An electrical engineer working on behalf of Chinese intelligence officials enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves and sought to target other potential defense industry sources, federal officials alleged in an indictment unveiled Tuesday.
Ji Chaqun, a Chinese citizen who moved to the U.S. in 2013, gave Communist intelligence handlers background information on eight individuals “for possible recruitment,” according to the Justice Department. The eight targets include at least one person from one of “the world’s top aircraft engine suppliers” for the U.S. military and private sector, according to court documents.
“It appears that Ji was tasked by [a Chinese intelligence officer] to provide him with background information on eight individuals for possible recruitment,” FBI special agent Andrew McKay alleged in the criminal complaint.
It’s just the latest Chinese espionage case to break into public view. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., was recently revealed to have fired an aide whom the FBI suspected of being recruited by the Chinese government. “He was not a mole or a spy, but someone who a foreign intelligence service thought it could recruit,” Feinstein said in August. A former FBI employee pleaded guilty in August to passing documents to a Chinese government official. And a former Apple engineer was arrested in July while trying to leave the United States for China and “charged with stealing proprietary information related to Apple’s self-driving car project,” according to the Washington Post.
The indictment comes in the wake of increasingly stark warning from U.S. officials about Chinese espionage against the United States.
“The use of nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting — whether its professors, scientists, students — we see in almost every field office that the FBI has around the country,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers in February. “So, one of the things we’re trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat but a whole-of-society threat on their end and I think it’s going to take a whole of-society response by us.”
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Feds accuse Chinese citizen who enlisted in US Army Reserves of spying https://t.co/ED5n3v2SLS
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) September 26, 2018
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