A hero for the 21st century
Jon Carroll

Let us raise our glasses today to Katrina Leung, the woman whom all men want to know and who all women want to be. She has the power to cloud men's minds and then steal their secrets. And then apologize for it, and do it again.

And again.

She also made close to $2 million off the deal, most of it coming from the FBI but $100,000 of it coming from the Chinese government. In the '80s, it would appear, she became a highly paid spy because former Chinese President Yang Shangkun "liked her."

I am assuming here that Yang Shangkun "liked" Katrina Leung in the sense that FBI agent James J. Smith "liked" her. Smith enjoyed carnal liking with Leung, and it's safe to say that goal-oriented liking was one of her favorite tactics.

Leung was apparently a double agent for both the FBI and the Chinese since 1982. She told neither side of her work for the other, and it is unclear where her loyalties lay, if indeed loyalty was part of the dynamic.

Sometime between 1982 and 1991, Leung started her affair with Smith and also started to extract secret documents from his briefcase, microfilm them and pass them on to the Chinese.

For reasons not entirely clear, in 1991 Leung admitted to Smith that she had stolen his secrets and had blown the cover of two FBI agents who had traveled to China. The Chinese had them followed but did not injure them.

So what did Smith do? You're gonna love this. Did he turn Leung in? No. Did he stop having carnal liking with her? No. He flew with Katrina Leung to San Francisco, where she met with one of the two agents whose cover she had blown and apologized to him.

Her apologies were so effective that the agent, William Cleveland, also started having an affair with her. This is a very fine story. It seems that neither of the two agents knew that the other was (a) engaged in secret liking and (b) continuing to have secrets lifted from his pocket or glove compartment or wherever the hell he was keeping them.

Imagine Smith's mind-set. Yeah, we know she stole secrets, but that's all behind her. She promised me. I'll just do what I did before -- take my secrets to Katrina's and lay my burden down. And Cleveland! Spend some time inside his head: OK, so she tried to have me killed; on the other hand, she's got nice eyes.

Are you smelling instant movie of the week? I sure am.

Cleveland later quit the FBI and took a job as head of security at the Lawrence Livermore Labs. This career change probably suited Leung just fine. There are secrets at Lawrence Livermore too, and now the Chinese have some of them. It does make you worry about the employee screening process both at the LLL and the FBI. I mean, if they'd been Arab guys who'd outstayed their visas, we'd be all over them like white on milk.

Here's the beauty part. This little arrangement continued, the liking and the stealing and the unauthorized trips to China, until this year, when Katrina Leung was 49 years old. Anybody can be a backstabbing double-crossing sex goddess, but a 49-year-old backstabbing double-crossing sex goddess -- well, it gives us all hope, doesn't it?

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Here is the picture of, to quote Warren Ellis, the inscrutable Intelligence Slut Mom: