Sherry Chen, a hydrologist for the federal government in Ohio, was arrested last October and accused of economic espionage. Afterward, she said, “I did nothing but cry for days.”Credit Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
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.作者: master 时间: 2015-5-11 20:56:46
4月24日，美国绩效系统保护委员会（Merit Systems Protection Board，MSPB ）的首席行政法官在130多页的决定中裁定，美国商务部没有理由解雇陈霞芬，因此命令商务部恢复陈霞芬在国家气象部门的工作，支付她的工资和福利，希望商业部机构接受这个理由充分的决定，并立即遵守，允许陈霞芬回到她喜欢的工作中。