Is the missing Midwestern professor merely a rogue researcher — or a Chinese spy? 

The academic, whose current whereabouts are unknown, is Xiaofeng Wang, a native of the People’s Republic of China and a certified star in the rarified world of cryptography and cybersecurity. Wang and his wife, Nainli Ma, have been missing since the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided two of their Indiana homes on March 28, the same day that Wang was fired by Indiana University. Ma, an IU library systems analyst, was fired the same day as her husband.  

Recommended Stories

• Revamp US assistance to counter China
• America's manufacturing problem has an internal cause
• Designer babies won’t solve our fertility crisis

Wang had been on the IU faculty since 2004, fresh from receiving his doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He previously received undergraduate and master’s degrees in his native China. Wang’s rise at IU was accomplished with a promotion to full professor in 2015, followed two years later by his appointment to a prestigious named chairman in IU’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering.  

Wang was a standout at the Luddy School, winning numerous research grants for his cutting-edge work in computers and codes. Wang collaborated in well-funded projects with universities across the United States and around the world. Before his sudden termination, in addition to his normal academic duties, Wang was serving as the co-director of IU’s Center for Security and Privacy in Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, as well as the associate dean for research.  

By any standards, Wang was an academic high-flyer. He was highly regarded in his field, having received numerous professional awards for his research and publications. Since joining the IU faculty in 2004, Wang has served as the lead scholar on research projects cumulatively valued at $23 million.  

Given how busy he was, it’s difficult to imagine how Wang had time for professional misconduct, but his employer came to feel differently. The ostensible cause for Wang’s abrupt termination was his shady dealings with his native country. As reported by WIRED, the professor came under scrutiny by his employer at the end of last year over a 2017-18 research grant received in China, which he failed to report to IU.  

This grant was executed in collaboration with Ninghui Li, a computer science professor at Purdue University, another PRC native, who collaborated on research with Wang going back to 2006, at least. IU’s concerns about this particular grant stemmed from the allegation that Wang failed to mention his dealings with Chinese research institutes in his grant applications to U.S. government research entities. 

It’s highly unusual for a tenured and respected professor to be terminated over such a relatively trivial matter. After all, Wang wasn’t accused of academic fraud or stealing another scholar’s research but rather a seemingly minor infraction. However, IU felt differently. Wang apparently suspected that his days at the Luddy School were numbered since he informed IU that he had taken a position at a university in Singapore for the next academic year.  

Wang reportedly then requested a leave of absence in March of this year, but his employer responded by placing him on administrative leave while shutting Wang’s access to university IT systems. By this point, IU knew that Wang was under FBI investigation, and by the time the feds raided his residences on March 28, Wang and his wife had been fired while IU had removed their professional pages on the university’s website. 

The affair was over as far as IU was concerned, and the university offered no comment on the FBI’s investigation into Wang. Speaking through their attorney after the FBI raids, the couple explained, “While we are unable to provide substantive comment on the investigation at this time, neither Prof. Wang nor Ms. Ma have been arrested and both are currently safe. Further, there are no pending criminal charges as far as we are aware,” while adding the pro forma statement that they look forward to clearing their names. 

On cue, academics at IU and beyond have expressed performative outrage over the alleged mistreatment of the couple over a minor academic infraction. However, the fact that their attorney won’t reveal the whereabouts of Wang and Ma indicates that there’s more to the FBI investigation than has been publicly revealed. Are the couple even in the United States any longer? 

After all, a Chinese married couple in Canada, employed at that country’s top bioresearch lab in Winnipeg and possessing security clearances, were fired in 2019, then abruptly disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The couple had been under Canadian counterintelligence scrutiny for some time prior to their termination, and they were subsequently revealed to have been spies for Beijing, passing valuable and dangerous bioresearch secrets to their native country. 

Has that messy spy story been repeated in Indiana? A hint regarding why Wang wound up on FBI radar comes from his purged IU website, which stated, “Wang’s research has been supported by NSF, NIH, ARO, IARPA, and other federal funding agencies and industry.” That’s the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. The last is the intelligence community’s in-house entity, established in 2006, to support academic research that’s deemed of high intelligence value to the U.S. and its spy agencies.  

EU ‘READY TO NEGOTIATE’ WITH TRUMP ON TARIFF DEAL

What IARPA projects did Wang work on? Were they classified? How much taxpayer money did Wang receive? Did the feds know about Wang’s PRC research grant when he was also working for the U.S. government? 

These questions demand urgent answers, but there may be none forthcoming if Wang and Ma managed to flee to their native China. Academia and even the FBI may simply want yet another spy scandal, embarrassing because avoidable, to go away.  

John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.