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发帖数: 2299 | 1 He had been a seemingly all-American, clean-cut guy: No criminal record.
Engaged to be married. A job teaching English overseas. In letters to the
judge, loved ones described the 29-year-old Midwesterner as honest and
caring — a good citizen. His fiancee called him "Mr. Patriot."
Such descriptions make the one that culminated in the courtroom all the more
baffling: Glenn Shriver was also a spy recruit for China. He took $70,000
from individuals he knew to be Chinese intelligence officers to try to land
a job with a U.S. government agency — first the State Department and later
the CIA.
And Shriver is just one of at least 57 defendants in federal prosecutions
since 2008 charging espionage conspiracies with China or efforts to pass
classified information, sensitive technology or trade secrets to
intelligence operatives, state-sponsored entities, private individuals or
businesses in China, according to an Associated Press review of U.S. Justice
Department cases.
Of those, nine are awaiting trial, and two are considered fugitives. The
other defendants have been convicted, though some are yet to be sentenced.
Most of these prosecutions have received little public attention —
especially compared with the headline splash that followed last summer's
arrest of 10 Russian "sleeper agents" who'd been living in suburban America
for more than a decade but, according to Attorney General Eric Holder,
passed no secrets.
Contrast that with this snapshot:
_In Honolulu, a former B-2 bomber engineer and one-time professor at Purdue
gets 32 years in prison for working with the Chinese to develop a vital part
for a cruise missile in a case that a high-ranking Justice Department
official said resulted in the leak of "some of our country's most sensitive
weapons-related designs."
_In Boston, a Harvard-educated businessman is sent to prison, along with his
ex-wife, for conspiring for a decade to illegally export parts used in
military radar and electronic warfare systems to research institutes that
manufacture items for the Chinese military. The Department of Defense
concluded the illegal exports "represented a serious threat to U.S. national
and regional defense security interests."
_In Los Angeles, a man goes to jail for selling Raytheon-manufactured
thermal imaging cameras to a buyer in Shanghai whose company develops
infrared technology. The cameras are supposed to be restricted for export to
China because of "their potential use in a wide variety of military and
civilian applications," according to court documents.
_And in Alexandra, Va., there is Shriver, who told the judge quite simply: "
Somewhere along the way, I climbed into bed with the wrong people."
All five of these defendants were sentenced over just an 11-day span earlier
this year.
In Shriver's case, when once he asked his Chinese handlers — "What, exactly
, do you guys want?" — the response, as detailed in court documents, was
straightforward.
"If it's possible," they told him, "we want you to get us some secrets or
classified information."
Despite denials from Beijing, counterintelligence experts say the cases
reveal the Chinese as among the most active espionage offenders in America
today, paying more money and going to greater lengths to glean whatever
information they can from the United States.
___
Just after the New Year, at an airfield in Chengdu, the Chinese military
unveiled its first prototype stealth fighter jet: A radar-eluding plane
called the J-20, which made its maiden test flight even as U.S. Defense
Secretary Robert Gates was in Beijing on a rare visit.
If most Americans paid little attention, U.S. defense analysts were watching
closely. And they were caught a bit off-guard.
Gates would later acknowledge that the flight came six months to a year
before intelligence estimated it might happen.
So how did the Chinese do it? Was it reverse-engineering from parts taken
after an American aircraft was shot down over Serbia in 1999, as some Balkan
military officials alleged in interviews with The Associated Press?
Or was some of the technological know-how obtained through a U.S. engineer
who spent several years working illegally to help the Chinese develop
stealth technology?
A federal prosecutor raised the possibility of a link between the activities
of Noshir Gowadia, once a key engineer on America's B-2 bomber program, and
the faster-than-expected development of Chinese stealth aircraft designs.
The comments came just before Gowadia was sentenced to prison in a Honolulu
court in January on espionage charges. He was convicted of 14 counts,
including communicating national defense information to aid a foreign nation
and violating the Arms Export Control Act.
"China aggressively seeks U.S. defense technologies, and the People's
Liberation Army are now shown to have been actively working on stealth
aircraft designs, most certainly during Gowadia's visits there," Assistant U
.S. Attorney Ken Sorenson wrote in a court filing, noting Gowadia worked in
and with China for two years developing a stealth engine nozzle design.
In an interview, Sorenson said he couldn't comment on any evidence of a link
but added that "when an expert of that quality lands on your shores, and
you're interested in developing stealth technologies ... don't you think it'
s reasonable to assume that to some degree he's assisting them in overall
development? That is the kind of stakes we talk about when we talk about the
transfer of these U.S.-born military technologies."
For years, U.S. counterintelligence experts have cited a growing espionage
threat from China, the product of an ever-more competitive world in which
technology is as vital as political intelligence — but a sign, too, of
China's increasing prosperity, persistence and patience.
Recent cases reveal not only a high level of activity but also signs of
changing tactics and emboldened efforts. In one case, a convicted spy
managed to convince not one but two U.S. government officials to pass him
secret information, telling them it was going to Taiwan when he instead
passed it to a Chinese official.
The recruitment of more non-Chinese, such as Shriver and Gowadia (an India-
born, naturalized U.S. citizen), also represents a shift, said Larry Wortzel
, a former Army intelligence officer who serves on the U.S.-China Economic
and Security Review Commission. In the past, said Wortzel, China preferred
to deal with those "assessed as sympathetic to China or with ethnic Chinese.
"
And then there are the so-called "espionage entrepreneurs," motivated simply
by money.
When asked about the recent cases, the Chinese Foreign Ministry questioned
the statistics, responding in a faxed statement: "To speak of the Chinese
side's so-called `espionage activities' in the United States is pure
nonsense with ulterior motives."
However, Joel Brenner, who served as the U.S. National Counterintelligence
Executive from 2006 to 2009, said: "The Chinese espionage threat has been
relentless recently ... we've never seen anything like it. Some of it's
public. Some of it's private. And some of it lies in that ambiguous area in
between."
Today's "agents" are professors and engineers, businessmen exporting
legitimate products while also shipping restricted technology and munitions,
criminal capitalists who see only dollar signs. While some may be acting at
the direction of a government handler, others supply information to firms
for either private enterprise or state-sponsored research — or both.
Driving all of this, U.S. officials said, are China's desire to develop a
modernized military and its burgeoning wealth; last year China surpassed
Japan as the world's second-largest economy, behind only the United States.
"They have more money to pay for things," said Steve Pelak, a deputy chief
of the Justice Department's counterespionage section who points to the
amounts given to Shriver before he was ever in a position to access, much
less pass, secrets.
Still more money is going to private firms to help develop and build China's
military technology, sometimes through parts obtained illegally from U.S.
manufacturers.
Indeed most of the Justice Department cases reviewed by the AP involve the
illegal export of restricted defense-related parts or so-called "dual-use"
technology, which can have commercial or military applications. These are
items such as integrated circuits for radar systems, high-power amplifiers
designed for use in early-warning radar and missile target acquisition
systems, and military grade night-vision technology.
But that only scratches the surface. Other cases involve the theft of trade
secrets by individuals once employed at major U.S. corporations, including
Boeing, Motorola and Dow. In some instances, the secrets were computer
source codes or, in cases still awaiting trial, related to the development
of organic pesticides and telephone communications technology.
Stolen information about the space shuttle and technical data about the
capabilities of the U.S. Navy's nuclear-powered submarines have also been
passed along, as has simulation software used to help train fighter pilots.
While export cases and economic espionage comprise most of the China-related
intelligence prosecutions in recent years, there have been a few notable
instances of more traditional espionage — among them the Shriver case and
that of Tai Shen Kuo, a Louisiana businessman born in Taiwan who obtained
information from two federal government employees that he passed to China.
It all fits into what some experts call China's "vacuum cleaner" approach to
information-collection: Catch whatever you can.
"It's a little like ... the cancer that you don't know your body has. You
don't know that you're in trouble until it manifests itself in ways that
really, really hurt you," said Michelle Van Cleave, another former National
Counterintelligence Executive who served under President George W. Bush.
She points to revelations that surfaced throughout the 1990s regarding China
's procurement of U.S. nuclear secrets. The public controversy came to a
head in 1999, when a select congressional committee was named to investigate
Chinese espionage and security concerns at U.S. weapons labs.
Then came the government's bungled handling of Wen Ho Lee, the former
scientist once identified as the focus of a probe into the theft of nuclear
secrets at Los Alamos National Laboratory who wound up pleading guilty to a
single count of downloading sensitive material.
Intelligence assessments later concluded that China's successful nuclear
espionage effort dated back to at least the late 1970s, and reports blamed
everything from foreign visitor and scientific exchange programs to
espionage on the part of scientists such as Peter Lee, another Los Alamos
researcher who did share classified information with Chinese scientists.
But as Van Cleave points out: The exact methods used to acquire those
secrets may never be known.
"We know they have them," she said. "We just don't know how they got them."
Today, with ever more cases being prosecuted, we do know more — not only
about what's being pursued, but how and why.
___
"If you have customers in mainland China, please let us know if we could be
of any help. In China, it seems impossible for most companies to buy
directly from US. We can act as middleman for you."
It was 1996 and Zhen Zhou "Alex" Wu, a one-time schoolteacher in his native
China who later studied at Harvard, was e-mailing a firm to pitch his new
business: A company dedicated to selling electronics components to Chinese
customers. Based in Shenzhen, China, the company, Chitron, opened a single U
.S. office in Waltham, Mass., to acquire and ship desired technology.
The Massachusetts firm, federal authorities now say, was merely a front to
facilitate the export of defense technology from U.S. manufacturers to
Chinese military-related institutes. And Wu now sits in a federal prison
after being sentenced in January to eight years for conspiring to illegally
export restricted technologies.
According to the Department of Defense, the exported items are "vital for
Chinese military electronic warfare, military radar, fire control, military
guidance and control equipment, and satellite communications." Also included
The use of front companies, or private firms that may also do legitimate
business, is a common way that China seeks information, said Pelak, who in
2007 was appointed the Justice Department's first national export control
coordinator, focusing on illegal export of munitions and sensitive
technology. Prosecutions have since gone up, and today two-thirds of federal
illegal export cases involve either China or Iran.
"Those private firms, in China and operating elsewhere, they're paid money
to do this and they have great incentive to be doing it," said Pelak.
Take the case of William Chi-Wai Tsu, a naturalized U.S. citizen and
electrical engineer serving a three-year prison sentence for illegally
shipping several hundred thumbnail-size integrated circuits to a Beijing
company called Dimagit Science & Technology. Investigators said the circuits
have a variety of potential applications, including use in sophisticated
communications and military radar systems.
Dimagit's catalog, according to court records, displayed images of Chinese
military craft and promised: "We unswervingly take providing the motherland
with safe, reliable and advanced electronic technical support to revitalize
the national defense industry as our mission. Ride the wind and cleave the
waves, and set sail to cross the sea."
Among Dimagit's clients: a research institute affiliated with the state-
owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp.
Court records reviewed by the AP describe how Tsu went about acquiring
restricted parts: He created a fictitious company called Cheerway Trading
and used the California address of a friend for shipping. He then provided
false end-user statements to American electronics distributors, promising
that the parts he sought were not for export but for domestic use —
specifically a project with Cisco Systems. If a distributor pressed Tsu, he
would claim that nondisclosure agreements prevented him from providing more
detail.
Similar tactics were used in a case still awaiting sentencing in Seattle.
Lian Yang, a former software engineer at Microsoft, pleaded guilty in late
March to attempting to buy restricted technology for a "partner" in China —
specifically 300 radiation-hardened programmable semiconductor devices that
are used in satellites.
Yang told a confidential FBI source that he had old school friends in China
who'd made money importing electronic components from the United States. He
suggested creating a fake U.S. company to list as the end-user for parts
that would, in actuality, be exported to China.
"Say we need it (the parts) for R and D," he said, meaning research and
development, further suggesting that the informant be listed as the company
contact because that individual had a non-Chinese name. "And I will be the
secret shareholder," said a laughing Yang, according to a court affidavit.
Yang was arrested last Dec. 3 after he handed $20,000 to undercover agents
in exchange for five of the semiconductor devices. He later confessed that
he intended to drive to Canada and then fly to China to deliver the parts
himself. His sentencing is set for June 30.
"Boiled down to its essence, the defendant's offense amounted to a form of
espionage on behalf of the People's Republic of China," prosecutors argued
in court papers.
However, some defense attorneys counter that these export cases aren't
espionage at all or even deliberate attempts to circumvent U.S. laws — but
rather an outgrowth of confusing policies and, perhaps, overzealous
prosecutors.
In the Chitron case, appeals lawyers for Alex Wu insist U.S. export
regulations don't make clear enough what can and cannot be legally exported.
"Wu and others at his firm were not equipped and did not have the training
needed to understand this country's extremely complicated export control
laws," said his lawyer, Michael Schneider.
Stephanie Siegmann, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case,
responded that evidence clearly showed that Wu did understand the export
restrictions. One spreadsheet found on his computer was titled, "GP (Gross
Profit) for USA Restricted Military Parts." In e-mails he repeatedly
instructed an employee, "Do not say you export parts. Just say you are
broker."
To get around export laws, court documents said, Chitron workers identified
defense-related parts as "electronics components" classified as "No License
Required" and falsely listed freight forwarders in Hong Kong (where U.S.
export policies are more lenient) as the end-user.
Among the parts exported: phase shifters used in military radar systems.
"With such equipment," the Department of Defense's Defense Technology
Security Administration concluded, "China could defeat U.S. weapon systems."
___
Earlier this year, retired FBI agent I.C. Smith gave a speech called "China'
s Mole" at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. It was about a
man who landed a job with the Central Intelligence Agency and later turned
out to be a spy for China.
As Smith told a rapt audience: "The intelligence community had been
penetrated."
He was referring to one of the most damaging Chinese espionage cases of all
time: the infiltration of Larry Chin, a naturalized U.S. citizen who in 1986
admitted to spying for China during his almost three decades with the CIA.
As a former Chinese counterintelligence supervisor, Smith helped investigate
Chin, who later committed suicide.
Smith was stunned to learn of the 5 1/2-year recruitment of Glenn Shriver
and China's "run at the front door" of America's pre-eminent intelligence
agency.
"The Chinese," Smith said, "still have the capacity to surprise."
How did they do it in Shriver's case? Standing before a federal judge on a
blustery day in January, Shriver tried to explain how he went down the path
to betrayal.
"It started out fairly innocuous," he recalled. During a college study-
abroad program in Shanghai, he was taken with Chinese culture and became
proficient in Mandarin. After graduating from Grand Valley State University
in Michigan in 2004, he returned to China to look for work.
Shriver was just 22 years old when, in October 2004, he first met a woman in
Shanghai who would introduce him to the Chinese intelligence officers who
persuaded him to consider turning against his own country. According to
court documents, he'd responded to an English-language ad looking for
scholars of East Asian studies to write political papers.
He met several times with a woman called "Amanda," delivered to her a paper
about U.S.-China relations regarding North Korea and Taiwan, and was paid $
120.
She later asked Shriver if he'd be interested in meeting some other people
— two men he came to know as "Mr. Wu" and "Mr. Tang." Over the next several
years, they would meet at least 20 times.
As outlined in court documents and Shriver's own statements, the
conversations, at first, focused on developing a "friendship." The men asked
Shriver what type of work he was interested in and said that if he planned
on seeking a job with a U.S. government agency, "we can be close friends."
Had he ever thought about working for the U.S. State Department or, perhaps,
the CIA? "That would be pretty good," they told him.
"Only one time was I told that they would like secrets," Shriver told the
judge.
Six months after first meeting "Amanda," Shriver applied for a job as a
foreign service officer with the U.S. State Department. Though he failed the
foreign service exam, the intelligence officers paid him $10,000. A year
later, in April 2006, he took the exam a second time but again failed. He
was nevertheless paid $20,000.
Then, in June 2007, Shriver applied for a position in the clandestine branch
of the CIA. A few months later, he asked the Chinese intelligence officers
for $40,000 for his efforts.
During all this time, friends and family — Shriver's mother, especially —
thought he was just trying to figure out what to do with his life. He moved
for a while to Los Angeles, and talked about becoming a police officer or
joining the Peace Corps. Eventually he returned overseas, this time to Korea
, where he taught English and got engaged to a girl named Yumi.
No one knew he was continuing to communicate with his Chinese handler, "
Amanda."
In June 2010, Shriver underwent a series of final security screening
interviews at the CIA in Virginia, during which he lied in response to
questions about any previous affiliation with foreign intelligence officers.
A week later, he was arrested — U.S. officials wouldn't disclose what led
them to him — and his clandestine life unraveled.
"Nobody knew. Nobody," said his mother, Karen Chavez. "He was a good kid.
Worked, earned money, was respectful. ... I don't know what he was thinking.
"
The closest her son came to an explanation was when he told the sentencing
judge: "I think I was motivated by greed."
In a telephone interview from prison in April, Shriver tried to expand on
that.
"When you're 23 years old living in a very fun city, you almost get addicted
to money and you just kind of have it on tap," he told the AP. "After a
while it's kind of like: OK, I'm kind of up on what these guys are doing.
But by then it's just money getting thrown at you. I'm just like ... I can
apply to this, get some money and then just continue on with my life."
Even now he wonders aloud: "What, exactly, did I do that was so illegal?"
Shriver pleaded guilty to conspiracy to communicate national defense
information and is serving a four-year prison term.
It's true that he was, after all, never in a position to actually do any
spying. No harm done? That may depend on how you look at it.
"This case shows an aggressive attempt by (China) to recruit an American
citizen and attempt to place him in one of the nation's premier intelligence
agencies," said Neil MaMacBride, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District
of Virginia, whose office has handled a number of China-related
intelligence cases.
"Foreign intelligence services are watching," he said, "and they're looking
for any weakness they can identify and exploit." |
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