s******y
发帖数: 526 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/business/accused-of-spying-fo
On Monday, Oct. 20, 2014, Sherry Chen drove, as usual, to her office at the
National Weather Service in Wilmington, Ohio, where she forecast flood
threats along the Ohio River. She was a bit jet-lagged, having returned a
few days earlier from a visit to China. But as she headed to her desk, she
says, she had no reason to think it was anything other than an ordinary day.
Then her boss summoned her.
Once inside his office, a back door opened and in walked six agents from the
Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The agents accused Mrs. Chen, a hydrologist born in China and now a
naturalized American citizen, of using a stolen password to download
information about the nation’s dams and of lying about meeting with a high-
ranking Chinese official.
Mrs. Chen, 59, an adoptive Midwesterner who had received awards for her
government service, was now suspected of being a Chinese spy. She was
arrested and led in handcuffs past her co-workers to a federal courthouse 40
miles away in Dayton, where she was told she faced 25 years in prison and $
1 million in fines.
Her life went into a tailspin. She was suspended without pay from her job,
and her family in China had to scramble for money to pay for her legal
defense. Friends and co-workers said they were afraid to visit. Television
news trucks parked outside her house, waiting to spot a foreign spy hiding
in plain sight in suburban Wilmington, population 12,500.
“I could not sleep,” Mrs. Chen said in a recent interview. “I could not
eat. I did nothing but cry for days.”
Then, five months later, the ordeal abruptly ended. In March, just a week
before she was scheduled to go on trial, prosecutors dropped all charges
against Mrs. Chen without explanation.
★ 发自iPhone App: ChineseWeb 8.7 |
