Pattern of China Links Emerging in Spy Cases : Intelligence Experts Say That Door Opened to Trade With Peking Also Invites Espionage Risk

One aspect of the November parade of espionage cases is raising eyebrows among some U.S. intelligence experts: three of the four persons arrested on spying-related charges have been linked to the People’s Republic of China.

The arrests, while coincidental, underline what a growing body of experts believes is an increasingly widespread--and underrated--espionage network being run by the Communist Chinese--America’s newfound trading ally.

Together, the cases reinforce what one official calls a “generalized unease” about Chinese espionage operations here--operations so foreign to conventional Western tenets of snooping that American experts are uncertain how many Chinese spy agencies exist, how they operate and even how much we should try to keep secret from them.

Gambling for Influence

Those quandaries have become even more imponderable in recent years, as the United States opened its corporate, diplomatic and academic doors to China in a calculated gamble aimed at wooing it away from belligerence and out of the Soviet sphere of influence.

Moreover, the very success of that gamble has muddied notions of the sort of information that America should, and can, withhold without damaging its friendship with Peking.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dave Durenberger (R-Minn.) and Vice Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) alluded to those woes in October, when they warned that “there is clear evidence of clandestine intelligence operations by the Chinese in the United States” despite close U.S.-Chinese ties.

“The espionage cases of the last two years have involved billions of dollars of actual and potential damage to U.S. military programs,” the two said in testimony before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. “The problem is compounded by the vast numbers of Chinese officials and visitors in the U.S.”

That brief reference generally passed unheeded, however, until FBI agents arrested CIA translator Larry Wu-tai Chin and Naval Investigative Service analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard and his wife, Anne L. Henderson-Pollard, in mid-November. (The other suspect arrested in November was Ronald W. Pelton, charged with spying for the Soviets).

It later was alleged that Chin, wreaking what one intelligence official called a “goddamn disaster” on the United States, photographed and sold to Peking virtually all of the top-secret reports on Asia produced by American experts for two decades.

The FBI found in the Pollards’ possession top-secret documents, including invaluable American assessments of Chinese spying operations here that Henderson-Pollard reportedly planned to offer the Chinese during a self-styled “presentation” at their embassy in Washington. Pollard himself has been accused of spying for Israel.

Experts say privately that the arrests were a splash of cold water even to U.S. officials who have been upgrading their view of China’s intelligence abilities for some time.

“We’ve had, from time to time, a few other (espionage) cases involving the Chinese--a handful,” said George Carver, a former top CIA official now at the Georgetown Institute for Strategic and International Studies. “And I think we’ve got to expect more.”

Coping with more spies would be a simpler matter if mainland China were a more Western kind of foe, such as the Soviet Union, or even if it were the implacable Oriental enemy of a decade ago. But it is not an easy matter with the China of today--a seeming friend whose intentions the United States does not fully trust, and whose behavior remains largely foreign.

Unlike the CIA or the Soviet KGB, said current and former U.S. experts on Chinese intelligence, Peking may operate as many as six or seven offices devoted to foreign espionage. Some may not appear on bureaucratic flow charts, but are outgrowths of networks operated by individual Chinese officials.

Several Operations Likely

“Whatever the Chinese are doing here, it certainly will be done in a Chinese fashion, which places great emphasis on personal relations,” said one top expert who refused to be identified. “One should not think there is simply one Chinese operation here. There could easily be several, and they could be extensions of different powerful individuals.”

If Chinese history proves any yardstick, those operations likely began decades ago with deliberate deceptions that may only now be paying off. Stories of loyal agents who penetrated enemy ranks and disguised themselves for years are almost mythical in Chinese culture.

The story of Chin--who is alleged in court records to have been recruited by the Chinese Communists in 1942--a full seven years before the People’s Republic existed--is one example that clearly predates the decade-old warming trend between the U.S. and China. Intelligence sources say that undoubtedly there are others still in the government, although the United States has failed until recently to mount successful counterintelligence operations to mop them up.

The United States hopes to make it harder for Soviet and Warsaw Pact nations to recruit “moles” and conduct other clandestine operations by reducing the numbers of diplomats and other foreign nationals allowed here and restricting the travel freedoms of those who remain. But no such opportunity exists with the Chinese, whose numbers here have grown to the point where thorough policing is impossible.

The number of U.S. entry visas granted annually to Chinese grew fivefold, to nearly 29,000, between fiscal 1979 and fiscal 1984, and the increase in some sensitive categories--such as business and academic visiting permits--has been explosive.

More Visas for Chinese

The rate of entry for interns and professionals grew ninefold during that period, and the largest single category--business visas--leaped from 2,821 to 12,134. The Commerce Department says the number of Chinese corporations and joint ventures with U.S. offices has grown during the same period, from a handful to nearly 40. By one estimate, 150 Chinese trade delegations visit the United States in an average month.

The State Department now estimates that there are 15,000 to 17,000 Chinese students in all 50 of the United States, and they are concentrated in some of the nation’s most prestigious university laboratories and classrooms.

According to Carver and a second private expert, some of the Chinese are actually performing unclassified work on Defense Department research grants in fields such as computer software and high-energy physics.

By comparison, the most visible American presence--the Chinese diplomatic corps--roughly doubled in number from 1979 to 1984, to a modest 643 people.

Current American officials are extremely reluctant to talk about the presumed espionage activities of any of those visitors, especially while the bruises from the Chin and Pollard arrests are fresh.

Would Be ‘Foolish’

But Carver, for one, says it would be “foolish” to presume that many businessmen and academicians do not have at least a passing interest in espionage. “Anybody who thinks they’re not going to go back and report to the public security bureau what they’ve seen,” he said, “is living in cuckooland.” And it is apparent that many of the academic posts held by Chinese in the United States have long-term military applications in Peking.

There is also some evidence that the Chinese, like other friendly and hostile nations, have occasionally smuggled sensitive U.S. military equipment and technologies out of this country or out of friendly nations.

In a letter being sent to President Reagan, Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) suggested that the Chinese have violated export-control laws to ferret out “sensitive military equipment from the U.S. to China in past years, including equipment that may have been used at the Chinese nuclear test site in Lop Nor.”

“I think it will be important for the U.S. to monitor very carefully the corporations that the Chinese are establishing on their own or on a joint-venture basis in the U.S.,” said Michel Oksenberg, a China expert in the Jimmy Carter Administration who now is a political science professor at Michigan State University. “There are several companies in areas of high technology--computers, technologies with dual uses--and I think that will be very, very important to look at it carefully.”

Oksenberg and many others note, however, that the very access that the Chinese apparently exploit for espionage purposes in the United States is a direct--and anticipated--consequence of American efforts to establish trade and military ties with its old enemy.

The United States faces a potential security threat from the Chinese, who hold radically different ideas about nuclear proliferation and other strategic concerns beyond the gulfs that separate the two nations’ political systems. But it is part of the calculation of risk, experts say, that some espionage losses are worth the benefits of a lasting alliance.

‘A Matter of Concern’

According to Carver, who served in the Richard M. Nixon Administration, which first opened those doors to China, the risk of increased espionage “was certainly a matter of concern” at the time.

“But you have to be realistic,” he said. “We and China had one piece of common ground: we both detested the Soviet Union. As long as (the Chinese see) the Soviets as their greatest threat, they were willing to make an alliance with us, and still are.”