The friendly Mr Wu
CHINA
The friendly Mr Wu
The weakest link in America’s national security may not be foreign technology but its own people. Mara Hvistendahl traces the story of the single mother who sold out to China
When Candace Claiborne arrived in Beijing in November 2009 to work for the us State Department, her employer was already on edge. The American embassy had just moved from a building at the heart of the city’s diplomatic district to a ten-acre walled compound farther from the centre, a $434m fortress that projected both power and fear. The complex featured shatterproof glass, multiple checkpoints and a moat. To prevent Chinese agents from bugging offices, whole sections of the building had been shipped in from America, a tactic used previously when several floors of the us embassy in Moscow had to be razed following a breach in the 1980s. Even with all the safeguards, it turned out that two American construction workers had passed details about the building to China’s intelligence services. The news rattled policymakers in Washington, dc, who were watching China’s rapid economic and political rise with trepidation. The work environment that Claiborne would inhabit for the next three years included frequent security briefings and warnings about the cunning of China’s intelligence services. “I always tell the men, ‘Go look in the mirror. No beautiful woman, attractive woman, goes up to 50-year-old men,’” said one State Department official.
Though the embassy’s security staff had much to worry about, Claiborne was not an obvious source of concern. A 53-year-old mother of four grown children, Claiborne had the poise and manner of someone used to disciplined work. As a young woman she had dreamed of becoming a ballerina, and worked toward this goal with such dedication that she was admitted to the prestigious Washington School of Ballet. She came from a family committed to service – one brother went into the air force and another into the fbi– but Claiborne decided to follow her dream, and packed up her leotards to move to New York. She had some small victories, but the dance world was cut-throat and sustained success eluded her. After an ill-fated marriage, Claiborne ended up following her siblings into the family business. She became one of the hundreds of unlauded but vital administrators trained by the State Department to keep diplomats’ calendars, prepare agendas for meetings and take notes. Claiborne worked in the part of the embassy that handled classified information, and had top-secret security clearance.
She had lived in Beijing on an earlier tour, following it up with a posting to Shanghai. Normally, the State Department caps employees at two tours in a single country and additional stints require a special waiver. The department’s intelligence officers worry that if a person spends too long in one place, he or she might adopt a casual attitude toward potential security threats. But it was hard to persuade people to go to China, and Claiborne, who didn’t have so much as a parking ticket to her name, passed her security reviews easily. She did have one glaring vulnerability, however, which the State Department apparently overlooked.
As she prepared for her move back to Beijing, Claiborne was worried about Jamal, a pseudonym used here for a man described in court documents only as “Co-Conspirator A”. Excerpts from their communications make it clear that Claiborne and Jamal were close. He lived with her at times and often depended on her for money. Their messages and phone calls hint at a relationship marked by moments of petulance and immaturity on one side, and indulgence and anxiety on the other. In “Chinese Communist Espionage”, a book published last year, Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil write that Co-Conspirator A is Claiborne’s son. (Claiborne did not respond to an interview request sent to her prison. Her lawyer declined to be interviewed about the case and did not reply to an invitation to comment on Claiborne’s behalf. Jamal did not respond to a request for an interview or comment on the story.)
Jamal had recently graduated from Salisbury University in Maryland and was living in Washington, dc, doing a string of entry-level jobs. A skilled painter, he wanted to become a fashion designer but as court documents later revealed, he had debts from university and no money to pay for further study. Claiborne was also financially stretched. But she saw a solution.
Jamal had accompanied Claiborne on her first tour of Beijing, enrolling at an international high school. He had enjoyed living in China, and he and Claiborne had befriended a number of local Chinese. State Department employees are required to report all recurring contacts with foreign nationals, and few of them manage to make lasting friendships with locals. It is unclear how Claiborne first met a middle-aged man with babyish cheeks and a slight paunch referred to here as Mr Wu (court records withhold his real name). Mr Wu owned an import-export company and spa in Shanghai. There is no indication that he and Claiborne were romantically involved, but they were familiar enough for Claiborne to write to him before her third tour in Beijing asking whether Jamal might be able to continue his studies in China: “He needs a place to stay and he needs possible airfare…any suggestions?”
We don’t know exactly what Claiborne intended by her request. She may have been asking for an introduction to a workplace or a school, rather than cash. In any case, Mr Wu replied saying he would help. As Claiborne set herself up in Beijing, Mr Wu explored various options for Jamal, who was still in America, to study or work in China. When Jamal wanted beads a few months later, Mr Wu sent them to him. Mr Wu was so helpful that, over time, Claiborne became ever more dependent on him. Eventually his real purpose would be uncovered by American investigators: Mr Wu was a Chinese government spy.
Media coverage has recently homed in on the possibility that China’s advanced software could be exported around the world, potentially giving the Chinese state back doors into foreign telecommunications networks. But the Claiborne case illustrates that threats to America’s security can take far humbler forms. When her case came before a judge in 2017, it hit the headlines for a few days and was then quickly forgotten. She was ultimately convicted of defrauding the American government, a relatively light offence compared with some of the more attention-grabbing cases involving Chinese espionage. But intelligence experts in America viewed Claiborne’s case with alarm. “What it illustrates is that the Chinese intelligence services will dedicate years and significant resources to recruit even an office-management specialist,” said Ryan Gaynor, a supervisory special agent in the fbi, who investigated Claiborne’s case.
Claiborne left an extensive trail of communications with her Chinese contacts and her story offers unusually detailed insights into the patience and guile of Chinese intelligence services, challenging received wisdom about Chinese espionage. At the heart of the case is a critical question: how did an ordinary, hard-working woman sent to do public service abroad end up in the thrall of an enemy agent?
Claiborne grew up in Maryland, in a loving African-American family, the youngest of seven children. When she eventually relinquished her childhood dream of becoming a ballerina, she turned in a different direction: she married a devout Muslim, converted to Islam and had four children. Friends know little about this period of her life. One said that Claiborne settled with her then-husband in New York state in a community of members of the Nation of Islam, an African-American religious organisation.
When the marriage ended some years later, her exit was hurried and undignified. She stuffed her belongings into bin bags and moved to Baltimore. “She called our parents and asked if she could come home to start her life over,” her brother Kevin wrote in a letter to the court. From a world of tutus and pointe shoes, he said, she would “begin reconstructing a life with no appreciable job skills, no work experience, no professional education”.
She got a break when she was offered a low-level job with the us Comptroller of the Currency, a banking watchdog. She eventually moved to Washington, dc, and bought a duplex in a middle-class area near Howard University. A pillar of her community, Claiborne babysat for family members, organised outings to museums and volunteered to feed the homeless. Only rarely, at tai chi or yoga classes, did she devote time to herself.
The family home was sparse but orderly and stable. “There was very little comfortable furniture but there was a long study table and a computer for use by the children,” a former us civil servant who mentored one of her sons wrote in a letter to the court. Ensuring a good education for her children became Claiborne’s new dream, according to her brother, and she pursued it with the same dedication she had shown as a ballet dancer, scouring the internet for cheap or free online courses. But sending her children to college would require real money. Her first shot at getting it came in 1999, with a steady job at the State Department.
The State Department has a famously competitive entry process for foreign-service officers. Administrative jobs are less prestigious but dependable. Staff change posts every two to three years – housing and travel allowances make the frequent moves worthwhile. To boost her salary and save up for her children’s education, Claiborne volunteered for hardship postings: jobs in countries where conditions were tough, that pay an additional 15-35%. Typically, employees do one or two before requesting less arduous locations. Claiborne would go on to do five in a row, including Baghdad.
The first of these was in Beijing, which qualified as a hardship station because the Chinese government was less than friendly and pollutants gave the air the consistency of pea soup. Claiborne moved there in 2000, following it up with a post in Shanghai in 2003. At some point during these tours she met Mr Wu, who spoke good English, and by 2007 they were in regular email contact.
China is governed by a network of complex exchanges in which favours are tendered as currency, and Westerners living there frequently encounter businesspeople who offer unsolicited assistance. “As a foreigner in China, I was often treated to generous opportunities and left wondering what motivated the generosity,” said Sean Dahlen, who taught Claiborne yoga in China and struck up a friendship with her. “More often than not, it was harmless expressions of friendship. Sometimes it was clear later that they wanted something in return.” He recalled that Claiborne had a “tangible” kindness.
There is no evidence in the court papers that Mr Wu asked Claiborne for anything during the early years of their friendship. But if she ever thought that he was merely a benevolent businessman, it would have been clear to her by 2011 that there was more to the story. According to the court papers, in April of that year, Claiborne received a transfer for $2,480 from a Hong Kong company called Delta Shipping Co Ltd, along with a note saying the money was for Jamal. She didn’t report it. The following month, Chinese officials flew to America to meet Joe Biden, the vice-president, and Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, for the us-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, a series of high-level meetings between the two countries. After the summit, Mr Wu asked Claiborne for the State Department’s internal assessment of the dialogue. In particular, he wanted to know what the United States might do if China didn’t stick to the agreed timetable for revaluing the yuan.
Claiborne sent him a response with general information, some apparently drawn from public sources. “Was the stuff I sent useful?” she later asked Mr Wu by email.
“It is useful but it is also on the internet,” he responded dryly. “What they are looking for is what they cannot find on the internet.”
This was a crucial turning point, said Robert David Booth, a former deputy-director of counterintelligence for the State Department and author of “State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies, and Lies”. “The light had to go on,” he said. “I don’t care how naive she was and what she was trying to do. She finally had to stop deluding herself.”
The incident did apparently spook her. When Mr Wu next wrote to Claiborne asking if she had anything else for him, she sent him away. “To tell you the truth, I really don’t want to spend time on this kind of stuff,” she wrote. “I’m sorry, I don’t have the time or the energy.”
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