Program documents that I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, as well as the files of individual scientists who were surveilled, suggest a wide-ranging effort. The newly obtained documents show that alongside such efforts, the bureau singled out Chinese American scientists because of their ethnicity - and that it did so even after the Senate’s Church Committee, formed in 1975, exposed some of the most egregious intelligence abuses of the era, many involving government surveillance of Americans on U.S. The bureau’s broader surveillance of scientists during the Cold War is well documented among those targeted was theoretical physicist and Manhattan Project contributor Richard Feynman. Edgar Hoover, the FBI pursued a slew of misguided counterintelligence investigations, hounding civil rights activists, feminist groups, and left-leaning scholars. The program’s targets included several prominent scientists and scholars, most notably physicist Chang-Lin Tien, who later became chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. Titled “Chinese Communist Contacts with Scientists in the U.S.” and listed under the umbrella “IS-CH,” or Internal Security-China, the classified program dates to the late 1960s, when Chinese weapons development spurred intense anxiety within the U.S. He spent years searching for answers, but he never got the one that would have explained all the undue scrutiny: He was one of what appear to have been hundreds of people surveilled under a previously unreported FBI program that targeted ethnic Chinese scientists and students living in the United States. Sheng replied that he would immediately report the matter to the FBI. In a 1973 interview, an FBI agent asked him what he would do if the Communists pressured his relatives living in China. Sheng flew the American flag outside his house, and in his encounters with federal agents, he had seemingly done everything right. The FBI sometimes investigated undocumented immigrants, including in San Francisco’s Chinatown, but Sheng had married a white woman from Iowa, and he knew few other Chinese Americans in the Grand Rapids area. He had served in the marines for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces in the Chinese Civil War, against Mao’s Liberation Army, and had no desire to live under Communist rule. He never held a permanent position in his field again. He subsequently received two offers from other defense firms, Raytheon and Hazeltine, only to have them suddenly rescinded, he said. Sparton inexplicably transferred him to a drafting position - a move that he perceived as a demotion - and then, in 1975, laid him off. Agents from the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Defense grilled him about everything he had done on his sightseeing tour, he later said. According to an FBI memo, Sheng “declared his anti-communist feelings, his love and patriotism for America” and “denied any contact between himself and Communist agents.” But after Sheng and his wife returned from their 1973 visit to China, the U.S. In 1972, he had been interviewed by an FBI agent in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for an undisclosed purpose. Before joining Sparton, he had worked for a decade for the defense contractor Lear Siegler, where he held a secret-level U.S. Sheng was a gentle man who collected coins in his spare time and never missed a church service. For Chinese American scientists like Sheng, the thaw presented a simpler opportunity: a chance to return to their hometowns, eat their favorite foods, and hug the parents they had left behind decades earlier. military was fighting in Vietnam and increase America’s leverage over the Soviet Union. Washington hoped that rapprochement with China would destabilize the Communist-led independence forces the U.S. On Nixon’s trip, the two sides had agreed to set up exchanges in science, which, like pingpong, was seen as a way to improve ties between the United States and China. Sheng had just started his job at Sparton, but he loved his mother dearly. pingpong team had toured the mainland, and the following year, President Richard Nixon had made the historic visit that restored contact between the countries’ leaders. But now relations between the two countries were improving. citizen, he had left home just before Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, and he hadn’t seen his friends or relatives in China since. A native of Jiangsu province and a naturalized U.S. Sheng was among thousands of ethnic Chinese scientists then living in the United States, the early pioneers in what would become a sizable swath of the American research force. I n 1973, Harry Sheng was working as a mechanical engineer for Sparton Corporation, a defense contractor in Jackson, Michigan, when his mother got sick back in China.
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