In the fall of 2011, a farmer deep in Iowa corn country was so startled by an unusual sight that he called the cops. The alert sent over police radio went as follows: “South of here walking westbound there is an Asian male wearing a suit walking through a farm field. He was dropped off. Nature of incident: suspicious.”
It turned out that the man was dressed in khakis and a short-sleeve collared shirt, not a suit. But in a part of the state that was 97% white, it was the detail about the race of the man that was most salient. A sheriff’s deputy quickly intercepted the vehicle that had dropped the man off. Its driver, Chinese national Robert Mo, claimed that he and his associate were conducting agronomy research and looking at crops; in reality, they were trying to steal seed samples. The deputy let them go on their way. Soon, however, an FBI agent would place this same Robert Mo at the scene of a similarly suspicious episode from earlier in the year and in a different cornfield. And so was born an FBI investigation that illustrates a shift in American domestic intelligence—away from an all-consuming focus on terrorism and toward a heightened attentiveness to Chinese economic espionage.
