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。
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复印件。在电邮中，FBI探员企图雇佣该校一名雇员从事间谍活动，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 Course
Peng 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.
Bondage
In 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.
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