The Spies in Plain Sight

I spent years talking with legendary spy hunters about the clues that expose secret agents. Then I went looking for answers from a spy himself.

by Susan Katz Keating

Journalists love anniversaries, and this was a good one, the perfect day to highlight history and talk to a spy. Fourteen years earlier, on February 21, 1972, Richard Nixon made his historic visit to Beijing. Now, on the same date in 1986, Chinese agent Larry Wu-Tai Chin was sitting in a Virginia jail cell waiting to be sentenced for espionage. Chin had spent more than 30 years as a spy for Beijing inside the CIA, and secretly had given key information to China ahead of the Nixon summit. On this anniversary day, I had a notebook full of background information and one overriding question for Chin.

How could we have caught you? 

The question likely has been asked for as long as espionage itself has existed, in ancient Syria, Egypt, India, and beyond. It’s been written about in histories and spy novels, and has motivated every person who binge-watched The Americans and began monitoring the neighbors. 

“Spy-catching. It’s literally a blood sport,” my old friend Robert Crowley, a legendary Cold War clandestine operations chief, once told me. “The signs are there. You just have to know how to read them.”

Even the experts don’t always get it right.

Another Cold War legend, James Jesus Angleton, was CIA counterintelligence chief for 20 years. He focused on unmasking the Soviet Union’s version of the Chins who were burrowed inside the Agency. And yet, he missed the one at his own table, the man who later called him “a brilliant opponent.” This was Angleton’s close friend and mentor, British intelligence officer and liaison Kim Philby – a Soviet mole. By the time Angleton suspected the truth about Philby, it was too late. Philby fled to Moscow in 1963 before he could be arrested. Afterwards, Angleton chased suspected moles so aggressively that the Agency was roiled, and Angleton was forced to resign. Angleton went from a form of blindness to a condition that former CIA head William Colby told me was “hunting for ghosts.”

Both Crowley and Colby have since died, and their words now carry the weight of the past.

READ MORE: Same Spy, Different Day: The Recurring Shock of Chinese Espionage

Maybe Angleton saw ghosts, or maybe the spectres were real. They float into my world on a regular basis.

People contact me to say they’ve spotted a spy. They offer to send a dossier. Some of the so-called “hostile agents” supposedly work for China, Iran, Russia, or elsewhere. I’m not a counterintelligence officer, and I don’t have the resources to delve into every dossier. I try to reassure the tipsters, who genuinely are concerned, that if they found a real spy, there’s a good chance the Feds have spotted them, too. 

So what about my question for Chin? How could we have caught him?

Not very easily, Crowley told me. Chin was a translator for the U.S. Army during World War II, when he secretly worked for communist Chinese intelligence. The Army, the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai, and the CIA trusted him thoroughly. They did not look for signs that their “loyal” ally was a spy.

With Chin, the signs are best viewed in retrospect, Crowley said. They tend to come in a cluster.

Spies endure the strain of carrying two or more lives at once. Sometimes they drink too hard, and blurt out clues. They have to manage their money. They have to account for where it comes from. They go on wild spending sprees.

Chin bought 29 rental units valued at more than $700,000, court documents show. He threw money away at the gambling tables. He showed signs of what Crowley called “the pressure of the double life.” 

In a letter dated Feb. 2, 1980, to the Sands casino in Las Vegas, Chin complained that the casino had allowed him to gamble beyond his credit limit. 

”When I was suffering from a hopeless losing streak and insanely throwing good money after bad, instead of stopping me at the limit of my credit line, as all pit bosses would have done as a matter of course, a pit boss granted me thousands after thousands of dollars to bet,” Mr. Chin wrote in a letter that was entered into evidence at his trial.

”Under such mental strain, the $7,000 I brought in was soon drawn into the whirlpool the next day.” 

Those things mostly are meaningful with the benefit of hindsight, Colby told me years ago when we talked about the case. They don’t mean a person is a spy. Taken alone, they wouldn’t unmask an actual mole. In Chin’s case, they didn’t.

The U.S. trusted Chin throughout his career up until he retired from the CIA. Investigators didn’t catch him by following his money or noticing the strain of his double life. He only was caught because a defector turned him in. 

READ MORE: China’s Intelligence Collectors at Work Inside America

Sometimes investigators have something Chin’s hunters never had: they know where to look. That was the case with the Russian sleeper agents exposed in 2010 during the FBI’s Operation Ghost Stories.

“The Russian government spent significant funds and many years training and deploying these operatives,” said a counterintelligence agent who worked on the case, according to the FBI. The group known collectively as “The Illegals” had a number of objectives, including talent-spotting likely targets for recruitment. 

“Our agents and analysts watched the deep-cover operatives as they established themselves in the U.S. (some by using stolen identities) and went about leading seemingly normal lives – getting married, buying homes, raising children, and assimilating into American society,” the FBI noted.

The operation quickly rolled up when a defector fled Moscow with information on the Illegals Program. 

Other spies surface because investigators pull on a thread from somewhere else. In 2024, London police arrested three men on charges of breaking into a London apartment. This fed into another investigation involving suspected foreign intelligence operations inside the United Kingdom. Two of the men, Bill Yuen and Peter Wai, eventually were convicted and sentenced in June 2026. The third, Matthew Trickett, never made it to trial. He was found dead before it began. 

Which leads me back to February 21, 1986. 

I drove for a while that morning through the crowded lots that serve both the jail and the Manassas courthouse. I found parking, a tiny victory on its own. The day felt upbeat, a comparatively mild morning after a cold month. It felt like a promise, finally, of spring. 

I walked across the lot toward the jail, mentally rehearsing my question. I didn’t get far. There was a commotion of some sort. A woman walked toward me, shaking her head. She’d been planning to visit her son. “I’m gonna come back later,” she said. “Something’s going on.” 

I soon learned what that was. At 8:45 a.m., Chin was found dead in his cell. A plastic garbage bag was tied around his head with shoelaces. The death was ruled a suicide.

People who worked at the jail reported a few random signs that could have signalled what Chin planned to do. He asked for high top sneakers, which came with long shoelaces. He asked for a plastic bag so he could use it to line a garbage pail and his unit could pass inspection. 

Another detail has stayed with me. In the week before he died, Chin appeared on the CBS News program ”Nightwatch.” He seemed to have come to terms with life in prison, saying, “I can write my memoirs and continue to live.” 

A Chinese official visited him in jail.

What did the official say, and did it have any connection to Chin’s plan to write his memoirs? The answer vanished on February 21.

I had picked that date because it belonged to Nixon and to history. It turned out Chin already had claimed the 1986 version for something else. It was the one last thing that was missed.

Susan Katz Keating is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Soldier of Fortune Magazine.