Then the agents produced a series of documents, including contracts from 2011 and 2012, and Dr. Lieber examined them, remarking at one point, “I should pay more attention to what I’m signing.”
“That’s pretty damning,” he said. “Now that you bring it up, yes, I do remember.”
He went on to offer detail about his financial arrangements with Wuhan University: A portion of his salary was deposited in a Chinese bank account and the remainder was paid in $100 bills, which he carried home in his luggage.
He said his involvement with the university had ended by 2016 but acknowledged he had not been forthcoming when approached by the Defense Department two years later.
“I was scared of being arrested, like I am now,” he said.
At moments in the interview, Dr. Lieber was reflective about the role of international funding in the lives of researchers, saying that relationships with foreign partners were never as straightforward as they seemed at first.
“Early on, if someone said, ‘We’ll give you this title and we’ll pay your travel to and from,’ you don’t think anything about it,” he explained, “but partners “always want something from you.”
“A lot of countries, money is what they have in excess,” he said.
He tried to impress on the two special agents that a different motive, the desire for acclaim, had brought him to partner with Wuhan and train scientists there.
“I was younger and stupid,” he said. “I want to be recognized for what I’ve done. Everyone wants to be recognized.” He offered a comparison he had given his son, a high school wrestler. The Nobel Prize is “kind of like an Olympic gold medal — it’s very, very rare,” he said.
A prize he had won recently was more like a bronze medal, he said with a self-deprecating laugh. “That probably is the underlying reason I did this,” he said.
Source: NYT
