David Wise’s ‘Tiger Trap: America’s Secret Spy War With China’

Book review by John Pomfret

On Dec. 16, 2005, federal judge Florence Marie Cooper sentenced a Chinese American woman to three years’ probation, 200 hours of community service and a $10,000 fine for lying to the FBI. “I love America” was Katrina Leung’s reply.

Leung’s reaction made sense. By all accounts, her case constituted the most sensational example ever of the penetration of the FBI by Chinese intelligence. And all she got was a rap on the knuckles.

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‘Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War with China’ by David Wise (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 292 pp. $28)

For decades during the Cold War, the most captivating spy-vs.-spy battle was the one waged between Moscow and Washington. With the rise of China, a new player has entered the game. These days, it seems, not a month goes by without an intelligence case involving alleged Chinese spies stealing American industrial secrets, or reports that China tried to pay an American to join the CIA, or Chinese hackers (perhaps from the government) breaking into the Gmail accounts of U.S. officials and human rights activists. Move over U.S.S.R., China is America’s espionage enemy No. 1.

But, as David Wise concludes in his new book, “Tiger Trap,” the federal agencies arrayed to protect the United States have handled the threat with astounding incompetence.

The author of bestsellers on spies and counterspies, Wise is a master of page-turning nonfiction, and from that perspective “Tiger Trap” doesn’t disappoint. His book paints a sobering, sometimes pathetic picture of American law enforcement and counterintelligence forces that appear woefully incapable of coping with the challenge from China. Some of the cases Wise details seem right out of the Keystone Kops.

Wise ties the unraveling of a half a dozen cases to bureaucratic wrangling, bad decisions by government agents and prosecutors, investigative incompetence, and possible racism, among other problems. FBI probes have upended the lives of innocent Americans and destroyed the career of at least one loyal FBI agent, a Chinese American woman. At the same time, Wise concludes that over the past 30 years, China’s spies have learned an enormous amount about what he calls the most advanced weapon in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the W88, a powerful warhead so small that several can be placed on one missile. Wise reports that details about the W88significantly hastened the modernization of China’s own strategic forces. Chinese spies also have burrowed deep into the FBI’s counterintelligence operations and might have uncovered U.S. attempts to bug then-President Jiang Zemin’s private aircraft in 2001.

The Chinese gather intelligence differently from Western nations, Wise writes. While Russians and Americans rely on professional snoops or fancy equipment, the Chinese count on friends and connections to piece together information. He quotes one FBI analyst as saying that if the Chinese wanted to learn about a beach, they would send in a thousand tourists, each assigned to collect a single grain of sand. “When they returned,” Wise writes, “they would be asked to shake out their towels. And [the Chinese] would end up knowing more about the sand than anyone else.”