The Spy Within: Larry Chin and China's Penetration of the CIA
One of several American traitors in the national security establishment who were arrested in the mid-1980s, Larry Wu-Tai Chin was convicted of espionage on behalf of the People’s Republic of China. In this reconstruction of the case, Hoffman, a writer who worked in Canadian intelligence, wends the facts adduced at trial though speculations about Chin’s rationalizations for his betrayals. Employed as a translator for three decades by the State Department and then the CIA, Chin claimed a pure motive for his spying: it improved China-U.S. relations. When laying aside his attempts to get inside Chin’s head, Hoffman turns to the main events in Chin’s downfall: an alert to the CIA of a mole in its midst; the FBI’s identification of Chin as the mole; Chin’s admissions to the FBI; and Chin’s trial, conviction, and, well, there was no sentencing because Chin committed suicide in jail. Or was Chin’s death a murder, Hoffman wonders? Sprinkling suspicions of what Chin actually passed to the PRC throughout this account, Hoffman renders a well-researched example of the Chinese approach to espionage. --Gilbert Taylor