Larry Wu-tai Chin (simplified Chinese: 金无怠; traditional Chinese: 金無怠; pinyin: Jīn Wúdài; August 17, 1922 – February 21, 1986) was a Chinese Communist spy who worked for the United States Government for 37 years (1944–1981), including positions at the U.S. Army and the CIA, while secretly being a mole for the Chinese Communist Party's intelligence apparatus from the very beginning. He kept passing classified documents and secret information to the People's Republic of China even after his retirement, until he was finally exposed in 1985.

Chin was one of China's most valuable foreign intelligence agents of the entire Cold War period; he supplied the PRC with top-secret information on American foreign policy initiatives relating to China, as well as biographical profiles of CIA agents. In 1970, he passed CIA documents to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai regarding President Richard Nixon's desire to open relations with the PRC; Mao therefore knew about Nixon's intentions well in advance of his diplomatic overtures, which allowed him to alter his policy (such as the volume of anti-American rhetoric in the state-controlled Chinese press) in order to extract the maximum political concessions from the Americans. Chin was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Born as Chin Wu-tai in Peking, Republic of China, in 1922, he attended Yenching University.

Chin was recruited by the Chinese Communist intelligence apparatus (then called the Central Social Affairs Department, or SAD) in 1944, during World War II. He was specifically directed to find employment in an American government agency (at the time, the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek was working closely with the Americans against Japan). Chin, who spoke English well, was hired by the United States Army, and was appointed to work as a translator of Chinese language at the U.S. Army Liaison Office in the city of Fuzhou.

From 1945 to 1949 Chin was a translator for the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai, and from 1949 to 1950 for the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong (then under British rule). During this time, he passed countless classified documents to the Chinese Communist intelligence service directed by Li Kenong during the early years of the PRC and was named first the Liaison Department and later the Central Investigation Department. Chin was regularly and highly paid for his services.

Chin served as a Chinese translator in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, helping to debrief Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war. He misrepresented the intelligence that he was translating from captured Chinese soldiers resulting in the loss of U.S. forces and missed tactical opportunities. Many of these Chinese soldiers intended to defect to South Korea. He also provided the Chinese government with the names of captured Chinese soldiers who were revealing information or declared themselves opposed to Communist Party rule and intended to defect. The Chinese then specifically requested these soldiers by name to be released back to China before the armistice negotiations could take place. This delayed the negotiations process for over a year.

Following his U.S. Army service, Chin applied to and was accepted by the CIA. He was assigned as a Chinese language translator and analyst of the Chinese Communist press at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), where he continued his espionage for China. He was posted in Okinawa (1952–61), Santa Rosa, California (1961–71) and Rosslyn, Virginia (1971–81). According to No Kum-Sok, the North Korean pilot who defected with a MiG-15, Larry Chin was one of his CIA handlers after his defection.

As an FBIS analyst and one of the CIA's few fluent Chinese linguists, Chin was able to pass along such information as Intelligence Information Reports (IIRs) on China and East Asia, biographical profiles and assessments of fellow CIA employees, and the names and identities of the Agency's covert agents. He was also in a position to provide information about recruited deep-cover agents in China. Due to the CIA's policy of internal compartmentalization, Chin did not know their real names or identities; however, based on the intelligence they provided, he could infer such things as their locations, employers, and levels of access. Chinese counterintelligence could then attempt to identify them by determining who had access to what information. Once the agents were identified, they would routinely be arrested and executed, or, alternatively, fed false information to be communicated to the CIA. Most significantly, in 1970 Chin provided to the Maoist leadership in Beijing CIA documents that revealed the plans of President Richard Nixon to engage China in order to form a tactical alliance against (and put pressure on) the Soviet Union. Mao, knowing in advance of American designs and objectives, could squeeze maximum concessions from the Nixon administration.