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“No. No. No.”

Mo Yun was flustered. The slim, 40-year-old Chinese citizen had just vacationed in California with her kids, where she had made good on a promise — a trip to Disneyland.

Now they were at their departure gate at Los Angeles International Airport, preparing to return to Beijing, when agents approached and announced that they had a warrant for her arrest. They explained that she would need to be separated from her five-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son.

The agents gave her two options: Put her children on a plane back to China alone to be met by a friend or relative, or keep them in Los Angeles, where they would be handed over to child protective services. 

“You’re going to need to make a decision, OK?” a Customs and Border Protection agent told her. “Or we can make the decision. It’s up to you.”

Mo Yun chose to put her children on the flight to Beijing, alone. Her daughter screamed as she said goodbye. 

Mo Yun’s arrest in the summer of 2014 was tied to her work for Dabeinong Technology Group, or DBN, a Beijing agricultural company suspected by the FBI in a plot to steal bioengineered corn seeds from U.S. competitors and smuggle them back to China. She had once overseen research at DBN and was married to its chief executive officer. Her brother Robert Mo, who worked for DBN in the U.S., had been arrested a few months earlier and charged with economic espionage. Mark Betten, the FBI special agent running the investigation, had found copies on Robert’s devices of what might be considered to be incriminating online chats between Robert, Mo Yun, and other DBN staff in Beijing. 

In one chat, Robert and Mo Yun discussed the purchase of farmland in the Midwest. In another, Mo Yun asked if Robert had managed to get any corn yet. In a third, a DBN executive told Robert that Mo Yun “is in charge of the specifics from the home country side” and that he would speak to her about more people to help Robert with seed collection.

When he heard that Mo Yun was leaving the country, Betten flew to Los Angeles. He and customs agents talked casually with her at first and tried other tactics to tease out information before reading her Miranda rights. Only later, when they took her to a processing facility in the airport basement did they hand her a document in Chinese spelling out the rights, advising her that she could remain silent and that anything she said could be used against her.

The FBI finally had someone close to DBN’s leadership in custody.

A Dragon Head Enterprise 

In the past decade, combating Chinese industrial espionage has become one of the FBI’s top counterintelligence priorities, second only to fighting terrorism. The focus started during the Obama administration, as China charted a bold economic and scientific rise — helped in some areas by technological theft. 

Since then, there have been charges brought in dozens of cases. The bureau now has over 1,000 active investigations involving China and technology spanning all 56 field offices. Some of these cases, like the one that led to the arrest of Harvard University chemistry department chair Charles Lieber in January, involve alleged hiding of payments from China. Others involved the theft of technologies related to wind turbines, paint whitener, and telecommunications routing. 

The Covid-19 outbreak has brought new strife in U.S.-China relations. Before the pandemic, though, the situation was already tense. Industrial espionage had become a key talking point for Trump administration officials, and an ostensible justification for the U.S. trade war with China. Over a dinner with CEOs in 2018, President Trump reportedly said, in a thinly veiled reference to China, that “almost every student that comes over to this country is a spy.” 

In the DBN case, U.S. efforts to protect its agricultural prowess and China’s quest to eliminate its food insecurity met head-on in the cornfields of Iowa and Illinois. The FBI spent two years on what it called Operation Purple Maze, chasing suspects across the Midwest, bugging rental cars, running aerial surveillance, and even pulling a mother from her children. 

The FBI spent two years on Operation Purple Maze, chasing suspects across the Midwest, bugging rental cars, running aerial surveillance, and even pulling a mother from her children.

DBN is headquartered on the fourteenth floor of an aging office tower in Zhongguancun, a tech-driven hub in Beijing. Shao Genhuo, Mo Yun’s husband and Robert Mo’s brother-in-law, founded the agricultural company in an apartment in 1993 with less than $3,000 in capital. Shao, the son of farmers, initially focused on selling animal feed, which he sourced from countries including the U.S. As China grew wealthier and people ate more meat —braised pork belly, Peking duck, cumin-spiced beef — demand for grain-based animal feed surged. Shao soon became wealthy.

But China didn’t produce enough grain to feed its people, and like other Chinese agricultural companies, DBN was vulnerable to the whims of foreign suppliers. An increase in U.S. corn prices could have a direct impact on Chinese food security — and on DBN’s profits. The company’s margins could be even higher, Shao saw, if the company went into the business of growing corn itself.

In 2001, he created a subsidiary to focus on seed breeding. In Chinese the company was called Jinse Nonghua, which loosely translates as Golden Agriculture and was awkwardly anglicized as Kings Nower. The goal was not to reach U.S. farmers. It was to dominate developing world markets, starting with China. In time, DBN would generate billions of dollars in revenue, employ thousands, and help Shao Genhuo earn a spot on the Forbes list of the richest Chinese.  

And yet the company faced significant obstacles. There were thousands of Chinese seed companies — by one count 8,700 — and none had successfully managed to create seed lines as productive as those of the international seed outfits.

Developing an elite seed line required a good supply of inbred seed lines, which most Chinese companies didn’t have, as well as talent, money, and years of time. Nor were companies allowed to sell genetically modified seeds, which many Chinese people were reluctant to accept after a series of food-safety scandals. 

Leaders in Beijing encouraged mergers and acquisitions to whittle down the seed industry to a few big outfits that could rapidly improve their lines and compete with foreign agricultural giants. Then the government could legalize genetically modified crops without handing over the market to foreign firms.

In consolidating the industry, the agriculture ministry began favoring some companies over others – and nationalism helped them pick the favorites. DBN’s clunky slogan read like it had been crafted with that in mind: “Serve the country to help agriculture flourish, strive for number one, develop together.” 

DBN and Kings Nower received tax breaks, access to low-interest loans, and direct government financial support. They were known as dragon head enterprises — a notion taken from the dragon dance performed at the Lunar New Year, where one performer stands tall, wearing the head, while a row of others trails behind him, hunched down to play the body. 

Employees at DBN talked about the need for a “national hero” and were open about their strategy: to use the foreigners’ technology to beat them at their own game. The goal was to one day compete with the likes of U.S. seed makers Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer.

Chasing Muddy Hooves

Robert Mo, Mo Yun’s brother, lived with his wife and American-born children in Florida when he first started working for DBN. He had a PhD in thermodynamics but was frustrated by the salary of an academic, so he finally agreed to work for his brother-in-law’s animal feed business. Then his duties shifted and he began working for a man named Li Shaoming, who was in charge of DBN’s seed subsidiary. Robert’s new boss, whom everyone called Dr. Li, had a peasant’s face, with a prominent mole on his right cheek, and a coarse humor. He was prone to rash ideas, and he soon dreamed up a shortcut that avoided years of research.  

With Robert’s help, Kings Nower would swipe top-notch corn seeds from American companies and then reverse engineer the seed lines. Robert knew this was illegal under U.S. law, and he made his discomfort clear early on. When he and Mo Yun began talking of targeting American seed lines, Robert wrote her that he needed to be careful and “drive to somewhere unseen.” She agreed.

Dr. Li sought the components for one hundred seed lines. In some cases, he wanted as many as 5,000 samples of a single strain of corn. Robert pleaded with him that a hundred varieties were too many. Although reverse-engineering the seeds was theoretically quicker than developing them from scratch, the process of re-creating even one seed line still could take years. But Dr. Li didn’t listen. So Robert shipped thousands of seeds back to China, then lived in fear that they would be seized en route by customs officials. 

The FBI learned of the case after Robert was found near two separate Iowa fields. That it centered on genetically modified corn made it the perfect case for Des Moines agents to take on. Special Agent Betten was put in charge of the investigation. They nicknamed Robert “Muddy Hooves.”

As he drove over dirt roads trailing his quarry, Betten worried about stirring up dust clouds that would give him away. So he began relying on the FBI’s fleet of low-flying, single-engine aircraft to surveil Robert, allowing Betten to drop back and watch from afar. 

The FBI also began collecting evidence using a secret warrant authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA warrants were designed for targeting terrorists and foreign government spies, and they permit broad electronic and physical surveillance, including covert “sneak and peek” searches — meaning agents could search Robert’s house or property without his knowledge and intercept cellphone calls. As The FBI tracked the seed thieves methodically, the chase took some frantic turns.

Intercept and Evasion

One spring day in Iowa in 2012, Robert and two colleagues, Ye Jian and Lin Yong, pulled into a suburban Chicago strip mall and hauled five boxes into a FedEx. After they left, an FBI agent intercepted the packages. The boxes were addressed to a logistics company in Hong Kong and contained 42 Ziploc bags of seed, each labeled with a unique code. Betten was not ready to make arrests, but he didn’t want to let potentially stolen seed leave the country, so he devised a novel solution: replace it with outdated seed that looked identical. 

Seed companies’ products have distinctive shapes and colors. Pioneer seed is typically dull red and almost round. Other seeds might be purple or yellow and more flat. To make sure the switch was believable, the FBI had to get the replacement seed directly from Pioneer — and then transport it from Pioneer’s headquarters in Johnston, Iowa, to the FedEx office outside Chicago in time to make the shipment’s deadline.

Betten enlisted one of the bureau pilots to help. As the pilot flew to the Des Moines airport, Betten drove to Johnston to fetch the decoy seed. On his way back toward the Des Moines airport, he got word that the pilot could spend only a few minutes on the ground because he was close to maxing out on his allowable on-duty hours. If the pilot lingered, he would be grounded and the replacement seed would have to fly the next day — delaying the arrival of the FedEx shipment in Hong Kong and possibly arousing suspicion among employees at DBN expecting the delivery.

Betten looked at the time and realized he had ten minutes to make a journey that normally takes half an hour. Flicking on his lights and siren, he raced down Interstate 35, arriving at the airport just in time. He passed the seed to the pilot, who rushed it to Chicago. On the other end, agents picked up the delivery and meticulously filled 42 bags with old Pioneer product and laid the bags in the FedEx boxes. Soon the decoy seed was soaring over the Pacific on its way to Hong Kong. The shipment arrived on schedule.

Months later, after gleaning more ears from cornfields, the DBN team gathered at a farm that the company had bought in Illinois to ready more seed for transporting to China. They slipped the seed into coded packets so that DBN breeders in China could distinguish the lines, then hid the packets in boxes of Orville Redenbacher and Pop Weaver microwave popcorn.  

This time, the seeds were to be divided and carried out of the U.S. by three couriers — Dr. Li and Le Jian in their bags on a flight from Chicago to Beijing, and Wang Hongwei, an associate who had come from Quebec to help, and who would take an air-and-overland route back to Canada. Robert Mo would remain in the U.S. 

Betten was onto the trio’s travel plans and cargo, but decided against arresting them. Prosecutors wanted to definitively prove via lab tests that the seeds the men carried were stolen from the U.S. companies. Betten knew the risk the FBI ran by seizing seed and questioning the DBN employees without arresting them: they might never return to the U.S. But it was clear that the men were carrying more than microwave popcorn, and that their stash likely included Pioneer and Monsanto products. Letting the men leave the country with stolen intellectual property would defeat the investigation.  

The FBI’s solution was to enlist customs agents, who confiscated the seeds from Dr. Li and Ye Jian at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport but allowed them to leave the country. Wang Hongwei landed in Burlington, Vermont, after a flight from Chicago, and agents tracked him to Canadian border. A search of his car yielded a notebook filled with what appeared to be latitude and longitude coordinates, hundreds of photos of cornfields, and, stashed underneath a seat, 44 small brown bags containing manila envelopes filled with seed. Wang drove on, minus his cargo, into Canada.

Miranda Rights

At 6:00 a.m. on December 11, 2013, a squad of agents in bulletproof vests encircled Robert Mo’s house in Boca Raton, Florida, pounded on his door and arrested him. Mark Betten was elsewhere that day, but he’d helped arrange the arrest date with the FBI’s Miami field office. 

Federal prosecutors charged Robert with conspiracy to steal trade secrets under the Economic Espionage Act, a 1996 law used often against alleged industrial spies. He faced a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. He was moved to a jail in Des Moines, near the U.S. District Court for Southern Iowa, where he would be tried. Ahead of the trial, under house arrest. He continued to work for DBN, sourcing animal-feed supplies for the company.  

Meanwhile, his sister Mo Yun hired lawyers who argued that any potentially incriminating statements she made to the FBI at Los Angeles International Airport before agents read her Miranda rights had to be thrown out. U.S. District Court Judge Stephanie Rose agreed: “We’ve got at least four officers with this one woman — one of whom is in uniform wearing a gun and baton. … If the government says to you, ‘You’ll answer our questions,’ you’ll answer their questions.” Mo Yun, she ruled, was entitled to have her Miranda rights read. With that, the charges against her were thrown out. Betten, who once had seven Chinese suspects in his sights, had to make do with apprehending just one. Dr. Li and four other DBN employees who had returned to China were placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

As his trial date approached, Robert’s lawyers moved to get evidence excluded. They pointed to allegations in other cases that federal investigators and prosecutors had singled out Asian Americans. So explosive was the atmosphere surrounding economic espionage, Robert’s lawyers argued, that his case was at risk of being marred by racism and xenophobia. 

Their arguments convinced Judge Rose to forbid unnecessary mention of Robert’s ethnicity and nationality at trial. But other motions brought by the defense failed. After years of pre-trial proceedings, Robert agreed to a plea deal in 2016 and received a sentence of three years in prison. After serving the time, he remains in an immigration detention, pending deportation to China, according to his wife. He was also ordered to pay $425,000 to Monsanto in restitution, and properties that he and DBN had purchased were forfeited to the U.S. government.

His alleged accomplices —including Dr. Li Ye Jian, Lin Yong, and Wang Hongwei — remain on the Most Wanted list.

DBN, where Shao Genhuo remains chairman and president, has grown since the FBI arrested his wife and her brother, but how much it may have gained from its seed-gathering foray in the U.S. is difficult to say. The company reported revenue of over $2.3 billion last year. 

Monsanto, one of the companies the FBI worked to protect, was taken over by the German chemical giant Bayer AG in 2018 for $63 billion, placing its valuable American-made seed technology in foreign hands after all. Soon after the takeover, analysts predicted growing liabilities ahead for Bayer linked to Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller, an alleged cancer-causer in thousands of farmer lawsuits, rocking the company and its share price. “Monsanto appreciated all of the efforts that were taken by the U.S. Government to protect intellectual property,” a spokeswoman for Bayer wrote me after the merger.

After a multibillion-merger between its parent and Dow Chemical, DuPont Pioneer was spun off into a new company, Corteva Agritech.

Mark Betten recently retired from the FBI. In an interview before he left, I asked him how he felt about the suspects who fled. “I think any agent is frustrated when you’re unable to get in custody the person charged,” he told me. “But there are lots of member countries in Interpol. I haven’t ruled out the possibility that we could still get one of these individuals.”

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Adapted from THE SCIENTIST AND THE SPY: A True Story of China, The FBI, and Industrial Espionage by Mara Hvistendahl, to be published by Riverhead, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Mara Hvistendahl.