Who Exposed Larry Wu-Tai Chin, the Chinese Spy Inside the CIA?

For decades, Larry Wu-Tai Chin lived two lives.

To his colleagues, he was a respected Chinese-language specialist and analyst who served the U.S. intelligence community for nearly 30 years. He had worked for the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, earned praise for his performance, and retired with a medal from Deputy Director Bobby Ray Inman.

But according to U.S. investigators, Larry Wu-Tai Chin had also spent much of that same career passing information to Beijing.

The mystery of how he was finally exposed became one of the most intriguing parts of the case. The answer, according to Tod Hoffman’s 2008 book The Spy Within: Larry Chin and China’s Penetration of the CIA, points to Yu Qiangsheng, a senior Chinese intelligence official who secretly worked with the CIA before defecting to the United States.

Yu was not an ordinary source. He came from an elite Chinese Communist Party family and was the elder brother of Yu Zhengsheng, who later became a member of the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee and chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference before retiring from public office. Yu Qiangsheng’s defection was embarrassing for Beijing, but for U.S. intelligence, it opened a path to uncovering one of the most damaging moles ever found inside the CIA.

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