In Bed With Beijing: The Double Agent Who Seduced Her FBI Handler

Sasha Ingber: Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe. Katrina Leung, Codename Parlor maid, received nearly $2 million from the FBI for being their top China informant.

But little did the bureau know she was a double agent collecting intelligence for China's Ministry of State Security, and she was sleeping with her FBI Handler. James J. Smith. For nearly two decades, J.J. covered up reports that raised red flags about her. That's where retired FBI agent Steven Conley comes in.

He worked for J.J. in the LA field office and then he became Katrina's new handler and he realized she wasn't exactly providing useful information. Ultimately he helped extract two painful confessions in a case that damaged the FBI's reputation for years. Here's our conversation.

Steve Conley. Welcome to Spycast.

Steve Conley: Hi Sasha. Thanks for having me. 

Sasha Ingber: So how did Katrina come to the attention of the FBI in 1981? And what did the bureau see in her that could be valuable? 

Steve Conley: So Katrina Leung, she came to the attention of the FBI in 81 because of a huge espionage investigation going on up in San Francisco, a code word Tiger Trap.

Essentially, China unveiled their neutron bomb and it looked remarkably similar to the United States neutron bomb. So they open an investigation, they determine technology was stolen. They trace it back to Lawrence Livermore National Lab in San Francisco. They start focusing on a guy named Min Gwo Bao And again, through the investigation they determined that Katrina Leung is a close associate of men in another subject of the Tiger Trap investigation.

Sasha Ingber: So tell me more about Katrina. Who is she? How is she connected to these people? 

Steve Conley: So Katrina, she immigrates to the United States in 1970. She's about 15 years old. She comes with, uh, the person she claimed was her mother. It was not her biological mother, it was actually her aunt who raised her. They go to New York City, she goes to high school there.

She goes to Cornell to get an engineering degree. And when she's at Cornell, she starts participating in the pro communist Chinese student groups and starts to become heavily involved in those groups. She leaves Cornell, she goes to Chicago to get her MBA while she's in Chicago again, she gets involved with the pro Communist Chinese student organizations, much more so. And she gets, uh, involved with the Chinese consulate. So she starts making a name for herself and running in those circles with the Chinese officials in Chicago. And her husband is working in Cincinnati at the time. She gets her MBA, they decide they want to expand their business opportunities, and they moved to LA and that was 1980.

And she actually moved into an apartment building in LA. The FBI called the Nest of spies because of all of the counterintelligence investigations open on people that live in that building. 

Sasha Ingber: Based on the fact that she has been living in this den of spies and has associations with the Chinese Communist Party, why does the FBI see her as a potential informant as opposed to a potential national security threat of potential spy?

Steve Conley: 'cause she had those connections and she had, her stock was rising within the Chinese immigrant community. She had access to local officials. She had access to consular officials, she had access. She started hosting receptions and being the embassy for banquets for any Chinese officials that would come to the United States because they would all go through San Francisco or Los Angeles.

So it was access. She had access to these top Chinese officials. 

Sasha Ingber: Did the FBI. Think that she was an MSS Ministry of State Security Officer at that time? 

Steve Conley: No, they did not. The lead from San Francisco was sent to LA. FBI LA gives this lead to an FBI agent named James J. Smith, who goes by JJ to go out and interview Katrina about her connections and, and the only documentation on that contact is through JJ Smith who interviewed her for off and on for about a year before he opened her as a source at the end of 1982. So everything we know is dependent on what JJ documented and, and it wasn't a lot, but he determined that because of her status in the community and because of her access to Chinese officials, she would be a good source.

Sasha Ingber: And JJ not only becomes her handler, but he becomes her lover. What was he thinking?

Steve Conley: I, I don't think he was, uh, he, he, at that point, he had worked counter intelligence for several years. He knew the drill. He knew about honey traps. And go back to your previous question. In retrospect, some of us believed that she really was working for the MSS from the beginning. There's no proof of that, but it was just, it was kind of hard to, to, to believe that she was this devout pro-communist Chinese uh, supporter and involved with the consulate, and JJ goes and interviews her a couple times and she decides she's just going to work with the FBI. 

Sasha Ingber: And there's also a second FBI agent Bill Cleveland, who also ends up sleeping with her. And I hate to ask it, but is this a thing? Do handlers sleep with their sources?

Steve Conley: So it does occasionally happen. You're warned about it from day one. In, in, in Quantico. There's two ways to get fired as an agent sleeping with sources or stealing money. And they know the drill. So Bill Cleveland was the case agent of Tiger Trap. That's how he met Katrina Leung. And it was several years later, according to Bill, around 1987 or so, when he started his relationship with her again because of the contacts in the Chinese community in LA and, and even in San Francisco.

She would consult with Bill up in San Francisco, which was an excuse for her to go up there. Eventually their relationship started and both claimed JJ and Bill both claimed they did not know about each other's relationship. 

Sasha Ingber: And what was JJ'S relationship like with Katrina, especially in the early days where he is presumably building up a professional relationship with her?

Steve Conley: Right. So there's, there's not a, a lot of information in the file. JJ was not pure when it came to administrative documentation, but what they did, and this was part of the the double agent operation that he created for her, that was code word Parlor maid, his excuse for being with her all the time, including at public events, was that she, he was her the FBI liaison for the protection of foreign officials because they were constantly having all these banquets and ceremonies, and he would go and be seen with her publicly and essentially hide in plain sight.

Now, nobody knew about the personal relationship. But if anybody asked, well, why is he here? Why is he always coming to these events? The excuse was, it's part of his job as the FBI's authority to protect foreign officials. And so they kind of used that professional excuse to be together all the time. And her, she was traveling back and forth at China at this point as part of the double agent operation.

So the debriefs would go on for days because she would bring back so much information on the people that she had met with, met and had talked to and, and because it was a double agent operation, she was being debriefed by the Chinese Intelligence Service, which provided us direct insight into what they wanted to know about the United States.

Sasha Ingber: And you said that she was able to get access to China that nobody else had? 

Steve Conley: Right. So the, the epitome of that, and what really cemented her status was in 1989 when Tiananmen Square happened. The student protests. Thousands of students come into Tiananmen Square and it starts to get a little violent. If you're old enough to remember, the tanks start rolling in, and that one businessman with his briefcase stands in front of the tanks to block them.

And then there's a blackout, complete media blackout. China forces out the Westerners, all the Western press, they take all their video, their pictures. Nobody knows what's happening. Now in China, almost nobody was allowed to travel in or outside of China. Except for Katrina, they let her travel back to Beijing.

While this was going on, she was able to go in, come back and tell us the revolution had failed and there was this big massacre and the, but the government is still in place when nobody else knew what was going on inside China at that time. So that cemented her status at the, the top of the heap as far as being the country's top source into China.

JJ starts sweeping these reports that are troubling under the rug, documenting suspicious behaviors. Can you give me some examples of what people had been reporting? 

Steve Conley: Yeah, so there, there are several red flags that start occurring about 1987 was the first documented one where she was picked up on an intercept calling an official at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco and telling him.

To call her from a payphone. The implication being that they could not talk on a consulate line. So a source reports that FBI headquarters gets that information and they send it out to JJ and they say, JJ take care of this. And there's no documentation, no information as to what happened or what JJ did, if anything.

So that that is a recurring theme. There were more compromises. There was a huge technical compromise in 1990 of something that's still classified. And again, a source reported that she was the one responsible for this compromise. But there's no documentation in the file as to what was done about it other than again, it was referred to JJ.

And in one of the communications, JJ actually says he, he denies that she was the source of the compromise because he didn't know about this technical operation. He actually says there's no way she could have known about it because he didn't know about it. That's how close they were, that he thought that she would share everything.

Well, to me, it indicates that he was telling her stuff. He was giving her information because he said that she didn't know about it because he didn't know about it, suggesting that if he knew about it, she would've known about it. So there was no follow up. Again, no documentation as to what was done. 

Sasha Ingber: This is a cautionary tale in the saying, love is blind.

Steve Conley: Right? Right. But again, nobody at this point is entertaining the, the idea that she's dirty or, or even jj, uh, could be compromised. And then there's, there's a big, the big red flag is in 1991 when there's another intercept. Bill Cleveland. Remember the, she's, she's had the guy she's having an affair with in San Francisco.

He was the case agent for Tiger Trip. He goes on an undercover mission along with another agent to ShenYang China, which is a little out of the way up in Northern China. And while he's there, they just, they see that they're under intense surveillance. Much more than expected. More than than usual. He goes into his hotel and in the lobby of his hotel, he gets bumped by Min Gwo Bao. The subject of Tiger Trap case, which is a signal assigned to for the the intelligence service to let them let them know that they know who they are and why they're there. He comes back to San Francisco. Trip is over. Then he gets this tech cut, an intercept of a conversation of a female calling herself Woe talking to a guy named Mao where she warns him about Bill Cleveland's impending travel beforehand. And she talks about three or four other FBI operations that were ongoing. So Bill goes and actually listens to the intercept and says, that's Katrina, with whom he now knows. We now know he know, knew her very well because he was having an affair with her.

Sasha Ingber: That's nuts. So what happens after that? 

Steve Conley: Uh, he calls JJ, JJ goes up and listens to it. He allegedly is, is dumbfounded. He had no, uh, no excuse to explain why that happened. There's this meeting at FBI headquarters about this phone call and about this compromise, and there's virtually no documentation on who was there or what happened other than it was decided that what we were gaining, what the FBI was gaining for her access was more important than what she had compromised.

So they recommended to let the Parlor Maid operation continue. 

Sasha Ingber: So there are still a lot of questions that remain in this case. How was Katrina able to share enough information to keep the FBI satiated while also ultimately protecting China's Ministry of State Security? 

Steve Conley: So on during the debriefs, and I can attest to this, when, when I took over, she provided voluminous information on people that she would go into, come into contact with.

Suggest this person may be of interest, this person may be of interest. You might wanna look at this person. This person's not worth it. I mean, literally she would come back with stacks of business cards that, that I would have to sit down and go through and JJ would have to sit down and go through and analyze and run the names and try to figure out who had a background or a job that was of interest to us.

And she would also tell us what she was asked by the MSS, so we knew what they were looking for. So again, it was voluminous information. It took a long time to do the debriefs and sometimes weeks to do the paperwork afterward to document it. So there was a lot of information coming in. And again, she had this status and, and it was all based on her status and her access.

Everybody deferred to JJ, everybody in the LA office completely deferred to JJ. They didn't wanna rock the boat. And then the, the officials at FBI headquarters that kept getting these, these reports every now and then from other sources that Katrina was a spy, including specific reports that she had a spy in the LA office, that she was in bed with the LA office, quote unquote, nobody took it.

Literally, nobody entertained the idea and it would always be referred to JJ and he would blow it off saying, ah, the source is just jealous. It's just infighting within the MSS. Without any explanation as to how he would know that or why. These independent sources in the MSS would know about each other.

'cause that shouldn't be happening either. 

Sasha Ingber: I mean, this almost sounds like the plot of a bad soap opera. When we come back, Steve explains how he got involved in the case and what ultimately became of Katrina and JJ.

And you end up working for JJ. You had been a surveillance specialist. You got moved into healthcare fraud. You had wanted to be in counterintelligence. JJ gives you a break in 1999. So you ended up getting involved in this case first without knowing it as a sort of participant. What was JJ like when you first met him before you knew anything that we're talking about today?

Steve Conley: You know, JJ was, he was very well liked throughout the office, especially on the squad. He was funny, uh, very personable. He was the agents supervisor. He, he had been an agent for so long, he became the supervisor of the squad in 1996, which by the way, gave him access to everything. He would, he would go to lunch with us.

And then when I got onto the squad, he said he was thinking about retiring and he, he did not want the Parlor Maid operation to go away because he thought it was too important. And so he started pitching it to me, asked me if I was interested. I said, yes. And he sold it to me really by saying, because I was a new agent and he said, you're writing your own ticket.

This is the golden ticket. This will make your career. You never have to do anything else, which sounded pretty good when you're, when you're a new agent, why do you think he chose you as opposed to the other counterintelligence agents who were in the LA office? I do believe in retrospect that he not only spotted, assessed and recruited me to take over the Parlor Maid operation. Knowing what we know now, it appears that he was really setting me up to replace him as her access to the FBI and to potentially be compromised. 

Sasha Ingber: So you agree and JJ introduces you to Katrina. What were your impressions of her and what was that first meeting like?

Steve Conley: Yeah, it was a little weird, honestly, because. Again, I'm a new agent, so I'm also not wanting to rock the boat and risk losing what appears to be a great operation. So he, he tells me that I have to meet with her and basically says that she has to agree, she has to approve me, that she has to be able to feel like she can work with me.

And so we go to lunch and myself, JJ, and Katrina and another agent from the office who they knew. And it was really, it felt like almost like an audition, but I was being asked more questions that I was asking her, and it should have been the other way around. The source should not be controlling the operation.

Uh, but she was very, very intelligent. You could tell that from the get go. Very smart. And she was controlling. She, she kind of ran the meeting and the, the brief, sometimes she tried to control where they would go and who we talked about. And she liked being in charge. That was clear. But also very engaging.

She knew how to talk to people and how to get people to open up and talk to her. Uh, so it's, it's not surprising that to me that she was able to gain the access that she had, not only within China, but to a couple FBI agents here in the States. 

Steve Conley: When you finally end up being her handler, is she giving anything of value?

Steve Conley: Yeah, I didn't think so. I started questioning, what am I gaining? What are we really gaining from this information? Because I'm spinning my wheels here and there's a, again, a lot of stacks of business cards, long list of people that she's telling us that we should be interested in, but they never seem to go anywhere.

There's no real bang for the buck that I can see. And then I, my name now is going on the payments. We were paying her a ton of money. And again, I'm looking at the itemized list of things that we were paying for, and I'm just questioning why are we doing this? So I, I start going through the file more in depth, which at that point was about 18 years worth of Parlor Maid files, and I start coming across these reported anomalies and there was no resolution to them.

And going through the years, okay, she reported on this, what happened? There's no documentation that it went anywhere. So I start raising those concerns with FBI headquarters. 

Sasha Ingber: What does headquarters say? 

Steve Conley:Uh, basically that I should just keep things the way they were and stop asking questions. Now, what I didn't know was that FBI headquarters at that point was suspicious of her, and they were starting to look into her.

Sasha Ingber: So you kind of take matters into your own hands here because you were describing how you talked to FBI headquarters. They're saying it's fine, just keep going. But she hasn't been polygraphed in decades since 1986. So you tell her that she needs to be polygraphed again, and that headquarters said this.

This is something that you made up. You took it upon yourself too. Say this? What happened after that? 

Steve Conley: Yeah, so when I'm going through the file, I see she had only been polygraphed twice, 1984, 1986, and it was a very basic polygraph, nothing like we have to do now. And I see that as an opportunity. I, I tell her, I say, you know, headquarters is, wants me to be a little more administratively pure.

We need to get back to the way things should be administratively. It's been so long since you had a polygraph. I just need you to knock one out. Her response was, I quit, which is a huge red flag. But I was happy, quite frankly. I went back and called headquarters and said, you know what I, I was trying to be administratively pure.

It was time for a polygraph. So I told her she needed to take a polygraph and she quit. So I'm gonna be closing the case. 

Sasha Ingber: What does headquarters say to you? 

Steve Conley: Everything kind of exploded at that point. A lot of yelling. A lot of screaming. We told you not to rock the boat. Uh, so. They send people out to Los Angeles and they polygraph a bunch of us on the squad.

There were people at FBI headquarters that thought there was a spy ring in the LA office. They thought there were multiple compromised agents and my name had come up because I'm, I was her handler. And so I, I passed the polygraph and they decide to brief me in because I gotta get, I gotta make things right and get her back on board because.

I'm the access to her for the FBI now kind of a role reversal because of their investigation into her, they can task me with information that I need to solicit from her for purposes of the espionage investigation. 

Sasha Ingber: So now the FBI knows that you are not part of a potential spying. They know they can trust you in this. How do you bring Katrina back and how are you going to handle her now that she's said that she's quit? 

Steve Conley: Yeah, so I just, I go back to her and I said, you know what? I talked to FBI headquarters. I talked them off the cliff. You're, you're too important. I played up to her ego. You're too important. You, we can't let this operation go away.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna waive the polygraph. I'm gonna get them to back down. Let's just go back to the way things were and we did, hopefully, from her point of view. Now, my direction at that time was that I could not, again, throughout J J's entire tenure, he ran everything by her. He had the agents on the squad run all their cases by her and people.

They were potentially looking at his sources. So she would have access to all this information. Now, I had to take over this operation and I was told to not give her any information about cases, don't talk to her about any people that we're interested in, and that could raise its own red flag to her. So now you have to start making things up to make it seem like everything is just normal.

Right? So the second part of of my instruction was. Don't let her know that anything's changed. So yeah, I just, I had to make stuff up and started just going back and looking at old stuff that was determined to not be important and really kind of string her along. And a couple times she actually asked, she said, you know what?

You don't seem to be asking me about as much as, as JJ used to. And I would just do some sort of little song and dance and say, well, our focus is switched to, to this technology or to this policy, or whatever the case may be. But it was all I, I was now running a fake DA operation, double agent operation.

For purposes of the investigation into her, I was still the double agent operation case agent. I was still her handling agent and pursuant to the espionage investigation into her, we get court approved FISA coverage of her in her hotel room one night in Los Angeles and JJ shows up and now we have evidence that there's a sexual relationship there.

And that he's compromised. 

Sasha Ingber: Now we're talking about the sex video. 

Steve Conley: Correct. So even though we had all these warnings and all these flags throughout the last decade, nobody entertained the idea that JJ was actually compromised, that he was dirty at, at worst. He was inadvertently giving up information through their briefs because they were so close, which is not okay, but nobody wanted to.

To consider that he, he was compromised. So now my, my former boss and my, my mentor, the guy who recruited me to take over this operation we now know is compromised and I'm brought into this task force that was set up to investigate Katrina. Now they open up at the espionage investigation on JJ Smith, but they're still afraid there's a spy ring and they don't wanna bring anybody new into the fold. 

Sasha Ingber: And I'm gonna stop you there for a second. You're still a new agent here. Are you going home and ever wondering, am I in over my head? I mean, this is not your average FBI gig. 

Steve Conley: Yeah, it was, um, it was pretty tough for a while and especially when we, we saw that JJ was compromised. Like I said, he was, he was beloved.

He was a friend. You know, I met his family. I had gone out to to, to dinner and stuff like that. Then the realization sets in that, well, maybe. Maybe that was part of the plan. Maybe that was by design and I was being set up. There is documentation where the FBI thought that I might be a spy, and you start questioning everything that you've done for the last, last couple years.

Sasha Ingber: None of that can feel good. You're describing layers of betrayal here that go against you personally as, as well as the security of the United States. When did the ruse for JJ begin after seeing that video? 

Steve Conley: Yeah, it wasn't too long after that. They open up the case and they, they actually, they make me the case agent on JJ.

Like I would do a debrief of Katrina and then he would come and go out to lunch with us, because now I'm also trying to get information from him. Pursuant to my espionage investigation on him and I'm working, they call it light cover. It was really just documenting financial stuff, travel stuff, going back and actually trying to determine what he really knew.

What did he know about? Because we had to assume whatever JJ knew about, he told her and she compromised it.

Sasha Ingber: And things really take a turn. When JJ tells you, I'm bored, maybe I should come back. 

Steve Conley: Right. So one of the briefs, he goes out for a smoke break. I go out with him and he tells me he's, he's, he's tired, he's bored.

He doesn't wanna be retired anymore. He asked me, is there any possibility of me getting a contractor job with the FBI? So I go back and, and I start coming up with this plan to give him a job offer, and we come up with this ruse job offer and we jump through some hoops and we get him to agree to come in for an interview.

Was somebody he didn't know and they ask him questions that we still had some gaps of intel on his financials and his travel. And by the way, this position requires a clearance. You're gonna have to take a polygraph to get your clearance back, which he agrees to. So he goes into the interview, provides the information, agrees to take the polygraph, he goes into the polygraph and fails it miserably.

No question. And we knew he would. So we had agents standing outside the door ready to start interviewing JJ at that point about, about Katrina and what they had done for the last 18 years. 

Sasha Ingber: At that point, what did JJ and Katrina say in their confessions? 

Steve Conley: So, numerous interviews, JJ admitted that he told her more than he should have, that anything that she compromised she got from him.

But he, again, he, so he says that not knowing. She was sleeping with Bill Cleveland. Now, bill passed his polygraph. There's no evidence that Bill compromised anything, but there's no way JJ could know who else she had compromised or who else she was getting information from. But he took it all on on onto him and said that whatever she got was from him and she admitted that she was taking information from him.

She was writing down notes. Another big, huge red flag. The debriefs were at her house. And he would go to her house and her husband who knew about the relationship, uh, the professional relationship would just leave and they would have the house to themselves. So they would have sex or whatever, and, and then he would get jump in the shower or go out for a smoke break, and she would look in his briefcase and take documents and either write notes down or copy 'em.

She had a fax machine copy right there in her kitchen, and she would copy 'em and put 'em back in his briefcase. She claimed that he did not know about that she, he did not realize that she was doing that. Her, her quote, I think was something along the lines of, I think I sneaked it. And then she went on to admit that she would do that and, and pass that information on to the MSS without JJ's knowledge

Sasha Ingber: And she admitted to passing it on to the MSS.What were some of the worst things that Katrina stole and gave to the Chinese? 

Steve Conley: So one of the big, big things that she did, uh, it doesn't seem big, but it, it really is a major, uh, in intelligence gap for, for the MSS in, in China are our identities. The, the identities of FBI agents who work Chinese counterintelligence matters so they can create countermeasure, that kind of thing.

So she clearly did that. We know she did that because we searched her luggage traveling back and forth to China pursuant to the espionage investigations, and there were pictures of agents that she had taken over that did not come back. She did with me. My picture was in one. There were documents. She, she voluntarily let us, let us search her house.

And, and we, we, we found documents, uh, squad, telephone lists, telephone lists, uh, documents regarding the Tourist investigation, which was another espionage investigation. Documents regarding, this was a secret, if not top secret, I think it was secret document regarding Chinese fugitives people that the Chinese were looking for, that they were gonna execute.

They were dissidents or they were defectors or something along those lines. She had a, she had one of those documents and it was still classified. It was the actual document or copy of it. And in her safe, we found it was a five page document with, which was the excerpts. From that 1991 intercept where she compromised Bill Cleveland's travel, so FBI operations, absolutely FBI, technical operations.

Technical sources. We know she compromised at least a couple of those. It's believed maybe more. We know that she definitely influenced those investigations because they were run by her, either by by JJ or someone else on the squad who said, Hey, I've got an legal tech transfer case in Monterey Park. Do you know this company or do you know this person?

Well, then she could go back and tell them, you need to leave. You need to get outta the country now, or you need to lay low and disrupt the investigation.

Sasha Ingber: That way what you're describing is incredibly damaging from this person who is supposed to be the FBI's top source on China, but this case wasn't ultimately prosecuted. Why? 

Steve Conley: It was the perfect storm of events we had. United States attorney's office office did not have anybody in the office that had experience working espionage. The district court judge that we got came in on the very first hearing, the very first day and, and made statements along the lines of, I know the FBI tends to, to persecute these poor Chinese people.

This better be good. And that kind of set the tone for, for the rest of the, the legal wrangling. Um. Ultimately it came down to gray mail. Gray mail is when the defense threatens to expose classified information at trial and make it publicly available, thereby endangering operations or the lives of sources. If we wanted to prosecute and go to trial, we were gonna have to expose those sources, which we weren't going to do

Sasha Ingber: And then what was the ultimate consequence for them? 

Steve Conley: So JJ uh, was prosecuted for 1001 violation. That's lying to the FBI during a formal investigation or on FBI paperwork. So throughout the years, he had document, we had to do these source evaluations.

He had documented that she was reliable. There were no warnings or red flags that there were problems. Those were all lies. He got a $10,000 fine and, uh, I think some community service 

Sasha Ingber: total slap on the wrist. 

Steve Conley: Uh, not even that right Katrina. So at, at least during one of the interviews, one that she was in, at the end of the interview, they turn off the, the recorder.

They turn off the camera, her case agent's walking her out of the building and she says, you know what? Wouldn't it be better if I just disappeared? If you just gave me back my passport, I go away. This all goes away. There's no big FBI embarrassment. There's, you know, it's better for me. My, my family not realizing that her case agent still had his, his wire on.

So the, the district court judge was not able to throw that out. She had to have Katrina help without bail when she was arrested because she was a flight risk. So her punishment, her only real punishment, she got $10,000 fine and, and probation was the three months that she served. While she was held without bail, she was not prosecuted for an espionage related, uh, charge because of J'S plea agreement.

There was a clause in the plea agreement that the defense attorneys interpreted to mean that JJ could not talk to Katrina or her attorneys. That's not what it meant, that that wasn't the purpose of it. But the judge went along with it and she dismissed everything against Katrina. 

Sasha Ingber: So what did that do to morale at the FBI And what kind of message does that send to spies from China after this all goes down?

Steve Conley: Yeah, so morale was, was, was, was not good. I don't know that within the intelligence community we ever did really regain a whole lot of credibility within the China program. It was a long time, new rules were implemented and the old rules that existed that were just, just weren't being enforced yet now, they were absolutely being enforced, um, because of 'cause of Katrina Leung and JJ Smith.

Sasha Ingber: Okay, last question. What happened to Katrina and JJ? Where are they now? 

Steve Conley: So as, as Word has it, they, uh, they waited a while after the, the plea agreements were done. They both divorced their respective spouses and then they ran off to Hong Kong together and got married. They lived there a while, and then they came back to Los Angeles.

And the last I heard as recently as a couple weeks ago, they were living in Northern California, outside San Francisco somewhere. 

Sasha Ingber: What a story. We're gonna have to leave it here. It's strange to end it on it. And they lived happily ever after. 

Steve Conley: Yep. 

Sasha Ingber: But in a way, I sort of feel like that's where we're leaving it.

Steve Conley, thank you so much for coming on Spycast. 

Steve Conley: Thanks for having me. 

Sasha Ingber: Thanks for listening to this episode of spycast. If you like the episode, give us a follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a rating or review. It really helps if you have any feedback or you wanna hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email at spycast at spy museum dot. org. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and the show is brought to you by N2K Networks, goat Rodeo, and the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.