By Pauline Arrillaga
The Associated Press
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — The young man stood before the judge, his usually neatly trimmed hair now long enough to brush the collar of his prison jumpsuit. Glenn Duffie Shriver had confessed his transgressions and was here, in a federal courtroom with his mother watching, to receive his sentence and to try, somehow, to explain it all.
When the time came for him to address the court, he spoke of the many dreams he’d had to serve his country.
He had been a seemingly all-American, clean-cut guy. No criminal record. A job teaching English overseas.
Such descriptions make the one that culminated in the courtroom all the more baffling. Glenn Shriver was 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.
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, 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.
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, also represents a shift, said Larry Wortzel, who serves on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
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 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.
“They have more money to pay for things,” said Steve Pelak, a deputy chief of the Justice Department’s counterespionage section.
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.
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 traditional espionage — among them the Shriver case and that of Tai Shen Kuo, a Louisiana businessman who obtained information from two federal government employees that he passed to China.
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 pitch for his 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 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.
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.
Take the case of William Chi-Wai Tsu, an 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.
Court records describe how Tsu went about acquiring restricted parts. He created a fictitious company 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 was arrested last Dec. 3 after he handed $20,000 to undercover agents in exchange for five of the devices. His sentencing is set for June 30.
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 the evidence clearly showed that Wu did understand the restrictions. One spreadsheet found on his computer was titled, “GP (Gross Profit) for USA Restricted Military Parts.” Among the parts exported included phase shifters used in military radar 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.
He was referring to one of the most damaging Chinese espionage cases of all time, the infiltration of Larry Chin, 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, and he was stunned to learn of the 5.5-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 called “Amanda.” According to court documents, he’d responded to an English-language ad looking for scholars of East Asian studies to write political papers. He wrote one about U.S.-China relations regarding North Korea and Taiwan, and was paid $120.
“Amanda” 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.”
As outlined in court documents and Shriver’s own statements, their 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 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 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.
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. 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. … 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 …,” 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.”
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 MacBride, 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.” ♦