In Chicago, an engineer, Ji Chaoqun, has been found guilty of spying for the Chinese government by compiling data on American engineers and scientists and was consequently given an eight-year prison sentence.
Ji Chaoqun, a Chinese national, was detained in 2018. He arrived in the US in 2013 to study electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Later, Ji Chaoqun joined the US Army Reserves.
The 31-year-old was found guilty in September of providing a materially false statement to the US Army and operating unlawfully as an agent of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS).
Ji was tasked, according to the Justice Department, with giving an intelligence officer biographical data about people who might be hired as Chinese spies. Chinese nationals who were employed as engineers and scientists in the US, some of them for American defence companies, were among the group.
According to a statement from the Justice Department, Ji’s snooping was a component of a Chinese intelligence operation to gain access to cutting-edge aeronautical and satellite technologies being developed by US corporations.
He joined the US Army Reserves in 2016, a year after graduating, as part of a programme that allows foreign nationals to be enlisted if their abilities are deemed “vital to the national interest.”
He lied on his application to the programme, saying he hadn’t spoken to a foreign government in the previous seven years. In a subsequent interview with a US Army officer, he allegedly omitted to disclose his connection to and interactions with Chinese intelligence agents, according to the Justice Department.
Ji met with an undercover US law enforcement agent who was impersonating as a member of China’s MSS on many occasions in 2018. He claimed during these meetings that he could visit and take pictures of “Roosevelt-class” aircraft carriers using his military identification. He also stated that he intended to apply for jobs at the CIA, FBI, or NASA after receiving his US citizenship and security clearance through the Army Reserves programme, according to testimony during the trial.
The Justice Department stated in the statement that Ji intended to work as a cybersecurity specialist at one of those organisations so he could gain access to databases, including those that included scientific information.
According to the statement, Ji was carrying out his duties under the supervision of Xu Yanjun, a deputy division director at the MMS’ Jiangsu province branch.
A professional intelligence officer named Xu was given a 20-year prison term last year for attempting to acquire trade secrets from multiple US aerospace and aviation industries. As a result of the FBI investigation, Xu also became the first Chinese spy to be extradited to the US for trial after he was apprehended in Belgium in 2018.
Zheng Xiaoqing, a former employee of General Electric, was sentenced to two years in prison earlier this month in the US for disclosing sensitive information to the Chinese government.
Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, stated in July that China intended to “ransack” the intellectual property of Western businesses in order to accelerate its own industrial growth and eventually control several important industries.
The response from China at the time was that Mr. Wray was “smearing China” and had a “Cold War mentality.”