But Lee's concentration in Government did introduce him to Chinese foreign policy, a subject he studied by sitting in on seminars with renowned China scholar John K. Fairbank `29.

Lee recalls being impressed in particular by one of the guest lecturers, named Owen Lattimore, a prolific Asia scholar at Johns Hopkins University.

In 1950, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy accused Lattimore of being the Soviet Union's top spy in the United States. Though later cleared of all charges, Lattimore was called before McCarthy's Senate committee for questioning.

Lee traveled to Washington to watch a couple of the hearings and recalls that Lattimore held his ground "calmly and courageously."

"That was part of my early political education," Lee says. "I felt very negative about the senators. I saw them being bullying. I knew enough about Lattimore's background to know that the senators were full of baloney."

Lee followed his time at Harvard with graduate work at the University of Chicago, but he says that period didn't radicalize him either.

It was not until he began his first teaching job at the University of Maryland in 1958 that Lee moved decisively to the far left. Many of Lee's colleagues and graduate students in Maryland were fairly leftist, he recalls, and in the late 1950s, anti-Communism was less virulent than earlier in the decade.

A series of US foreign policy moves--which Lee calls "American shenanigans"--left him disillusioned with the American government.

First, Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959. In response to the takeover, the US imposed a trade embargo.

Of Castro's revolution, Lee says, "I felt good about it, and I felt negative about the American government."

Then came the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. American support of right-wing generals in Laos further eroded Lee's trust in the government.

By this time, Lee was teaching and writing about Chinese and Soviet foreign policy. His opinions went against what policy-makers and many scholars were saying at the time.

One of his early publications, for instance, was an article in Nation magazine entitled "The Myth of Chinese Communist Aggression."

By this time, he recalls, he would sometimes be asked if he was a communist. His answer was always no. He endorsed Marx and Lenin's writings, but wasn't prepared to espouse the entire communist ideology.

In his classes at Maryland though he would regularly praise the Communists' foreign policy, or at least justify it. He insists his presentations were "professional and factual," but some of his students thought otherwise. They wrote letters to the FBI and sent copies of his handouts to the Bureau. Lee would first learn of his students' letters when he asked for his file.