美国联邦调查局（FBI）一批要求南佛罗里达大学（the University of SouthFlorida）协助，迫使该学一名中国副教授帮助他们从事间谍活动的电子邮件日前曝光。
据彭博新闻社报道称，FBI在2012年4月份的一封信中，要求南佛罗里达大学退还之前他们写给学校一封电子邮件複印件。在电邮中，FBI探员企图僱佣该校一名僱员从事间谍活动，当事人彭大进是该校国际关系学的副教授。
2010年，FBI探员DianneMercurio要求南佛罗里达大学，对彭大进在中国开设南佛罗里达州立大学的分支机构作出说明，她希望彭大进能利用自己的身份进行情报蒐集。
彭大进毕业于北京国际关系学院（该学校由中国国安部控制），后移民美国，并且成为南佛罗里达大学孔子学院的首位负责人。彭大进被指任职期间犯有重大过失，如伪造财务记录和帮助中国学生伪造签证资料。
Sex, Lies andEspionage: Did a Professor Spy for the FBI?
(Bloomberg) -- When Dianne Mercurio first knocked on Dajin Peng’sdoor, he was searching the Internet for the best way to killhimself. Mercurio, an FBI agent, had other ideas.
Mercurio knew Peng was in trouble with the University of SouthFlorida, where he taught international business and ran theConfucius Institute, a cultural program funded by a Chinesegovernment affiliate. USF had placed him on leave for allegedmismanagement there. As they strolled outside his apartment, sheasked Peng, a Chinese-born U.S. citizen, to serve his adoptedcountry.
The encounter, in April 2009, started Peng’s recruitment. SoonMercurio was pressing him to spy on his homeland and Tampa’sChinese community, and he reluctantly agreed, he said ininterviews. In return, she worked to protect him as the universityaccused him of faking thousands of dollars in expenses, falsifyingletters to help Chinese scholars get U.S. visas, and storingexplicit images of bondage on a USF laptop. Peng denied anywrongdoing.
“Remember I am keeping you out of jail,” Mercurio wrote to Pengin July 2010, “and it’s difficult to put a price on freedom.”
No one knew the value of freedom better than Peng, who foundhimself dragged once again into the powerful currents of politicsand spycraft decades after his childhood was fractured by Mao’sinformers.
His story, winding from China to Princeton University to Tampa,shows how worried the U.S. government has been about growingChinese involvement in American higher education, especially theactivities of the Confucius Institutes. It also reveals the rise ofanother sometimes-unwanted influence on campus -- that of U.S.intelligence agencies keeping tabs on the rapidly growing ranks offoreign students and professors.
“There’s a real tension between what the FBI and CIA want to doand our valid and necessary international openness,” said RiceUniversity President David Leebron, a member of the NationalSecurity Higher Education Advisory Board, created in 2005 to fosterdialogue between intelligence agencies and academic leaders.
“But we don’t want to wake up one morning and find out thatthere are people on campus stealing our trade secrets or puttingour country in danger,” he said, speaking generally rather thanabout the Peng case. “We might be uneasy bedfellows, but we’ve gotto find an accommodation.”
Who is Dajin Peng?
Fluent in both Chinese and Japanese, Peng has connections in thehighest reaches of China’s spy services, he said. At 57, he travelsfrequently between Tampa and his homeland, where he has severalteaching posts. Fixed on his potential intelligence value, Mercurioeven alarmed USF’s leadership by suggesting that the universityconsider establishing a campus in China. The FBI hoped to use it asa base for Peng’s spying, he said.
Ten U.S. colleges have set up China campuses, despite someprofessors’ fears that political discussions are restricted atthese branches. Meanwhile, the ranks of Chinese students andfaculty in the U.S. have swelled. About 275,000 students in theU.S. now come from China, a seven-fold increase in two decades.Government data show 150,000 Chinese-born scientists, socialscientists and engineers worked at U.S. colleges in 2010, or 47percent more than in 2003.
“Obviously we have a large number of foreign educators, foreignstudents coming into our country with a certain amount ofinformation that can be gleaned from them,” said Steven Ibison, whowas special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau ofInvestigation’s Tampa office during its courtship of Peng. “Itwouldn’t be unusual that there are those folks here to gatherintelligence on us.”
Ibison said he couldn’t recall the Peng case. Mercurio declinedto comment, as did spokesmen for the bureau’s Tampa and nationaloffices. The University of South Florida said it actedappropriately and wasn’t influenced by the FBI.
Peng, an associate professor, is currently serving his secondsuspension from USF. During 10 hours of interviews, he accused theFBI of destroying his career. He said the bureau encourageddisgruntled Confucius Institute staffers to initiate theuniversity’s investigation of him, effectively forcing him to spyto keep his job.
“The FBI was involved, but everybody pretends it doesn’thappen,” he said.
It isn’t easy to meet with Peng. “I am not allowed to use myoffice since I am in suspension,” he e-mailed a reporter. ’’I donot think it is a good idea for us to meet at my apartment becauseI am afraid it might be tapped. For the same reason it is not goodfor us to pre-set a restaurant.’’
Instead, Peng suggested a rendezvous in a drugstore parking lot.There, he left his Toyota Sienna for the reporter’s rental car. Hegave directions to a Chinese restaurant run by a friend of his, wholed the way to a sparse back room and closed the door. The waitresshad to knock.
His eyes were reddened and puffy, perhaps from stress or jetlag. He had just returned from Beijing by way of Dubai and Capetownon vacation with his widowed 89-year-old father. Divorced, with twosons at elite U.S. universities, Peng poured out his story influent English, though occasionally confusing “his” with“hers.”
Ten days after Peng was born, in 1958, his mother was forced tosave her job as a high school administrator by divorcing hisfather, who had been sent to a labor camp for criticizing thegovernment. The baby was given his mother’s family name, Peng, anda first name, Dajin, which means Great Leap Forward, a politicallycorrect tribute to the disastrous industrialization programintroduced that year by Mao Zedong.
After his father’s release from the camp, Peng and his mothervisited him, sometimes in secret, even after authoritiesreprimanded her for it. In 1978, as Deng Xiaoping liberalizedChina, his parents remarried. They eventually would join Peng inthe U.S.
His mother died in 2004. His father, who became a citizen, waskilled in December when a car hit him near the USF campus. In aeulogy, Peng said his father had instilled in him a passion forworld affairs -- and the ability to withstand pressure.
Peng graduated from Wuhan University and enrolled in what onecollege friend called the “Chinese spy university,” the Instituteof International Relations in Beijing. The school is run by China’sMinistry of State Security and trains many MSS intelligenceofficers, according to national-security consulting firm Stratfor.Peng chose the institute for its academic quality and didn’t becomea spy, he said.
Even so, he said, “I know a lot of people in the ministry.” Thedeputy director of American Research, Peng’s department at theBeijing school, was Geng Huichang, now China’s minister of statesecurity. Peng worked briefly for a research institute run by thesecurity ministry and then left for the U.S., where he earnedanother master’s from the University of Akron and a doctorate fromPrinceton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and InternationalAffairs.
The FBI kept tabs on Institute of International Relations alumniand interviewed Peng at Akron, he said. At Princeton, Peng got toknow agent Nicholas Abaid of the FBI’s Trenton office. Throughcontacts at Princeton, Abaid said, he identified Chinese studentswho might become helpful informants and cultivated them. Peng andAbaid often had lunch together and talked whenever Peng was aboutto return to China.
Mercurio would later call Abaid to ask about Peng. She “wasfeeling her way in the Chinese field,” Abaid said. Now retired,Abaid said he gleaned little of intelligence value from Peng.
When Abaid asked Peng to keep in touch with the FBI in Tampa,Peng politely refused, he said, hoping that he had seen the last ofU.S. intelligence agencies.
Collision CoursePeng left Princeton for an up-and-coming state school with palmtrees instead of ivy. Founded in 1956, USF has an enrollment of48,400 on three campuses, including 3,300 foreign students. Itprides itself on research and entrepreneurship and ranked among thetop 15 universities worldwide from 2010 through 2013 in U.S.patents granted.
It is also one of 20 schools designated by the U.S. governmentas Intelligence Community Centers of Academic Excellence. USF hasreceived $1.5 million to train students for certificates innational and competitive intelligence, and placed 40 interns withsecurity clearance at the U.S. State Department and DefenseIntelligence Agency, said Walter Andrusyszyn, who runs theuniversity’s program.
USF has made “a healthy transition from a university that wasanti-military, anti-intelligence to one that wants a partnership,”said Andrusyszyn, a former State Department official who served onthe White House’s National Security Council.
Dianne Mercurio would test that partnership.
Mercurio grew up in Mauldin, South Carolina, where she was amember of her high school’s cross-country, basketball and trackteams, winning a state championship at 800 meters. She majored inpsychology at the University of North Carolina, graduating in 1990.Delmer Howell, her high school track coach, said he wasn’tsurprised that Mercurio became an FBI agent. “She has the kind ofintelligence and perseverance they’re looking for,” he said.
While Mercurio forged her FBI career, Peng became a U.S. citizenand earned tenure at USF. He offered courses in Japanese business,U.S.-China relations, and other topics, and won an award foroutstanding teaching. He supplemented his USF salary by teachingmid-career business students in China, starting at NankaiUniversity in 2005. He impressed students in both countries byrattling off the population of any country they named.
Through his Chinese connections, Peng helped USF establish thefirst Confucius Institute in Florida, with Nankai as its partner.Hanban, an affiliate of China’s education ministry, operates almost450 of the institutes worldwide, including more than 90 in theU.S., each with a partner school in China.
An instrument of “soft power,” as former Chinese President HuJintao described them in a 2007 speech, the institutes, named forthe revered philosopher, have become academic lightning rods. InJune, the American Association of University Professors urgedschools to break from the institutes unless they could gain controlfrom Hanban over all academic matters. The faculty union said hostschools allow the institutes “to advance a state agenda” byrecruiting and controlling staff, choosing curriculum andrestricting debate. Later, the University of Chicago andPennsylvania State University cut ties with their Confuciuscenters.
Hanban officials in the U.S. and China didn’t respond toe-mailed questions.
As director at USF, Peng choreographed the institute’s openingceremonies in 2008, attended by the Chinese consul general fromHouston and featuring a lantern-festooned dinner, a magic act and aboat tour of Tampa Bay. Peng ramped up the institute’s courseofferings and opened a cultural center. Then, in 2009, his careercame crashing down, and the FBI re-entered his life, notnecessarily in that order.
BondageIn March of that year, Xiaonong Zhang, then the institute’sassociate director, complained to the university that Peng wasmismanaging the institute financially, requiring staff help withpersonal chores, and making inappropriate sexual advances andcomments to visiting Nankai professor Baojing Sang and otherwomen.
Shuhua Liu Kriesel, a former institute employee, also cameforward. She accused Peng of “leaning against her or placing hisarm around her while she was working,” and of asking her to buyclothes, wash dishes and fix meals for him, according to internalUSF reports describing the women’s complaints. Like Zhang, sheexpressed concern about Peng’s behavior toward Sang.
Peng said he treated employees well and that Kriesel, whom hehad recently dismissed, and Zhang had grudges against him. He andZhang had exchanged affectionate e-mails in 2007-2008, addressingeach other as Big Sea Elephant and Little Sea Elephant. Then theyhad a falling-out, both said.
Reached in China, Baojing Sang said Peng was a caring supervisorand didn’t bother her. She was unaware that Zhang and Kriesel namedher in their complaints, she said.
Peng was placed on leave from the institute, with pay, pendinginvestigation. The allegations were “actually a setup of the FBI”to “coerce me into spying for them,” Peng wrote in a 2012racial-discrimination complaint against the university.
The university dismissed the discrimination complaint. SeniorVice Provost Dwayne Smith said his office “has not one shred ofevidence that the FBI was in contact with the two employees thatbrought forth concerns about Dr. Peng’s conduct.”
Zhang and Kriesel said they had no contact with the FBI.University phone logs obtained through a public-records requestindicate the FBI’s Mercurio was in touch with someone at USF beforeKriesel and Zhang complained. They show 12 calls from Mercurio’smobile phone to one or more USF numbers in January and February2009. The university redacted the numbers, citing an exemption inFlorida public records law for disclosing anything that couldidentify a confidential informant.
At their first meeting, Mercurio told Peng she suspected theConfucius Institutes of spying, he said. Nationally, the FBI in2009 was looking at that possibility, but decided it lacked groundsfor a full investigation, according to a former federal official,who declined to be named because the inquiry never becamepublic.
Peng told Mercurio she was wrong. China would never use theConfucius Institutes for spying, for fear that the U.S. would findout and shut them down, he said.
Mercurio went on to set up an e-mail address -- [email protected] -- where Pengcould contact her, he said. Although the address doesn’t name her,she typically signed her e-mails “Dianne.”
She asked Peng to reconnect with former schoolmates andcolleagues at the institutes run by the Chinese security service sohe could gather information about China’s foreign-policystrategies, he said. She also wanted to know about his Chinesefriends working in the U.S., Hong Kong and Macau, he said.
Those were potentially dangerous requests, and not just forPeng. Asking faculty to work undercover jeopardizes the access toresearch and the personal safety of all scholars, said JamesMillward, a professor and China historian at GeorgetownUniversity’s School of Foreign Service.
Peng put Mercurio off, saying he wanted to wait for theuniversity’s verdict -- the first in a series of what he describedas delaying tactics.
His reluctance to spy on China was at least in part practical.“I would rather rot in a U.S. jail than a Chinese jail,” he oncetold his USF mentor, Harvey Nelsen, a former China analyst at theU.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.
USF closed the sexual-harassment investigation because Zhang andKriesel didn’t pursue their complaints. “I was tired of telling theunpleasant facts again and again,” Zhang said. But the schoolcontinued looking into Peng, and its findings jeopardized his joband his freedom.
In August 2009, while searching his university laptop, USF’saudit and compliance office found “a large cache of sexuallyrelated materials with disturbing thematic content,” according tothe school. USF Provost Ralph Wilcox removed Peng as ConfuciusInstitute director.
The material, which included images of women in bondage, relatedto his academic research, Peng said. “SM and naked pictures are avery important part of the Japanese culture, and you do not fullyunderstand Japanese culture without it,” he said.
Shadowed by the FBIUniversity auditors dug into Peng’s spending as well. He hadbilked USF out of $15,590 in entertainment and travel expenses,mainly by pretending that he was doing research or attendingconferences when he was on vacation or teaching at Chineseuniversities, they concluded.
They also said Peng wrote letters supporting immigrationapplications for Chinese students and teachers that overstatedstipends USF would pay them, boosting their chances of visaapproval.
Peng did go to the disputed conferences, and the sums hepromised students were subject to change, he said.
“It might be a bit right that I do not know the universityprocedures well and do not distinguish university and privatebusiness very well,” Peng wrote in a response to the Audit andCompliance report. “However, I do it much to the favor of theuniversity.”
Separately, Peng’s own department barred him from its graduateprograms for three years because he gave answers from past exams totwo Chinese students about to take the test. Peng said there was norule against doing so, and it was common in China.
All the while, the FBI appeared to be keeping track of theauditors’ investigation. Mercurio called the audit office threetimes on Oct. 20, 2009, including one call to the phone number ofKate Head, who conducted the Confucius Institute review. A draft ofthe report was sent to Peng on Nov. 10. Two days later, two callswere placed from Head’s phone to Mercurio. Head declined tocomment.
Mercurio and another FBI agent took Peng to lunch on Nov. 17 anddiscussed the Audit and Compliance report, e-mails show. The nextday, Peng appealed to Mercurio.
“If the final report is very bad and I am severely punished, Iwill be in a very weak position to help you because I will surelylose my reputation in China,” Peng wrote to the snowbox Yahooaddress. “If you can help me and my status and reputation are kept,I promise I can do a lot for you.”
“There probably isn’t much I can do,” she responded. “However,let me know your status, and if I can help you, I will.”
According to Peng, Mercurio suggested he consider a ventureoutside academia, running a front company that the FBI wouldestablish and fund. Peng said he persuaded her it wouldn’t workbecause he needed affiliation with USF and the Confucius Instituteor he couldn’t do what the FBI wanted -- get closer to Chinesegovernment officials. The bureau regarded the institutes as “verygood cover,” he said.
USF police called Mercurio’s office twice on Dec. 17, 2009; oneconversation lasted more than 14 minutes. The final Audit andCompliance report came out on Jan. 28, 2010. It said auditors hadreferred Peng’s alleged theft of public funds and immigration fraudto university police. Mercurio talked to USF police for 12 minutesthat day, according to phone records.
“It is my understanding that she is asking USF police to not doanything with their case until she can assess your situation,”Peng’s criminal lawyer, Stephen Romine, wrote to Peng on Feb. 17,after speaking with Mercurio.
‘We Are Dependent on Her’University officials were appalled by the audit report.President Judy Genshaft, General Counsel Steven Prevaux and ProvostWilcox “wanted to put you in jail for what is in the Head report,”Steven Wenzel, Peng’s civil lawyer and a former USF generalcounsel, told him later by e-mail.
In early March, Mercurio met with Peng and Romine, according toe-mails. They agreed that Peng would cooperate with the FBI on“national security issues,” and Mercurio would advocate for himwith the university, Peng said.
Periodically, Wenzel updated him on the progress of “ourfriends,” the lawyer’s euphemism for the FBI. After a faculty panelwas convened to review Peng’s case, Wenzel told Peng that “ourfriends and I are working to get this thing stopped but that istaking longer than I had hoped.”
Mercurio is “the only one to get USF to budge,” Wenzel wrotePeng in August 2010. “We are dependent on her.”
As Mercurio negotiated with the school, she debriefed Peng abouthis trips to China and pressed for information about Tampa’sChinese community. She sought his advice on how to induce otherChinese-Americans, including professors and businessmen, tocooperate with the bureau, he said. They would meet, sometimes withother FBI agents, far enough from the USF campus that passers-bywouldn’t recognize Peng, typically at an Olive Garden or airporthotel.
Perhaps stroking his ego, Mercurio assured him that his insightswould go directly to President Barack Obama, Peng said. Peng saidhe offered his views on China’s Taiwan policy and other generaltopics but avoided names and specifics as much as possible. Whilerejecting the FBI’s request to take a lie detector test, heaccepted several thousand dollars for China travel, he said.
“I am willing to serve my country utilizing my special capacityand resources. But I have to be treated in an honorable and fairway,” he e-mailed Mercurio on Aug. 11, 2010. He told her it was“impossible for me to make more concessions. Even if you and USFcan twist my arms and force me into a more unfair deal, it is goingto hurt our common course in the long run. Please let USF not tomistreat me further.”
Mercurio lashed back. “Your assistance to my office is notconsidered substantial, only minimal at this point,” she wrote.“Therefore, understand that I have stuck my neck out for you thusfar, knowing that substantial assistance may never happen. A thankyou, instead of a list of demands, would be nice for a change.”
EndgameOn Aug. 24, 2010, Peng and the university settled theallegations against him. It fined him $10,000 and suspended himfrom December 2010 to December 2011 without pay, preserving histenure, which the school had threatened to revoke.
Asked if the FBI helped save Peng’s job, Wenzel said, “That’sabout right.”
Peng said FBI agents told him that they were able to influencethe university on his behalf because the school was grateful forthe bureau’s work on a 2003 indictment of USF professor SamiAl-Arian. He would later plead guilty to conspiring to fund aPalestinian terrorist group. USF had called off a deal to buy outAl-Arian for almost $1 million, possibly because it was expectingthe indictment, said Robert McKee, his lawyer at the time.
The FBI had no effect on Peng’s punishment, universityspokeswoman Lara Wade-Martinez said. USF consistently told the FBIit would “make its own determination” regarding Peng, whosediscipline was appropriate and consistent with past practice, shesaid in a statement. USF’s Genshaft and Wilcox declined tocomment.
Peng wasn’t charged criminally, even though USF Police DetectiveJeff Collins said in an interview that there was enough evidence todo so. The school police didn’t pursue charges because Peng and theuniversity reached a settlement, Wade-Martinez said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement closed an investigationinto Peng’s alleged falsifying of visa documents without takingaction, according to Tamara Spicer, spokeswoman for the agency’sTampa office.
After the settlement, Mercurio unsuccessfully prodded theuniversity to facilitate Peng’s access to Chinese officials,e-mails show. Mercurio and an agent of the Central IntelligenceAgency went to see Karen Holbrook, then a USF senior vicepresident, to vouch for Peng, Holbrook said. Mercurio calledHolbrook’s office eight times from Oct. 15 to Dec. 1, 2010. CIAspokesman Ryan Trapani declined to comment on Peng’s case and saidthe agency “has developed a strong relationship with academia.”
In 2011, Nankai University withdrew from the Confucius Institutepartnership, citing threatening e-mails it received from anonymous“overseas Chinese” in Tampa. The e-mails said Peng had “made greatsacrifices for the motherland” yet was being persecuted by USF,Nankai and the FBI. Nankai said Peng wrote them himself, which hedenied. USF blamed Peng and suspended him again, this time for twoyears without pay, beginning in June 2013.
While waiting for his suspension to end in August, Peng earns aliving by teaching in China. Although suicide was on his mind whenMercurio knocked on his door, he said he decided to emulate hisfather and persevere through adversity. He hopes to start a Chinesebusiness center for U.S. universities.
Peng has largely given up scholarly research. With hisreputation in tatters, nobody would publish his work anyway, hesaid. He presents his travails as a case study in U.S.-Sinomisunderstanding to his classes in China.
In response to his second suspension, Peng filed a grievanceaccusing USF of retaliating against him for refusing to spy onChina. It was “by far the most exotic case we’ve ever had,” saidRobert Welker, the faculty union’s negotiator. USF rejected hisgrievance and an appeal.
Senior Vice Provost Smith had warned union leaders that thegovernment had enough evidence to put Peng in prison for 20 years,said Welker and Paul Terry, then union president. How did he knowthat? Smith’s comment was “speculative,” said Wade-Martinez, theschool spokeswoman, because he “was never in communication with theFBI.”
Terry said he couldn’t understand why USF hadn’t fired Peng, butsuspected the school was worried that its dealings with the FBIwould become public if he were dismissed. Terry recalled telling acolleague at the time that Peng “must have something on theuniversity.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Daniel Golden in Bostonat [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Gary Putka [email protected]eter Jeffrey at [email protected] CecileDaur, Lisa Wolfson
eter Jeffrey at [email protected] CecileDaur, Lisa Wolfson