter at JFK, apparently sensing he was being watched, he switched his plans at the last minute to catch his Hong Kong flight in Los Angeles.
    At LAX, the airliner was about to take off with Huang as a passenger when a customs agent boarded the plane and asked Huang to come with him. He was escorted to a hotel where the FBI was waiting. Huang told them little but agreed to meet them again on his next trip to the United States. He met the agents in New York in May and again in August but refused to talk further about his relationship with Min. The Immigration and Naturalization Service then barred him from the country.
    The FBI nevertheless felt it had gathered enough evidence to prosecute Min for espionage. Harry J. Godfrey, Cleveland's supervisor on the TIGER TRAP case, several times pressed John L. Martin, the chief of the Justice Department's internal security section, to move on the case. Martin refused.
    Unless a spy is caught in the act, the FBI cannot make arrests in sensitive national security cases without the approval of the Justice Department. And that meant Martin. Unknown outside the closed world of intelligence, Martin was the man who ruled whether espionage cases would make the front pages and the nightly news or perhaps never become public.
    Without a confession by Min, Martin insisted to both Godfrey and Cleveland, he would not go to a grand jury. In Martin's long career, seventy-six spies had been prosecuted, and all but one convicted.FBI counterintelligence agents were often frustrated by his cautious approach, however, complaining that he was more interested in protecting his reputation than in catching spies. Martin's decision had blocked any legal action against Min, but it did not prevent the bureau from continuing its investigation.
    Late in 1981, Hanson Huang was asked by Chinese officials to brief them on his contacts with the FBI. Then, early in 1982, Huang disappeared from his hotel room in Beijing. A year later he was convicted of espionage against China and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. It was then that PARLOR MAID managed to visit him.
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    With the TIGER TRAP investigation on a hold button, although not closed, counterintelligence officials at FBI headquarters decided to launch a broader probe of whether China was advancing its nuclear weapons program by eliciting information from visiting US scientists. The new case, as an offshoot of TIGER TRAP , was given the code name TIGER SPRINGE . (A rarely used word, "springe" refers to a snare made of a noose under tension that springs when triggered.)
    Dozens of scientists and senior officials in Washington were questioned in the TIGER SPRINGE investigation. Once more, Bill Cleveland and his partner, Al Heiman, conducted many of the interviews.