NEW: A few years, a woman came to me with the story of a family friend, Chinese-American engineer Harry Sheng, who lost his job after a 1970s run-in with the FBI. He never found work in his field again.
We FOIAed documents that might explain why. (1/12) theintercept.com/2020/02/02/fbi…
We FOIAed documents that might explain why. (1/12) theintercept.com/2020/02/02/fbi…
In 1967, following China's detonation of a hydrogen bomb, J. Edgar Hoover's office ordered agents around the country to compile lists of ethnic Chinese scientists. The goal was to identify all 4,000 such researchers (FBI's estimate) then in the U.S. (2/12) 
The bureau likely didn't reach that goal, but it certainly tried. The idea of the Chinese scientist program, as it was called, was to assemble the various lists into an index of 3x5 cards listing researchers' names, clearance levels, and "degree of cooperation." (3/12)
The documents make clear that the targets included U.S. citizens. Harry Sheng, for example, left China before 1949 and became a US citizen in 1961. (4/12)
The effort covered ethnic Chinese students as well, though field offices may have struggled to come up with meaningful lists here. This was the late 1960s, and the FBI wasn't exactly welcome on campus. So the bureau used membership records of old scientific organizations. (5/12)
One FBI field office floated the idea of recruiting ethnic Chinese researchers as double agents, planting them in labs, and waiting until Chinese intelligence operatives approached them. (6/12)
The Chinese scientist program continued into the late 1970s and likely affected hundreds of researchers. Chang-Lin Tien, the former chancellor of @UCBerkeley, was among the people surveilled under it. (7/12)
The program was driven by the assumption that advances in China were the result of subterfuge by immigrant scientists in the U.S., ignoring the possibility that China had made gains on its own and that (perhaps more important) non-ethnic Chinese might spy for China. (8/12)
Look, for example, at the case of Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard's chemistry department. His offenses would have been missed using this traditional framework. (He was charged with grant fraud, not economic espionage.) (9/12)
I also talked to former FBI agents and employees who detailed disturbing practices within the bureau. One told me that he was advised not to date Asian-American women because doing so might put the United States at risk. He is Asian-American himself. (10/12)
Harry Sheng spent years searching for answers about why he never found a job in his field again. He wrote his congressman and even tried to FOIA his own file. Now, after his death, it seems clear that he was caught up in a global rivalry. (11/12)
Please go to the story to see the documents. More background is my book, out Tuesday. amazon.com/Scientist-Spy-…
(END)
(END)
