Did I tell you, I am a sleeper agent for Communist China?

I admit to all of you, as well as the NSA & Dick Cheney reading this post, that despite my pro-Taiwan leanings (which has been such a great cover), that I am indeed a sleeper agent for Communist China. I’ve been secretly networking in Silicon Valley all these years to steal and sell commercial and military secrets to China. My Democratic Party political activism as well has been an elaborate scheme for me to fool everyone of my treacherous nature (well, being a Democratic is to hate America, right?)

Chinese Sleeper Agent John 8Asian infiltrating

the highest levels of government.

I also confess that my four years at an aerospace/defense giant in Connecticut as a design engineer were all a ruse for my most lucrative years as a traitor to the United States. Why do you think I was really into the Internet, Mosaic and Netscape, advance Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations – installing PointCast on all the PC’s at my co-workers’ request (as well as installing Chinese spyware) and getting my departments into virtual mockups and prototyping tools and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) during my years from 1993 – 1997? Stealing secrets is a whole lot easier if everything is in electronic form that can be copied onto CD’s rather than photocopying stacks of paper!

And you ask what of my two years in business school? I was paying it forward and awakening and recruiting the next generation of Chinese and Taiwanese American spies on-campus and scouting out graduate students to see what their latest research and labs were doing and what would be useful to China. And my four undergraduate years at former Taiwanese president Lee-Tung Hui‘s alma mater was no coincidence either, since I was initially a spy for Taiwan before becoming a double agent and spying for China against Taiwan and the United States.

Despite being born-and-raised in Massachusetts, why did I betray America? Well, there is my ethnic Han Chinese pride as well as the shear fact that I am an unpatriotic, greedy bastard. Also, I’ve always tried to live up to the example of heroes such as Wen Ho Lee (the brother of my mother’s friend) in providing the latest and greatest nuclear secrets to China. Unfortunately, I had a mind and interest for mechanical engineering and business rather than nuclear physics.

Unfortunately, my cover has been blown and the FBI and Homeland Security will be taking me into custody soon. All I can say is that, please forgive me for my actions and forgive The New York Times, despite its flaws, a newspaper I still love.

Gotcha – I am of course being satirical , except for Cheney and the NSA reading my electronic correspondences :-). In today’s New York Times, the newspaper reports on “Spy Cases Raise Concern on China’s Intentions” and goes on to describe several cases regarding how naturalized or American-born-and-raised Chinese and Taiwanese-Americans, along with other willing and possibly clueless Americans, have been systematically recruited by China, either relying on Chinese ethnic pride or out of greed, to obtain military or commercial secrets for China:

“In interviews, current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials demonstrated uncertainty as to the precise scope of the problem of Chinese espionage. But many officials offered a similar description of the pattern of the cases: Chinese government and state-sponsored industries have relied on the Chinese diaspora — using immigrants, students and people of second- and third-generation Chinese heritage — and regular commercial relations to operate a system in which some people wittingly or unwittingly participate… Chi Mak, a Chinese-born engineer who was sentenced in March to more than 24 years in prison for selling naval secrets to China. The information was not classified, Mr. Mak’s lawyers argued at trial, although it was illegal to provide it to China… [The intelligence community’s top counterintelligence official] Mr. Brenner noted testimony showing that Mr. Mak was a “sleeper agent” who worked his way up in the military contracting industry, an ascent he said “bespeaks a patience that the Chinese are especially good at.”

Now, I know it only takes a few bad apples to perpetuate a stereotype. I’ve outlined how I could easily be painted as a sleeper agent in my faux confession. Obviously, any American – whether they be Asian, white, black, Hispanic or whatever creed, race or ethnicity, who steals military and commercial secrets for any foreign government is a traitor to the United States.

However, we are no longer living in the Cold War, and the newly emerging economic, political and military perceived threat today is China. There are and will be ethnic Chinese spying for China, just as I am sure that there are American spies in China and throughout the world. The question of Taiwanese or Chinese Americans, or Asian Americans in general, being loyal to the United States will inadvertently (or perhaps sometimes blatantly) be asked. But let us not forget from the recent history of World War II, Executive Order 9066 and Japanese American internment, that with such disloyal stereotypes can materialize real and harmful consequences to all Asian Americans, but to all Americans as well.