Hua could face life in prison as a traitor. But what worries his friends most is that his trial may come only weeks after the United States fired a Taiwan-born Los Alamos scientist for balking at an FBI probe into whether he passed nuclear-warhead secrets to Beijing. Fearing that Hua might be sacrificed in a game of high-stakes diplomatic revenge, his Stanford friends are warning Beijing that spy-for-spy justice will only further poison relations with the United States. With the two sides clashing over missiles, spies and trade, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other U.S. officials have taken up the Hua case in Beijing, hoping to win at least a partial reprieve.
Hua was that rare Chinese exile who may have had real secrets to tell. A 1960 graduate of the elite Moscow Institute of Aeronautics, Hua went on to an illustrious career at the Chinese Academy of Space Technology in Beijing. After “24 years inside China’s aerospace industry,” Hua boasted to NEWSWEEK in 1997, “everyone knows me.” Hua “retired” to a Beijing think tank in 1984, but was still very much in the know. When Stanford political scientist John Lewis arrived in Beijing in the mid-’80s to write a history of its strategic-weapons programs, the Chinese leaders nominated Hua Di to be Lewis’s guide to their missile developments.
By the end of the decade, Hua told NEWSWEEK, he was a confidant of key leaders, including Deng Xiaoping. In 1987 Hua received China’s greatest honor, the State Prize, for his role in building China’s first space launcher and orbital satellite. Indeed some American right-wingers believe Hua was a spy for China, not against it. This much is true: Hua was close to leaders of the “863 program,” a campaign to modernize the military by acquiring Western technology.
Hua’s status in Beijing took a sudden fall when he signed a petition against the harsh curfew imposed on Beijing in May 1989. The petition recounted in detail a secret meeting at which Deng allegedly pushed the Politburo to pass the curfew. By chance, Hua was on a train to Moscow when police came to arrest him on June 3, the night of the Tiananmen crackdown.
Hua found refuge with John Lewis at Stanford. Relying on their access to Chinese documents and specialists, they wrote articles that exposed previously unknown details of Beijing’s missile efforts. Hua said Beijing officials “felt I had revealed everything they’re doing” in a 1992 article for International Security, which reported the existence of China’s DF-21 intermediate-range ballistic missile. Hua also spoke out on an even more sensitive topic: Beijing’s plans for threatening Taiwan. At a 1994 conference in Los Angeles, Hua described a Chinese ballistic missile capable of surgical strikes “against the centers of the Taipei regime,” according to conference organizer Ho Pin.
Hua knew it would be dangerous to return to Beijing, but he had already missed his mother’s funeral and was getting homesick. At a 1997 meeting in Hong Kong, Hua sounded out Chinese security officials. They complained that he had leaked state secrets, but they also praised his patriotism and assured him that he was no longer seen as a defector. Hua would have gone home immediately, but he was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to endure two operations. Finally, in January 1998, he received a hero’s welcome from friends in Beijing. But less than a week later, the security police came for him.
Hua awaits his fate in Beijing’s Dahongmen (Big Red Gate) Prison. Westerners close to his family say they are hopeful he will receive no more than four years, and get off after a few months on “medical parole.” That’s a plausible scenario. Though Beijing officials are publicly blasting some Americans’ “cold-war mentality,” they do not blame the administration. According to a source involved in the talks on Hua, Beijing has written off Clinton as a lame duck, but looks forward to better relations with the man they expect to succeed him in 2000: George W. Bush Jr. But Beijing is not likely to get much help from Bush or anyone else if it tries to play the game of spy versus spy.
