PBS FRONTLINE: FROM CHINA WITH LOVE PART 3 OF 3
In 1991, the FBI assigned Cleveland to travel to China. While there, he was followed by Chinese security agents and apparently confronted by a former espionage suspect under suspicious circumstances. When Cleveland returned to the United States, he was given a wiretap audio recording made before his trip to China on which a woman with the code name "Luo" talks to an agent code named "Mao" and gives the details of Cleveland's upcoming trip. The woman's voice was well known to Cleveland. It was one of the FBI's prized assets -- "Parlor Maid."
But Cleveland had a problem: for three years he and Katrina Leung also had been lovers. Cleveland would have to turn Leung in to headquarters but hope they never discovered his personal relationship. Headquarters didn't discover Cleveland's or Smith's relationship with Leung -- and in what would later be criticized as a profound failure of management, they actually returned "Parlor Maid" to the field and allowed Smith to continue supervising her. Subsequently it was revealed that even after learning that Leung was working with the Chinese, both Agent Smith and Agent Cleveland continued to share information about important Chinese counterintelligence investigations with Parlor Maid.
"Cleveland is deeply involved with Gwo-Bao Min, he's deeply involved in Wen Ho Lee. He is deeply involved in the Peter Lee Case," says Dan Stober, author of A Convenient Spy. "If Cleveland is talking to Katrina about these things, that she's telling the Chinese, the Chinese theoretically could be telling their sources at the labs, 'Look out, look out.'" Former agent Cleveland has not been charged by the federal government and is said to be cooperating with the investigation.
