Far Eastern Economic Review
Letter to the Editor
February 17, 2000

Profiles
A New McCarthyism? [Jan. 13] misstated my testimony before the Asian Pacific American Caucus of the United States Congress in October. It does your readers a disservice by not only misinforming them on the facts, but also leading them to conclude that it is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not the People's Republic of China, that is the cause of the discomfort currently experienced by many Americans of Chinese ancestry.

In my testimony, I pointed out that the most defining feature of China's intelligence operations in the U.S. is its obsessive reliance on targeting Chinese-Americans on the basis of ethnicity, only rarely trying to develop comparable relationships with others. Observers rightly conclude that China applies a racial profile in its intelligence recruitment operations in the U.S. What I went on to say very strenuously, however, was that the FBI does not use racial profiling in its investigations of Chinese intelligence efforts. The FBI does make use of profiles, but they are based on observed Chinese intelligence practices, not based on ethnic origin.

When the FBI detects Chinese intelligence interest in a Chinese-American, it is because it is investigating observed activities. It is the activities that trigger investigative interest, not ancestry. The FBI, in my experience, has no interest in anyone until it detects a foreign intelligence interest in the individual. There is nothing improper here; it is the mission of counterintelligence to follow an intelligence adversary's activities wherever they lead.

Let me also add that ethnic profiling, as a means of predicting an individual's likelihood of becoming involved in covert intelligence, does not work. It doesn't work for China, and it certainly doesn't work for the FBI. The reason China bases its recruitment operations on ethnic profiling is because it is trying to sell Chinese-Americans on the notion that they have a special obligation to help their ancestral land. In my opinion, China adopted this strategy not because it has reason to think that Americans of Chinese heritage are burdened with an "espionage gene," but simply because that is the particular "sales approach" it uses. What the FBI and other U.S. counterintelligence officials have to deal with, at its heart, is just a sort of sales campaign, not an insidious cancer caused by some imaginary ethnic flaw.