Tiger Trap by David Wise

Author:David Wise
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Politics, Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780547553108
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

ROYAL TOURIST

IN JULY 1997 Robin Lee was annoyed when an outlet in the kitchen of her house in Manhattan Beach, California, suddenly stopped working. She unscrewed the faceplate to have a look; perhaps she could divine what was wrong and avoid the expense of an electrician.

She removed the plate and immediately saw something that struck her as extremely odd. There was an extra wire in the outlet, and it was unlike anything she had ever seen before.

Her husband, Peter Hoong-Yee Lee, a physicist and a graduate of the California Institute of Technology, had no difficulty recognizing the strange wire for what it was—a miniature bug, a microphone that had been disguised to pick up conversations in the room.

For Peter Lee, it was the first sign of danger, a harbinger of the major trouble that was soon to descend upon him. Until that moment, life had been good for the Lees. A respected scientist and expert on lasers who had worked at both the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons labs, Peter Lee was then fifty-eight and employed at TRW, a Livermore contractor, in Redondo Beach, California.

A shy, introverted man who spoke and wrote Chinese fluently, Lee was born in Chongqing (then Chungking), in central China, in 1939, grew up in Taiwan, and immigrated to the United States.

Lee, a naturalized citizen, had briefly appeared on the FBI's radar screen in the early 1980s, while he worked at Livermore. On a trip to China, according to Paul Moore, the former FBI analyst, "at breakfast he tells a colleague that the strangest thing happened, somebody came to my hotel room and wanted to talk to me. The person he confided this to said, 'This is the kind of thing the security folks want to know about, be sure to put it in your trip report.' Lee didn't but the other guy did. The FBI came out to interview Lee. Bill Cleveland did the interview. Lee says, 'Oh yeah, I didn't put that into my report, I should have.' 'You kept a trip diary?' Lee says yes, but he can't find it, come back later. The FBI comes back and Lee says he doesn't want to get involved any further. So now Lee is on the FBI's records."

What Peter Lee did not know was that a decade later, in 1991, J.J. Smith had opened an FBI case on him after the bureau received information about Lee from an informant. The scientist was suspected of passing government secrets to China. The FBI gave the Peter Lee file the code name ROYAL TOURIST.

Chinese spy cases have tendrils that often seem to reach out and become entangled in other cases. The Peter Lee case was used as a pretext when the FBI ran a notably unsuccessful sting on Wen Ho Lee, with a bureau agent pretending to be a spy for the MSS. And the names of the agents who worked on the Peter Lee case were found in PARLOR MAID's bookcase in 2002, when the FBI was closing in on Katrina Leung and J.

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