How a Networking Immigrant Became a Spy

Locked in a federal penitentiary in the Arizona desert, Tai Kuo spends his days helping with the cooking, teaching language classes and tennis, making new friends.

The convicted spy, it seems, has become a mentor.

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He wasn’t a professional agent by any means. He was a tennis coach. A restaurateur. A businessman who lived with his wife and daughter in a Louisiana town known for swamp tours and charter fishing. Born in Taiwan, son-in-law of a senior military officer there, he was an unlikely spy for China if ever there was one.

And yet his journey from entrepreneur to secret operative–one of dozens convicted in the last three years of efforts to pass secrets or restricted technology to the Chinese–is, in many ways, emblematic of the way China conducts espionage in the 21st century, experts say.

It is rooted in opportunity, nurtured by perseverance, sustained by greed. It relies on “guanxi”–a you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours notion of developing close relationships.

The Chinese took advantage of all of these things to cultivate Kuo, and then the man with the winning personality went to work on their behalf. In the end, Kuo would convince two U.S. government employees to give him secret information, which he then conveyed to an official with the communist nation.

His networking skill would make Kuo wealthy, a shining immigrant success story, but it would also make him a convicted felon–a man denounced by a bitter ex-friend as “worse than a thief . . . a traitor.”

Even in his youth, Kuo (pronounced gwoh) knew how to forge connections with people who mattered. In his early 20s, still living in his native Taiwan, he worked as a tennis instructor for the U.S. Embassy in Taipei. He soon obtained a student visa and landed in Cajun country in 1973, attending Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La., on a tennis scholarship.

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The late 1980s saw his circle of connections widen. With China growing more open to foreign investments, Kuo started a business working to market American expertise and products there. He teamed with a Louisiana legislator to sell cotton, promoted oil service companies for exploration work in the South China Sea, provided engineers for the development of Chinese plants.

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Apparently, the center of Kuo’s power network was a man named Lin Hong.

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Hong, according to court papers, worked for the Guangdong Friendship Association, one of many groups in China whose stated aims are to promote good relations with foreign countries and organizations. The association is backed by the Chinese government and hosts visits for private individuals and businesspeople. But foreign researchers have also tied the friendship groups to present-day efforts to collect intelligence.

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Kuo considered Hong a friend, at least at first. However, U.S. investigators use a different description. Hong, they say, was Kuo’s “handler,” who for years tasked Kuo with gathering information from contacts he’d made in the U.S. government.

It started with a request for “opinion papers.” Hong knew that Kuo was tight with various politicians and government officials. He wondered if Kuo could find someone to write papers to help him better understand U.S. attitudes toward China.

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Kuo, meanwhile, was currying favor with Hong, who he hoped would help him land a project in China. Kuo would later acknowledge his own motivation: “Just pure and simple greed.”

Then something happened that gave Hong more leverage over Kuo. Around 2002, some Chinese engineers who worked with Kuo on a project in Taiwan were arrested upon their return to China and accused of espionage. Kuo turned to Hong to help get them out of prison.

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The FBI videotape shows the inside of a rental car, with Kuo in the passenger seat. He pulls out a wad of cash, the outer bill being a $100 note. Then Kuo stuffs the money into the shirt pocket of the driver, Gregg Bergersen, and the two proceed to talk business.

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The two then stop for lunch, and Bergersen hands Kuo a thick document with cut marks at the top and bottom of each page; he explains that he’s removed the classification markings. For an hour at the restaurant, Kuo takes notes from the document, which details the quantity, dollar value and names of weapons systems planned for sale by the United States to Taiwan for five years.

It was July 14, 2007, and Kuo was on one of his many information-gathering trips to Washington, D.C. It had been a decade since he started passing information to China.

Bergersen worked as a weapon systems policy analyst at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, an arm of the Department of Defense that facilitates military sales overseas. His specialty was C4ISR, a sophisticated military command, control and communications network.

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Kuo began using encryption software to send e-mails and also enlisted a “cutout”–a young woman who had worked with him in the furniture import business and with whom he began having an affair–to sometimes serve as a go-between with him and Hong.

To avoid detection, Hong suggested that Kuo buy prepaid phone cards and use public telephones. He wanted him to change his e-mail addresses often, mail documents to him from the airport or another public location. For the most part, Kuo ignored his advice.

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On Feb. 11, 2008–almost two decades after first meeting Lin Hong–Kuo was arrested and charged with espionage.

Quickly pleading guilty, he began cooperating with the government.

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Bergersen, who was arrested the same day as Kuo, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to communicate national defense information and was sentenced to almost five years in prison, although he is scheduled to be released to home confinement in Texas by the end of June. He maintains that he did not act for financial gain but rather to help promote the defense system he’d spent years working on.

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Initially, Kuo was sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison, but that was reduced last summer to five years–thanks to his cooperation with authorities. Lirette says he could be released to a halfway house by the end of this year, and that he’ll find a way to start again.

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