1. Charles B. Hunt to Alan T. Waterman, 25 January 1954, in NAS: Agencies and Departments 1953: National Science Foundation: General, Archives of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.

2. On the idea of modern bureaucracy as an arena of technical command and rationalization, see Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 2, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. (Berkeley, 1978; this edition originally published by Bedminster Press, 1968), chap. 11. As Weber put it, “Bureaucracy is the means of transforming social action into rationally organized action” (987).

3. Richard Hofstadter, “Introduction,” The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York, 1967; originally published 1964), viii–x.

4. On rumor and its dynamics, Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, 2000), has become the standard reference. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), while concerned with a larger repertoire of “backstage discourse” and not just rumor, is also foundational. In addition, see Bastian, Misty L., “Fires, Tricksters, and Poisoned Medicines: Popular Cultures of Rumor in Onitsha, Nigeria and Its Markets,” Etnofoor 11 (1998): 111–32;Google Scholar Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela, Ndonko, Flavien T., and Schmidt-Ehry, Bergis, “Sterilizing Vaccines or the Politics of the Womb: Retrospective Study of a Rumor in Cameroon,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14 (June 2000): 159–79;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Christine Deslaurier, “La rumeur du cachet au Burundi (1960–61): Essai d’interprétation d’une conversation nationale sur le politique,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 45 (2005): 545–72; Langlois, Janet L., “‘Celebrating Arabs’: Tracing Legend and Rumor Labyrinths in Post-9/11 Detroit,” Journal of American Folklore 118 (Spring 2005): 219–36Google Scholar; Smith, S. A., “Talking Toads and Chinless Ghosts: The Politics of ‘Superstitious’ Rumors in the People’s Republic of China, 1961–1965,” American Historical Review 111 (April 2006): 405–27Google Scholar; and Bubandt, Nils, “Rumors, Pamphlets, and the Politics of Paranoia in Indonesia,” Journal of Asian Studies 67 (August 2008): 789–817Google Scholar. In his famous essay on “the paranoid style,” Hofstadter also commented on conspiratorial explanations as a response of the otherwise disempowered. Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, 39.

5. Deslaurier, “La rumeur du cachet au Burundi,” 546; Holquist, Peter, “What’s So Revolutionary about the Russian Revolution? State Practices and the New-Style Politics, 1914–21,” in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. Hoffmann, David L. and Kotsonis, Yanni (New York, 2000), 87–111.Google Scholar

6. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 14.

7. Bayly, C. A., Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1999), esp. chaps. 1, 2, and 4 (quotations on 167 and 365)Google Scholar. On legibility and the state’s use of censuses, cadastral surveys, and other classic tools of modern statecraft to “see” society, consult Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1995).Google Scholar

8. Freeman, Joanne B., Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, 2001)Google Scholar.

9. Ibid., 91–99.

10. Lauer, Josh, “From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in Nineteenth-Century America,” Technology and Culture 49 (April 2008): 301–24 (305).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Ibid., quotation on 309.

12. Ibid., quotation on 322.

13. McCoy, Alfred W., Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, 2009), 16, 21–23.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., chaps. 2 and 3 (quotations on 97 and 106). For a more compact version of McCoy’s argument about policing, surveillance, and their power in the Philippines, see McCoy, Alfred W., “Policing the Imperial Periphery: Philippine Pacification and the Rise of the U.S. National Security State,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, ed. McCoy, Alfred W. and Scarano, Francisco A. (Madison, 2009), 106–15Google Scholar. On gossip as a form of information that informed U.S. foreign policy, see also Molly M. Wood’s account of foreign service officers’ wives and their information-gathering functions: Wood, “‘Commanding Beauty’ and ‘Gentle Charm’: American Women and Gender in the Early Twentieth-Century Foreign Service,” Diplomatic History 31 (June 2007): 505–30 (521–24). Elsewhere, Andrea Friedman has explored the Cold War politics of sexual innuendo that Joseph McCarthy both exploited and fell victim to. Friedman, Andrea, “The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics,” American Quarterly 57 (December 2005): 1105–29Google Scholar. One could easily translate Friedman’s account into the analytical terms that McCoy has described.

15. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire, chap. 9.

16. On this point, see ibid., 12. John Krige has also recently commented on scholars’ failure to recognize the significance of the national security state in the regulation of research in science and engineering fields. Krige, “Regulating the Academic ‘Marketplace of Ideas’: Commercialization, Export Controls, and Counterintelligence,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 1 (2015): 1–24.

17. Association of Oak Ridge Engineers and Scientists, “Security Bulletin” 2, no. 2, published in “The Charges Presented in Oak Ridge Cases,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 4 (July 1948): 196. For a more extensive account of events at Oak Ridge and scientists’ responses, see Wang, Jessica, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, 1999), chap. 5.Google Scholar

18. On the structure and workings of the different bureaucratic systems that governed loyalty and security investigations of scientists at the federal level, see Gellhorn, Walter, Security, Loyalty, and Science (Ithaca, 1950), esp. chaps. 4 and 6.Google Scholar

19. On the Cold War FBI’s informational capacities and Hoover’s ability to cultivate an image of professional neutrality for the FBI while simultaneously exploiting political dirt by passing it to like-minded allies, see Theoharis, Athan G. and Cox, John Stuart, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia, 1988)Google Scholar; and O’Reilly, Kenneth, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia, 1983), chaps. 3–7.Google Scholar

20. The division of investigative labor between the FBI and the AEC is detailed in Gellhorn, Security, Loyalty, and Science, 82–85.

21. The bracketed observations and italics in this passage are, of course, my own.

22. I have written elsewhere at length about the FBI’s confidential informants and the sociology of distrust that their activities generated. See Wang, Jessica, “Scientists and the Problem of the Public in Cold War America, 1945–1960,” in Osiris, 2nd series, vol. 17, Science and Civil Society, ed. Broman, Thomas H. and Nyhart, Lynn K. (2002), 323–47Google Scholar; and Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety, chap. 2. On the unsettling effects of security-clearance denials on individuals, see American Science in an Age of Anxiety, chap. 3.

23. Davies, T. H., “Security Risk Cases—A Vexed Question,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 4 (July 1948): 193.Google Scholar

24. David E. Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, vol. 2, The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950 (New York, 1964), 233, for the quotation; Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety, 160–61, on Lilienthal’s general antipathy toward security proceedings.

25. Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety, chap. 6.

26. Knoxville lawyer S. Frank Fowler, quoted in Stephen White, “Report on Oak Ridge Hearings,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 4 (July 1948): 194–96 (196).

27. Gellhorn, Security, Loyalty, and Science, 90.

28. Memorandum, D. M. Ladd to the Director, 24 September 1946, p. 1, FBI HQ 100-344452-1, vol. 5, FBI file on the Federation of American Scientists, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C. Hoover penned his comment in the margins.

29. Recent studies have called into question both this notion of selfhood and the idea of its accessibility through written texts and other outward manifestations. See, for example, Rebecca Earle, “Introduction: Letters, Writers, and the Historian,” and Carolyn Steedman, “A Woman Writing a Letter,” both in Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945, ed. Rebecca Earle (Aldershot, England, 1999), 1–12 and 111–33, respectively; Shamir, Milette, Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature (Philadelphia, 2006), esp. 47–48 and 65–67Google Scholar; and Stoler, Ann Laura, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, 2009), 276–78Google Scholar.

30. Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety, 228–30; Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston, 1949)Google Scholar; Johnson, David K., The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago, 2004), introduction, esp. 8–9Google Scholar; Pells, Richard H., The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York, 1985), esp. chaps. 2 and 5Google Scholar; Gillon, Steven M., Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947–1985 (New York, 1985)Google Scholar.

31. On the tendency of the surveillance state to identify civil rights activism with subversion, see Caute, David, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York, 1978), 166–68Google Scholar; Whitfield, Stephen J., The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, 1991), 20–23Google Scholar; and Powers, Richard Gid, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York, 1987), 323–25Google Scholar. As Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox have noted, “The FBI tapped and bugged virtually every civil rights organization challenging racial segregation or seeking to promote equal rights for black Americans.” Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, 10.

32. Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety, 102–14 (112). One could see in Vought’s appeal to American-ness what James C. Scott once termed part of the public transcript of “public performances of deference and loyalty.” Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 17. In later years, someone in Vought’s position would not have received a hearing, since the point would have been moot given his acceptance of another job outside the AEC’s purview. But in 1948, the formative status of the AEC’s security-clearance procedures allowed greater flexibility, and Vought earned the retrospective vindication that “your employment on work of a classified nature would not have endangered the common defense and security.” Letter from John E. Gingrich, director of AEC security, to Robert H. Vought, 3 February 1949, quoted in Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety, 114.

33. Hill, David L., Rabinowitch, Eugene, and Simpson, John A. Jr., “The Atomic Scientists Speak Up: Nuclear Physicists Say There Is No Secrecy in Atomic Bomb and No Defense Against It,” Life 19 (29 October 1945): 45–46 (45), 48Google Scholar. On the vital secret mentality and scientists’ critique of it, see also Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety, 17–18 and 21–25.

34. Wellerstein, Alex, “A Tale of Openness and Secrecy: The Philadelphia Story,” Physics Today 65 (May 2012): 47–53;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb: Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, 1939–2008” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2008), 237–45. William E. Stephens was Robert H. Vought’s dissertation adviser, and Vought participated in the project. Although the 1945 seminar series did not feature in the AEC’s list of charges in Vought’s 1948 security-clearance hearing, it did dominate a significant part of the discussion at the hearing itself. Jessica Wang, “American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Civil Liberties, and the Cold War, 1945–1950” (Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995), 159–60.

35. Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb,” Part III; and Wellerstein, “A Tale of Openness and Secrecy.” Physicist Kenneth W. Ford’s recent memoir on his role in developing the hydrogen bomb has sparked yet another debate over the release of technical information from the early Cold War period, in this case forms of information deemed by the state to be sensitive and best not talked about, even though they are not actually classified. William J. Broad, “Hydrogen Bomb Physicist’s Book Runs Afoul of Energy Department,” New York Times (electronic edition), 23 March 2015.

36. Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb,” quotations on 6 and 11–12, respectively. See p. 18 for the number of classified documents within the AEC by 1954.

37. House, 79th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record (16 July 1946), vol. 92, pt. 7: 9252. On the vital secret mentality and congressional attitudes toward atomic secrecy, see also Harry S. Hall, “Congressional Attitudes Toward Science and Scientists: A Study of Legislative Reactions to Atomic Energy and the Political Participation of Scientists” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1961); published New York, 1979.

38. The Atomic City, directed by Jerry Hopper, 1952; Paramount Pictures, available on streaming video via Amazon.com (March 2015).

39. On the realities of Soviet espionage, see, for example, John E. Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (Chicago, 1996); and Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York, 1995).

40. For example, the opening chapter of the report presented a cartoonish image of China as a purely totalitarian state, strictly regulated by the centralized control of the Communist Party and fiercely dedicated to building its military capabilities. The privatization of China’s civilian economy, the Cox committee argued, served not the cause of liberalization, but constituted merely an adjunct to the Communist Party’s military objectives. As the report boldly proclaimed, “The CCP’s main aim for the civilian economy is to support the building of modern military weapons and to support the aims of the PLA [People’s Liberation Army].” Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China, “Report of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China,” declassified version, vol. 1, 105th Cong., 2nd sess., 25 May 1999, 3 vols., chap. 1, quotation on 5 (hereafter cited as Cox report).

The committee also hinted darkly at China’s expansionist goals, citing “territorial ambitions” with respect to Taiwan, the Senkaku Islands, and the Paracel Islands. The report even described Hong Kong as “absorbed by the PRC” and noted that “PLA garrisons took control of the region,” as if Hong Kong had been subjected to a military takeover and annexation, and not a legal transfer of power based upon the end of Great Britain’s ninety-nine-year lease over the territory and the return of full sovereignty to China. Cox report, 19 and 48.

Harvard University political scientist Alastair Iain Johnston attacked the Cox report for its “highly distorted and poorly researched picture of the nature of politics and policy-making in China.” Alastair Iain Johnston, “The Cox Report on Governance and Policy in China: Problems of Fact, Evidence, and Inference,” in The Cox Committee Report: An Assessment, ed. M. M. May, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, December 1999, p. 22, http://iis-db.stanford.edu/pubs/10331/cox.pdf (accessed February 2016). See 21–43 for Johnston’s full analysis. For other criticisms of the Cox report, see Krige, John, Callahan, Angelina Long, and Maharaj, Ashok, NASA in the World: Fifty Years of International Collaboration in Space (New York, 2013), 274–75.Google Scholar

41. On the Cox committee’s political origins, see Jeff Gerth and Tim Weiner, “Tracking Suspicions About China’s Atom Spying,” New York Times, 23 May 1999, 1.

42. Scholars in Asian American studies invoke the “perpetual foreigner stereotype” to denote the long-established hold over the American imagination, from the nineteenth century to the present, of the idea of ethnic Asians as racially Other, fundamentally unassimilable, and never truly American, no matter how many generations their families have been in the United States. See, for example, Wu, Frank H., Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White (New York, 2002), chap. 3.Google Scholar

43. Cox report, 1:xxxiv.

44. Ibid., 1:xxxv, 30, and 80, respectively. In another example of the report’s tendency to conflate the violation of official secrecy with legal and appropriate access to open information, consider the committee’s observation that Peter H. Lee, a Chinese American scientist at the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories who pled guilty in 1997 on charges of furnishing China with classified information, also “gave the PRC unclassified technical reports upon request.” Cox report, 1:81.

45. Thomas, J. Parnell, “Russia Grabs Our Inventions,” American Magazine 143 (June 1947), 18Google Scholar.

46. Cox report, 1:2.

47. Ibid., 1:vi.

48. Holloway, David, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (Stanford, 1994), 138–41 and 222–23.Google Scholar

49. As the prominent physicist and government adviser Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky remarked in a critique of the Cox report, “‘security by restriction’ . . . ultimately is a perishable commodity.” Panofsky, “A Critique of the Cox Report Allegations of Theft of Sensitive U.S. Nuclear Weapons Information,” in May, ed., The Cox Committee Report: An Assessment, 57.

50. “Key Findings: The Intelligence Community Damage Assessment on the Implications of China’s Acquisition of US Nuclear Weapons Information on the Development of Future Chinese Weapons,” 21 April 1999, available through the website of the Federation of American Scientists: http://fas.org/sgp/news/dci042199.html (accessed February 2016).

51. Johnston, 33–35, summarizes Chinese nuclear doctrine; Panofsky, 51–56, discusses Chinese nuclear strategy and the current size of the PRC’s arsenal; “Key Findings: The Intelligence Community Damage Assessment” notes that “China has had the technical capability to develop a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) system for its large, currently deployed ICBM for many years, but has not done so.”

52. Kristensen, Hans M. and Norris, Robert S., “Nuclear Notebook: Chinese Nuclear Forces, 2013,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 69 (2013): 79–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire, chap. 9.

54. The question of anti-Semitism and cultural tendencies to identify Jewishness with leftism has been a recurrent leitmotif in historical studies of American anticommunism, and examples are too numerous to list here. Observers in the 1940s and 1950s, such as the scientists who worried about suspensions in 1953 at the Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, that disproportionately affected Jewish personnel, certainly perceived such attitudes at work. Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety, 263–64. As Richard Pells has noted, American intellectuals in the post–World War II period also identified the roots of popular anticommunism in a nativist tradition of anti-Semitism dating back to the 1890s, and Stuart Svonkin has described the early Cold War emergence of Jewish anticommunism in response to embedded cultural stereotypes in the United States that associated Jews with communism. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, 334–36; and Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York, 1997), chap. 5, esp. 113–14.

At the same time, although ethnicity was interwoven with both leftist politics and the anticommunist political response, the casting of the Cold War as a grand ideological struggle tempered significantly the ethnic dimensions of Cold War anticommunism. As the bulk of historical accounts makes clear, anticommunism in the 1940s and 1950s cut a wide swath across American society in a crusade focused more on political than ethnic categories. In addition, the Cold War resurgence of anticommunism took place in the context of a dramatic decline in institutionalized anti-Semitism and waning anti-Semitic attitudes in the aftermath of World War II. Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York, 1994), chap. 8. As a measure of the changed cultural environment in the immediate postwar decades, Dinnerstein notes, “Even the association of Jews with communism failed to ignite popular imagination” (164).

55. Here I have in mind the ubiquity of cultural codes that identify Arabs as potential terrorists amid the anxieties of the post-9/11 world, coupled with the rumblings of anti-Chinese stereotyping as part of American insecurity in the face of reconfigurations in global geopolitics signified by China’s rapid economic growth in recent decades.

56. The distinctiveness of such methods is debatable. In recruiting American Communist Party members for espionage, the Soviet Union employed a similar strategy in the 1930s and 1940s. The Soviet Union, Israel, and other nations have also used the simpler expedient of money to recruit outsiders from their intelligence establishments for espionage. Also, as is well known, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI gathered domestic intelligence by cultivating a large network of ordinary citizens as informers.

57. Cox report, 1:2 and 28.

58. Ibid., 1:41.

59. Ibid., 1:21. In addition to dealing with the case of Peter H. Lee, the report also discussed the cases of Johnny Chung, Charlie Trie, and John Huang, three Chinese Americans who were best known as Democratic political operatives who had embarrassed the party and the Clinton administration by engaging in illegal fund-raising efforts. The Cox committee also implied, without evidence, that the three men had passed classified information to China or otherwise improperly assisted the PRC in acquiring advanced technology. Cox report, 1:23–25; 2:87–88; and 3:73–76.

60. Chang, Iris, Thread of the Silkworm (New York, 1995), chaps. 15–22.Google Scholar

61. Cox report, 1:178. The Cox report based much of its analysis of the Qian case on Chang’s biography, and Chang later accused the committee of misusing her work. Johnston, “The Cox Report on Governance and Policy in China,” 36.

62. As Richard Hofstadter noted in his analysis of the “paranoid style,” “Style has to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content.” Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” 5. On the social workings of rumor and gossip, see White, Speaking with Vampires, esp. chap. 2. Mary S. Morgan has proposed the evocative notion of “travelling facts” as a way to think about how and why certain bits of knowledge circulate and find audiences. Morgan, “Travelling Facts,” in How Well Do Facts Travel? The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge, ed. Peter Howlett and Mary S. Morgan (New York, 2011). Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger have also pointed out that scholars have devoted much energy to studying the construction of knowledge but paid little attention to the production of ignorance, and they have coined the term “agnotology” for what they hope will become a new field of inquiry. Proctor and Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, 2008). Although I want to avoid conflating vernacular knowledge with ignorance and all of the normative judgments that the latter implies, the notion of agnotology offers possibilities for understanding the mechanisms by which vernacular forms of knowledge gain credibility.

63. Nick Anderson, “Spy Scare Taints Labs’ Atmosphere, Asian Americans Say,” Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1999, A12; and Bob Drogin, “Asian American Lab Employees Fear Repercussions of Spy Inquiries,” Los Angeles Times, 12 June 1999, A10.

64. The so-called “walk-in” agent’s motivations are unknown. For speculation, see Glenn R. Simpson, “Lack of Evidence Leaves Uncertainty on the Depth of Chinese Spying Case,” Wall Street Journal, 26 May 1999; and “The Errors at Los Alamos,” Boston Globe, 26 September 1999, E6. Robert Scheer later reported that the CIA believed the “walk-in” was a double agent who wanted to send a signal, possibly to Taiwan, that China intended to upgrade its nuclear capabilities. Scheer, Robert, “No Defense: How the New York Times Convicted Wen Ho Lee,” The Nation 271 (23 October 2000): 11–20 (16).Google Scholar

65. Quoted in Vernon Loeb, “Ex-Official: Bomb Lab Case Lacks Evidence,” Washington Post, 17 August 1999, A7. Vrooman’s statement may have been self-serving since he was under attack from the Department of Energy for mishandling the Lee case during his tenure at Los Alamos, but it was also suggestive given subsequent developments in the W-88 investigation. Vrooman also repeated his allegation of racial profiling in a sworn affidavit submitted for Lee’s bail hearing in the summer of 2000, and Charles Washington, former acting director of counterintelligence at the Department of Energy, backed that charge in another affidavit. Scheer, “No Defense,” 18–19. In addition, Paul D. Moore, a former counterintelligence agent with the FBI, acknowledged the use of racial profiling in the FBI’s investigations of Chinese espionage. Vernon Loeb, “Espionage Stir Alienating Foreign Scientists in U.S.,” Washington Post, 25 November 1999, G1.

66. Bob Drogin, “FBI to Open New, Expanded Probe of China Spy Case,” Los Angeles Times, 23 September 1999, A1; Drogin, “Lack of Evidence Led to Wider China Spy Inquiry,” Los Angeles Times, 3 October 1999, A34; and “China Spy Probe Focus Shifts from Los Alamos,” Atlanta Constitution, 20 November 1999, 2C.

67. Scheer, “No Defense,” 11–12; Kim, Miriam, “Discrimination in the Wen Ho Lee Case: Reinterpreting the Intent Requirement in Constitutional and Statutory Race Discrimination Cases,” Asian American Law Journal 9 (2002): 117–61 (118–19).Google Scholar

68. “Joint Press Statement by Asian Pacific American Organizations,” 16 December 1999, personal copy. See also James Sterngold, “Coalition Fears an Asian Bias in Nuclear Case,” New York Times, 13 December 1999, A1. L. Ling-chi Wang, a professor of Asian American studies, provided another provocative commentary on the racial images at work: Wang, “Model Minority, High-tech Coolies, and Foreign Spies: Asian Americans in Science and Technology, with Special Reference to the Case of Dr. Wen Ho Lee,” Amerasia Journal 33 (2007): 51–61, condensed version of a speech originally delivered at the Society of Professional Scientists and Engineers, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 27 April 2000. Legal commentary has similarly explored the question of racial profiling in the Wen Ho Lee case. See, for example, Gotanda, Neil, “Comparative Racialization: Racial Profiling and the Case of Wen Ho Lee,” UCLA Law Review 47 (1999–2000): 1689–1703Google Scholar; and Chin, William Y., “Implausible Denial: The Government’s Denial of the Role of Race in Its Prosecution of Wen Ho Lee,” Rutgers Race and Law Review 5 (2003): 1–51Google Scholar.

69. Lewis R. Franklin, “A Critique of the Cox Report Allegations of PRC Acquisition of Sensitive U.S. Missile and Space Technology,” in May, ed., The Cox Committee Report: An Assessment, 81–82.

70. See, for example, Johnson, Jeff, “Can DOE Science Survive Security?” Chemical and Engineering News 77 (4 October 1999): 20Google Scholar; and Loeb, “Espionage Stir Alienating Foreign Scientists in U.S.,” G1.

71. As Los Alamos scientist John D. Fowler Jr. observed regarding an anticipated 2 percent rate of false positives, “In our situation, that’s 100 innocent people out of 5,000 whose reputations and careers would be blemished.” Quoted in Walter Pincus, “Senators Question Polygraph Use,” Washington Post, 24 July 1999, A2. During the debate over the proposal, University of Maryland physicist Robert L. Park commented on the inadequacies of polygraph testing: Park, “Liars Never Break a Sweat,” New York Times, 12 July 1999, A15.

72. Quoted in Laurie Garrett, “Scientists Say Security Measures Are Stifling,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 4 August 1999, 9A.

73. Gusterson, Hugh, “The Assault on Los Alamos National Laboratory: A Drama in Three Acts,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 67 (2011): 9–18;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Krige, “Regulating the Academic ‘Marketplace of Ideas,’” esp. 4–5, 7, and 13–14. As Krige points out, “Controlled Unclassified Information” is now an official category of knowledge in the nation’s executive branch (7).

74. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, “A New Kind of Spy: How China Obtains American Technological Secrets,” New Yorker, 5 May 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/05/a-new-kind-of-spy (accessed February 2016).

75. Matt Apuzzo, “U.S. Drops Charges that Professor Shared Technology With China,” New York Times, 11 September 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/us/politics/us-drops-charges-that-professor-shared-technology-with-china.html (accessed February 2016); Karin Fischer, “The Spy Who Wasn’t,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 January 2016, http://chronicle.com/article/The-Spy-Who-Wasnt/234857 (accessed February 2016). I thank Zuoyue Wang for alerting me to the Chronicle article.

76. Krige, John, “National Security and Academia: Regulating the International Circulation of Knowledge,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 70 (2014): 42–52;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Krige, “Regulating the Academic ‘Marketplace of Ideas,’” 16–18. University compliance with export controls has even prompted the creation of an entirely new class of professionals, as evidenced by the founding of the Association of University Export Control Officers. Krige, “Regulating the Academic ‘Marketplace of Ideas,’” 2.

77. Ibid., 42–43; William Pentland, “Congress Bans Scientific Collaboration with China, Cites High Espionage Risks,” Forbes, 7 May 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/05/07/congress-bans-scientific-collaboration-with-china-cites-high-espionage-risks/ (accessed March 2015).

78. By way of analogy, sexual crimes and other violence against children also constitute a real and serious issue, but, at the same time, advocates of “free range parenting” have raised important questions about the social consequences of denying children opportunities to develop independence and self-confidence through unsupervised play and the freedom to roam in what are, for the most part, extremely safe, low-risk neighborhoods. See, for example, Danielle Meitiv, “When Letting Your Kids Out of Your Sight Becomes a Crime,” Washington Post, 13 February 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/raising-children-on-fear/2015/02/13/9d9db67e-b2e7-11e4-827f-93f454140e2b_story.html (accessed February 2016). Indeed, one might ask whether anxieties about national security and about personal security in the realm of domesticity, and an assumption that elimination of risk is a positive good with negligible negative consequences, arise from the same cultural origins. The point may seem to overreach, but on the cultural resonances between domesticity and national Cold War anxieties, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988).

79. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire, 296.

80. Studies of knowledge, public policy, and the state have frequently revolved around questions about objectivity and liberal faith in the promise of depoliticized, value-free forms of inquiry versus the realities of ideologies, tacit assumptions, and power that have left the dream of an escape from politics neither tenable nor even particularly desirable. They have generally neglected the study of vernacular knowledge as a part of policymaking. For entry points into the literature on objective knowledge and expectations of depoliticized policymaking, see Furner, Mary O., Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (Lexington, Ky., 1975)Google Scholar; Ezrahi, Yaron, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar; Porter, Theodore M., Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, 1995)Google Scholar; O’Connor, Alice, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar; and Wang, Jessica, “Local Knowledge, State Power, and the Science of Industrial Labor Relations,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 46 (Fall 2010): 371–93.Google Scholar

81. Nick Cullather, “Central Intelligence before the CIA,” Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Ohio State University, 2 March 2015, manuscript in possession of the author. I am grateful to Nick for allowing me to cite this provocative and incisive work in progress.

82. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire, 81, 300–308, 330–32.

83. Most bureaucracies would cease to operate if the people within them literally followed all of the rules. As indicated in the earlier discussion of the Wen Ho Lee case, the normal rhythms of everyday work life made the mishandling of classified information a relatively common phenomenon in the national laboratories. In 1999, former CIA director John Deutch lost his security clearance for similar reasons, because he transferred classified information to an unsecured laptop in order to work at home. On the one hand, it is not unreasonable to expect people who accept security clearances and professional lives within a restricted research environment to take secrecy regulations seriously, however unwieldy and inconvenient they might be. The expectation created by export control and visa regulations that researchers in the more open environment of the university must also adhere to similar forms of regulation, however, is arguably quite another matter. See Krige, “National Security and Academia.”