[FPSPACE] Recent News on Tsien Hsue-Shen

[wayneday]

>===== Original Message From thomsona <thomsona@flash.net> =====
>>
>> The US did not have an ICBM program at that time.  Wasn't he expelled in
>> 1955?  Hadn't he been out of any real projects as of 1953?
>
>The US was certainly thinking seriously about ICBMs since the late 1940s,
>doing design work.  Immediately the question of ABMs, counter-ABM penaids,
>counter-penaid technology, etc., etc. came up:  measures and
>countermeasures, world without end.

Yes, I realized that was sloppy the second that I pressed "send."

But the Atlas ICBM program was not really running at full tilt until 1954,
if I remember correctly.  I believe that 1954 was also the first time that
the US seriously looked into the idea of ABM defense.  Penaids were 
essentially
theoretical before then.


> Tsien seems to have been assigned to
>look into penaids.   If  I remember the briefing correctly, some of the
>designs he worked on were eventually used on Titan (I or II, I know not).
>Likely it was fairly simple stuff: chaff, flares, balloons, jammers.

This may be why the 1998 Cox report stated that he had worked on the Titan
II, which had not even been started at the time he was deported.

I took a quick look at Thread of the Silkworm and without digging through
it too deeply, it appears as if his last access to military information was
in 1950.  He was finally deported to China in summer 1955.  So whatever
direct military information he had dated from 1950.  It would be a bit of a
stretch to say "He investigated balloons and chaff at penaids in 1949 and
then provided this sensitive information to the Chinese six years later."
While true, there is a wide gulf between thinking up possible ways to do 
something and actually developing a system that works.

I believe that the chronology went like this:

-Tsien came to the US in 1935
-in 1949 or so he decided to return to China
-in 1950 he was briefly detained by the US gov (2 weeks)
-at this time he was going to be forcefully deported (he was returning to
China anyways, but this would mean that he could never return to the US)
-he was essentially held in limbo for five years (I don't think he was under
house arrest for that entire time).  This was probably due to a desire to
make sure that he no longer knew anything sensitive.  But Chang says that
there were a lot of other political considerations involved (such as the
fact that China held American prisoners, whom Tsien was eventually exchanged
for)


His decision to return to China, coupled with his plans to ship his entire
library back there, appear rather odd even today, let alone back in "Red
Scare" days.  I am not sure if he has ever fully explained why he wanted to
return to a country that he had not seen in 15 years, and which had come 
under communist rule by that time.  This looked really suspicious to the 
FBI.  But it is entirely possible that he had simply grown home-
sick and didn't care about the politics.  After he returned to China, however,
his speeches became full of typical propaganda language.

The US government apparently did offer to let him stay in the US if he agreed
to testify in front of Congress about how evil Chinese communism was.  He was
apparently offended and refused.  By that time he had been treated rather 
badly by the government, so it is not hard to see why he had no desire to
stay.

In this respect, it is less easy to see the US "deportment" of Tsien as a 
stupid move.  After all, he wanted to leave and the American political 
environ-
ment made it impossible to offer him anything that would make him stay.  He 
was considered a security threat, so nobody was going to give him really
sensitive high-tech work.  The alternative (which they never did anyway) would
have been to offer him a really high teaching salary at a university.  But
lots of people would have objected to bribing someone that they considered a
communist and possibly a spy.

Also, if I remember correctly, the FBI has never released Tsien's file.  I
forget where she got most of her research, although she did have some signifi-
cant government documentation (possibley Tsien's Army file, since he worked
for Jet Propulsion Lab, which was then a US Army laboratory).  I'm not 
sure what their objection to releasing it is, although it is possibly 
because he is still alive (they do consider privacy issues important, even
for people that they don't like).  But it strikes me that if the FBI ever 
had any real evidence against him, they would have released it to prove 
their case.

Many years ago, when that little blurb "The allegations against Tsien are
believed to be true" appeared in the Cox report.  The footnote was vague and
said that this was due to something like a "Department of Defense briefing."
I FOIA'd the Defense Intelligence Agency, assuming that they were the ones
that would have briefed the committee.  But I got a "no records" response
from them.



DDAY












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