> his brilliant career in the United States came to a screeching halt in 1950, when the FBI accused him of being a member of a subversive organization

Yep, looks like the FBI created the problem they were ineptly trying to prevent.

And more than a half a century later, nothing changed:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-fbi-hatched-some-crazy-te...

from the article:

Qian returned to Caltech in 1949 and a year later faced the accusation by two former members of the Los Angeles Police Department's "Red Squad" that he was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

thanks LAPD

And everyone needs to ask how many deserving scientists are being mistreated in a similar manner by being labeled as bogeymen with du jour-isms of our time.

James Watson for starters

> So was he really a spy, or the suspicions were unfounded?

for a question like this to appear on HN makes me realize why mccarthy-era tactics were popular for so long.

they obviously work, even on smart people, and even in retrospect.

Yup. If they had no solid evidence, they should have left the man alone and continued to support him diligently. If you don't have proof, you have hearsay, and hearsay is not something worth persecuting someone over ever. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty. If he truly was a spy, giving secrets to China, then he would have eventually been caught in the act with irrefutable proof. Willingly forcing him out with all that knowledge and talent strikes me as incredibly naïve.

If someone produces excellent, productive research, and that research is leaking, simply ratchet up security around the research until the leaks stop. If there is a spy, they will eventually look around at all the security measures and consider the risk to their life and liberty to be too great to justify leaking information further. At that point, leaks will stop, but good research will continue, and that outcome provides much greater utility than the alternatives.

People are often too preoccupied with persecution that they view the absence of persecuting anyone of something as wrong. In the US we are preoccupied with the idea that someone, somewhere may be doing something wrong and that we should be punishing that person because they deserve it. In this case (and in most cases) persecution didn't solve the problem, but tightened security would have.

>they will eventually look around at all the security measures and consider the risk to their life and liberty to be too great to justify leaking information further.

This never happens in espionage. Once you go down that rabbit hole even a little, the people you're giving information to own you. They have the power to instantly ruin your life. If you stop giving them information, they inform on you. Most spies never wanted to be spies. They got sucked into a crappy situation by making one crappy decision, then they're stuck with it forever.

Sources, please, or Google terms for further reading? I find this terribly interesting.

This is fairly common knowledge in the intelligence communities. You can find lots of detail in declassified training manuals, but the most accessible sources will be memoirs from CIA/KGB operatives. The book Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB officer: The True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames by Victor Cherkashin is particularly good. He's quite critical of the Soviet practice of executing spies because once an American CIA agent converted a Soviet worker, the Soviet worker had no choice but to continue giving away secrets. The American agents (supposedly) used the threat of informing on the worker to coerce more and more information away.

What? GP was just asking if the allegations/accusations were actually true or not. Questioning the legitimacy of the deportation is the opposite of succumbing to McCarthyism.

Focusing on allegations is the issue. It seems clear that whether or not he was a spy, politics weren't important to him, science was his first master.

But people get focused on whether people are "with us or against us". He was with science. In the end, that's all that matters. Nations are not important.

the fact that this question even existed in the first place is the problem. there was no evidence. it was just a naked fabrication designed to get him out of the country on a false premise and to ruin his career.

and it succeeded, obviously, to great effect.

I think the question simply stems from the fourth paragraph:

"The man deemed responsible for these technological feats also was labeled a spy in the 1999 Cox Report issued by Congress after an investigation into how classified information had been obtained by the Chinese."

"It was the stupidest thing this country ever did," former Navy Secretary Dan Kimball later said, according to Aviation Week. "He was no more a Communist than I was, and we forced him to go."

I would imagine his opinion might count for something.

It's hard to justify. I am not going to say he can't be a spy. As a Chinese immigrant, many things you do can make you guilty of treason. There are many things your "friends" would disagree otherwise.

I say he probably wasn't interested in helping the Chinese government (both Nationalist and Communist). I think he likes being in his laboratory and doesn't care about politics.

But if no evidence ever found, our government should apologize.