Jeffrey LewisMilitary Intelligence

Bill Gertz has a story about a National Security Agency employee, Russ Tice, recently terminated after a pair of psychiatric evaluations found him “mentally unbalanced.”

Defense officials are telling the Washington Times that Tice is being persecuted for reporting suspicions about a former colleague during his previous work at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The Washington Times claims Tice “began to suspect that an Asian-American woman working with him at DIA was linked to Chinese intelligence.” In the absence of confirmable allegations, it is hard to dispute DIA’s claim that the allegation was “unfounded.”

It would be interesting to see why the NSA head shrinker found Tice “mentally unbalanced.”

The Washington Times implies an obsession with the former co-worker—noting that Tice “continued to report his security concerns about the DIA analyst” even after moving to NSA and that the NSA ordered the psych evaluation that led to Tice’s termination after Tice “sent an e-mail message from his NSA office to a DIA security official questioning the FBI’s competence in probing Chinese espionage.”

Only in Bill Gertz’s America does “my co worker is a Chinese intelligence asset” rate as a plausible explanation for tension between a man and a woman in an office setting.

We obviously don’t have all the facts in this case, but there is at least a plausible case that the persecution of an Asian-American colleague falls in the sordid history of persecution of Chinese Americans, from Qian Xuesen to Wen Ho Lee.