Questions about Wei Su’s loyalty would propel a multiyear investigation prompting the U.S. DOD to revoke the top-secret security clearance he’d held for 24 years. He retired the next year: humiliated, angry, and, the Pentagon later admitted, completely innocent.
The agents had played him a scratchy recording of a conversation he'd had with a friend at a restaurant in Eatontown, N.J. Both men found it strange when a pot of hot tea arrived at their table without their having ordered it, but only later did Su, an award-winning scientist for the U.S. Army's Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate, form a hypothesis. He thinks the teapot was bugged.
On the recording, Su says, he can be heard telling his friend in Chinese to always use English when they spoke on the phone, because the government was monitoring all his calls. He warned that "when you work with us, you need to be careful." Su says the FBI demanded to know if "us" was a reference to Chinese intelligence. No, he answered, "us" simply meant his employer, the U.S. Army.
Nevertheless, questions about Su's loyalty would propel a multiyear investigation that in 2016 prompted the U.S. Department of Defense to revoke the top-secret security clearance he'd held for 24 years. He retired the next year: humiliated, angry, and, the Pentagon later admitted, completely innocent.
The short, bespectacled scientist who loves to kayak, garden, and play the piano now divides his time between Maryland and Florida with his wife of 32 years, Elaine, a retired branch chief for a different Army communications lab. The government's case against him amounted to a tempest in a teapot, Su says, if not a listening device as well.
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