- SACRAMENTO -- As far as can
be told, former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Lok Lau may be a
genuine American hero, the first agent in FBI history to penetrate the
top levels of the Chinese government. But the US Department of Justice
is doing everything in its power - and some things that aren't - to prevent
even the tiniest detail of Lau's highly classified work from becoming public.
-
- As far as the Justice Department is concerned, Lau is
nothing more than a lying, thieving malcontent who was fired for shoplifting
$15 worth of merchandise from a California supermarket. And that's the
way the US government would like to keep it.
-
- The full truth about Lok Lau and his six-year-long foreign-counterintelligence
mission may never be known. But judging from information that briefly became
public as a result of an employment-discrimination suit Lau filed against
the FBI - and the Justice Department's frantic efforts to purge the public
record of what it claims were national-security secrets "illegally"
divulged by Lau and his lawyers - the 46-year-old Singapore native was
involved in some very heavy, very clandestine and very dangerous work inside
the People's Republic of China, on behalf of US intelligence, for years.
-
- It is also clear that once Lau's highly praised undercover
assignment was completed, the FBI decided he was a liability and began
a concerted effort to get rid of him, which it eventually did.
-
- Why the FBI turned with such vengeance against an agent
its own director had personally commended for heroism is not known, but
it wasn't because Lok Lau wasn't good at his job. If anything, his problem
might have been that he was too good at it.
-
- That Lau - who worked for the FBI as a special agent
(SA) from 1986 until 2000 - is the possessor of powerful secrets is beyond
dispute; it is a matter that has troubled the FBI for some years, records
show. Lau was considered so hot that in 1998 the FBI decided it could never
put him on a witness stand because of "the extremely sensitive nature
of SA Lau's assignment".
-
- A year later, as the Bureau contemplated firing Lau,
FBI headquarters asked its National Security Division in a secret memo
"to conduct an additional evaluation of the damage that might result
if, as seems likely, the circumstances of this Agent's career are publically
[sic] disclosed". One option the memo raised was to buy Lau's silence
with "a settlement that would preclude litigation and require confidentiality
on the part of the Agent and his attorneys". The FBI's Office of Professional
Responsibility agreed. "Significant damage would be done if information
related to his [deleted] work were revealed," a 1999 memo stated.
"It may be in the best interest of the FBI to avoid litigation if
possible."
-
- The results of the FBI's damage estimate are still secret
and Lau is forbidden by law to speak of his mission, which is also still
classified. But in 2000 Lau was fired and has since been publicly branded
by the Justice Department as a liar and a thief. Though the shoplifting
charge was eventually dismissed for insufficient evidence, the FBI argued
that Lau had been dishonest and was therefore unworthy of being an FBI
agent. After losing his US$81,000-a-year job, Lau sued the FBI, claiming
racial discrimination, and the case dragged through the court system unnoticed
for more than a year.
-
- In mid-October, however, a reporter for the San Antonio
Business Journal called the US Attorney's Office in Sacramento and asked
for a comment on a declaration Lau had made in the case. Within days, the
Justice Department stormed into federal court, demanded a private meeting
with the judge, and persuaded him on national-security grounds to black
out every mention of Lau's work in China, both from his declaration and
in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the League of United Latin American
Citizens, a Texas anti-discrimination group.
-
- Then it sought the judge's permission to seize any computers
that might have a copy of Lau's secrets on their hard drives - and to erase
them. That order, which was declined, was written broadly enough to have
covered not only the computers used by Lau and his lawyers, but those of
a Texas journalist covering the Lau story, the League of United Latin American
Citizens, and the California First Amendment Coalition, a newspaper-industry
advocacy group that had publicized the Justice Department's strange actions.
-
- "What's extraordinary is that the government, in
this case, succeeded in sealing something that had been on the public record
for three weeks," said Terry Francke, the First Amendment Coalition's
general counsel.
-
- Though the Justice Department had asked for and been
denied permission to seize all paper copies of Lau's declaration from anyone
who had it, Lau's lawyers and his support group in Texas all received phone
calls from the Sacramento US Attorney's Office asking for the papers back.
Lau's lawyers complied; the Texas anti-discrimination group refused.
-
- "I said show me a court order," said Julie
Marquez, who handles criminal-justice issues for the San Antonio-based
organization. "Even though the judge specifically told them they couldn't
go out and get these papers, they were still calling people up and telling
them to give them back."
-
- The First Amendment Coalition posted uncensored copies
of those documents on its website, prompting the Justice Department to
return to court and ask for an electronic search-and-destroy order. And,
coincidentally, while all of this was going on, the offices of Lau's psychologist
were burglarized and computer equipment was taken.
-
- The obvious question is: What is so explosive about Agent
Lau's work that, despite the passage of a dozen years, its merest mention
causes the Justice Department to react so stridently?
-
- Francke and others believe the FBI may be trying to conceal
the role it played in a foreign intelligence operation, because Lau's activities
in China were either illegal or unauthorized. While it is true that the
FBI is confined by law to domestic - not foreign - counterintelligence,
there is one specific instance in which it is perfectly legal for FBI agents
to be used as international spies: when it's being done "in coordination
with the CIA". President Ronald Reagan authorized that in the early
1980s in an executive order, 12333, which is still in effect today. That
means Lau's mission was either illegal or it was sanctioned by the Central
Intelligence Agency.
-
- Lau says he doesn't know, nor does it matter to him.
"You're talking to one of the footsoldiers here. I was out on the
street all the time. My assumption is that what I was doing was legal.
When the director of the FBI flies out to see you and personally shakes
your hand for something you've done, then yeah, my assumption is that this
was all approved."
-
- Prior to becoming an FBI agent, Lau had been a CIA operative,
spying on and occasionally recruiting Chinese students at the University
of Michigan in the early 1980s. "A former Bureau guy who was working
for the CIA spotted me," recalled Lau, who was a communications major
and fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese. "They recruited me right on
campus ... because I could speak the language."
-
- In 1984, he was hired as an FBI "asset", working
as a paid informant and operative in foreign-counterintelligence investigations.
Within months, he scored a major coup. "In July 1984, I was highly
commended by my FBI and CIA handlers for having recruited a valuable asset
for the US intelligence community," Lau wrote in a now-classified
portion of his court declaration. A year later he cracked another big case,
one that reportedly involved the exposure of a Chinese double agent. Believing
he had more than proved his worth to the FBI, Lau requested admission to
the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. The Bureau demurred. But when Lau
threatened to quit and take a job with the Seattle Police Department, a
spot was quickly found in the May 1986 training class, and Lau entered
the FBI Academy to begin the process of becoming a full-fledged FBI agent.
-
- At the time Lau was recruited, the Bureau was reeling
over the discovery of several Chinese moles within its walls. "There
had been a number of cases, and the feeling inside the FBI was that if
they were going to do this to us, then we were going to do something back
to them, like put someone inside their intelligence service," said
a former law-enforcement official familiar with Lau's work.
-
- All Lau would say on that score was that he "was
supposed to avenge the failings of the intelligence community".
-
- John Vasquez, the FBI's chief of training and research
at the time Lau attended the academy, knew Lau as a student and said in
a court filing that he was stunned to discover that the Bureau - halfway
through Lau's training - had already assigned him to work on an undercover
foreign-counterintelligence operation, something that struck the longtime
FBI man as extraordinary. Rookie FBI agents typically wait years before
they are deemed ready for undercover work. "The placement of an agent
[into an undercover operation] right out of the academy is very unusual,"
Vasquez said. "Mr Lau had never seen a case file, worked a case, arrested
anyone ... No one had ever taken an undercover assignment right out of
the academy as Mr Lau did, before he was even an agent." Vasquez,
who followed Lau's career, concluded that Lau "was probably recruited
by the FBI for a specific operation".
-
- After graduation, Lau was assigned to the Chicago FBI
office, which houses one of the Bureau's most active foreign-counterintelligence
centers, and he began working espionage cases undercover. He asked his
bosses to tell him how much danger he was in. "'Will I get my tail
shot off or will I get, you know, killed?' I asked [about] all the dangerous
scenarios. Do you know what the answer was, ladies and gentlemen?"
Lau asked an FBI security committee in 2000. "Nobody knew, because
nobody had ever done it before ... I was told that I was the second FBI
agent in history then, back in 1986, to attempt this project."
-
- In five years, he saw the inside of the FBI's office
once. He was living another life, that of a Chinese businessman and an
associate of Chinese organized-crime figures. He was so far undercover
that other FBI agents placed him under surveillance.
-
- "Then they'd get all pissed off because nobody had
bothered to tell them and they wasted all this manpower doing surveillance
of me," Lau recalled. "Most of the time the right hand didn't
know what the left hand was doing."
-
- "Mr Lau was in deep cover. Mr Lau did not go home
at night. He did not see his family," former FBI training official
Vasquez said. "Mr Lau's credentials and badge were in the vault in
the field office. He did not get a chance to see or hold his badge. When
I visited him, he would ask to see and hold my badge."
-
- According to the statements the Justice Department struck
from the public record as secret - which seems to confirm their veracity
- Lau twice went overseas, once in November 1987 and again in September
1989, as an undercover FBI agent. Prior to his first trip overseas, he
was betrayed by a high-level FBI asset. The country he revisited in the
fall of 1989 was then in turmoil, which accurately describes China at the
time. Also stated was the fact that he had briefed CIA agents on his area
of expertise, which happens to be China.
-
- "I don't think there's much mystery left as to which
country Lau was working in," newspaper lawyer Francke said jokingly.
"It doesn't sound like he was in Denmark."
-
- "During November of 1987, the historic trip turned
out to be very stressful, with subjects giving me enhanced scrutiny during
the visit, personnel armed with machine-guns were a constant reminder to
me of my fate if something went wrong," Lau wrote in one section that
was deemed classified. Because Lau was in China posing as a businessman
instead of a diplomat, which is the typical cover used by CIA agents, he
had no diplomatic immunity to spying charges. If caught, he would have
been imprisoned or executed, not merely deported.
-
- The month-long trip was a success, Lau said in another
classified section, "and my accomplishments had exceeded all expectations.
The skeptics made me undergo an extensive polygraph test to ascertain my
loyalty and accomplishments."
-
- According to the Justice Department, those bits of information
are state secrets because they have been "deemed to describe intelligence
methods and activities that are used in the FBI's present intelligence,
counterintelligence and count-terrorism investigations". They are
such important secrets that even the lawyer defending the FBI against Lau's
lawsuit, assistant US attorney Kristin Horn, isn't allowed to know them.
"I don't have a security clearance high enough," she explained.
-
- Declassified FBI documents suggest that by 1991, Lau
was deep inside the Chinese diplomatic community. In his performance review
for that year, Lau's supervisor wrote: "SA LAU continues working in
an undercover capacity in a complex, sensitive investigation of a major
criteria country diplomatic establishment. He has succeeded in becoming
a trusted confidant of numerous subjects of investigation and has also
penetrated the 'inner circle' of the subject community. As a result, he
obtains singular and sensitive information ..."
-
- Lau's undercover mission was so productive, court records
show, that then-FBI director William Sessions flew to Chicago in January
1988 to commend Lau personally and award him a bonus check for his work.
One of his supervisors, former top FBI official Michael Waguespack - whose
forte was Soviet intelligence and Chinese industrial espionage - described
Lau's work in a 1992 report as an "exceptional performance".
-
- Asked why he thinks the FBI wants to keep his highly
lauded achievements secret after so many years, Lau replied that in the
world of counterintelligence, there is often no such thing as "too"
long ago. "Counterintelligence work takes time to produce results.
It is like wine sometimes. The longer it ages," he said, "the
more valuable it becomes." Sometimes, Lau suggested, double agents
recruited at a young age eventually end up as influential policymakers
or military officials.
-
- There may be other reasons for the Bureau's squeamishness
about Lau's career becoming public: it is likely he was committing crimes
as part of his undercover role, crimes the FBI would have authorized Lau
to commit.
-
- "From a reading of the record, it is not difficult
to discern that Lau was involved in espionage activities, kidnappings,
trading in human slavery, illegal immigration, murder, torture, extortion,
hostage-taking and any number of other criminal activities that involved
crimes against humanity," claims a partially classified brief filed
in support of Lau by the League of United Latin American Citizens. "Lau
penetrated the Chinese Triads, the Tong, and other Chinese Organized Crime
Organizations that trade in all of these things as a way of life ... For
six years Lau had to be on his guard and had to participate in whatever
these hostile forces demanded of him."
-
- Lau would neither confirm nor deny that. "I'm not
going to discuss that issue without immunity," he said flatly. But
he asked if it made sense to imagine that an FBI undercover agent could
gain the trust of a hostile foreign power by "just walking into some
country and saying, 'Hi, I'm Lok Lau and I'd like to be your friend.' It
doesn't work like that."
-
- Lau's lawsuit against the FBI claims that his undercover
assignment left him emotionally scarred and suffering from stress-induced
disorders, but the FBI rebuffed his requests for counseling, saying there
were no therapists with security clearances high enough to hear those kinds
of woes. Lau asked the Bureau to find someone, and he was assured something
would be done.
-
- "The FBI failed to ... grant anyone the authorization
to listen to classified information presented by Mr Lau," the FBI's
Access Review Committee, which decides matters regarding security clearances,
declared in a blistering 2000 decision. "The [committee] cannot endorse
the actions of the FBI."
-
- Lau's frustrations finally boiled over in a Sears store
in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Christmas Eve in 1990. Pocketing some paintbrushes,
Lau tried to leave without paying for them. He was stopped and charged
with shoplifting, to which he pleaded guilty. The FBI did an internal investigation
and concluded that the stress of Lau's double life "contributed to
your uncharacteristic display of impetuous poor judgment" and was
a misdeed the Bureau could live with, given "the difficult and challenging
circumstances you encountered during the first five years of your career".
Lau immediately went back undercover; years later he served a two-week
suspension. No one, apparently, thought an FBI agent caught shoplifting
might need psychiatric help; in any event, none was offered.
-
- A few months later, the undercover operation ended and,
after six years in deep cover, Lau finally came in from the cold. He was
through with undercover work, and he asked to be transferred to the Seattle
office as a field agent so he could be close to his family, none of whom
were allowed to know where he was or what he'd been doing since the mid-1980s.
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- His superiors in the Chicago FBI office, citing his undercover
performance, strongly backed Lau's request, but FBI headquarters inexplicably
rejected their recommendation. "I feel very strongly that as an institution
the FBI mishandled SA Lau's transfer," former Chicago FBI official
Waguespack complained in 1992. At the time, Waguespack was director of
counterintelligence for the National Security Council.
-
- Instead, the FBI granted Lau his fourth and final preference:
the Sacramento office, where the resident agent, Deborah Pierce, soon began
"building a book" on her slightly eccentric new hire, who had
never worked in an FBI office before. His employment files for those years
show he was assigned mostly mundane chores and every bureaucratic misstep
and social faux pas he committed was duly noted and filed away:
-
- "He laughs and tells stories to fit in when he joins
a group, but his stories don't always fit the circumstances and he laughs
at inappropriate places."
-
- "He appeared to be trying to gain favor from his
peers by being funny."
-
- "Lau gave one of the steno clerks a T-shirt for
doing his typing ... Lau's behavior resulted in this individual feeling
uncomfortable."
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- In 1995, Lau asked for a transfer to the night shift
because it paid more and because he had been having trouble sleeping. When
his supervisor, Pierce, spoke to him about it, he "informed me that
he liked to do the midnight shift for other people because then they would
like him", she noted in a report. Those statements were later used
against Lau in a fitness report - evidence, according to Pierce, that he
was "overly concerned about money" and trying to "curry
favor" with his co-workers. Those aberrations led Piece to conclude
that Special Agent Lok Lau was "vulnerable to approach from a foreign
government" and she told her superiors she considered Lau "a
potential security risk" because of his poor attitude and his dislike
of his current job.
-
- For Lau, a naturalized citizen, it was his official death
sentence as an FBI counterintelligence agent, and the Bureau's unkindest
cut. "I risked my life for this country, for this agency, for six
years. I had a top-secret security clearance," Lau complained. "I
had a higher security clearance than she did."
-
- "We needed a record to show poor performance and
now have a year's worth," Pierce gloated in a handwritten 1995 memo
to another FBI supervisor. "Now we have to start on the poor performance
for investigations, which may take another year or more. Maybe we can get
HIM to make the move out." Soon, the FBI took away Lau's gun, allegedly
for medical reasons, revoked his Top Secret clearance, and confined him
to working during daylight hours. Meanwhile, his supervisors chided him
for his "delusions of persecution by management".
-
- Assigned to copy files for other agents and run background
checks on FBI job seekers, Lau began a mental meltdown and once again sought
psychiatric care. Once again, the FBI declined.
-
- "The FBI clearly failed in its obligations to provide
Mr Lau with psychological treatment and organizational support," the
FBI's Access Review Committee concluded. "The ARC unanimously agrees
... that Mr Lau did not receive appropriate support or psychological treatment."
But it upheld the decision to lift Lau's security clearance anyway.
-
- During the 1996 holiday season, Lau went into a Raley's
supermarket in Sacramento and pilfered some toothpaste and a Master Lock.
He was caught by a security guard, wrestled to the ground, handcuffed and
hustled into a back room, where he pleaded with the guard to let him go,
saying he was an FBI agent and would lose his job if he was prosecuted.
The store pressed charges anyway, but the District Attorney's Office dropped
them "in the interests of justice". Lau never told the FBI about
it. And that was all it took for the FBI - which discovered the shoplifting
incident several years later - to kick him out the door. Since then he
has been fighting, unsuccessfully, to get his job back.
-
- Assistant US attorney Horn, who succeeded in getting
his discrimination suit dismissed a few days ago, called Lau's claims "ludicrous"
and said the FBI had perfectly good reason to fire an agent who steals
and lies. His years of undercover work, she said, "are irrelevant
to this case". To help ensure that, Horn got Lau's expert witnesses
- psychiatrists who diagnosed him as suffering from post-traumatic stress
disorder and major depression - barred for failure to meet a filing deadline.
"He can't introduce anything pertaining to stress, or his undercover
work. He doesn't have much of a case left," Horn said in an interview
shortly before the suit was dismissed.
-
- Former FBI official Vasquez believes the travails of
Lok Lau are a tragedy. "The FBI used Mr Lau and then, when it was
over, discarded him," Vasquez stated.
-
- "Everyone is disposable," Lau said matter-of-factly.
"No matter what."
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