DOJ charges 13 in cases targeting Chinese spy and influence campaigns

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday announced charges against 10 alleged Chinese government spies and three other Chinese nationals in three separate cases, including a matter in which two intelligence officers sought to recruit a U.S. double agent in order to damage prosecution of tech company Huawei.

The sprawling activity described by DOJ includes several different plots, and is part of a pressure campaign on U.S.-based Chinese citizens who have been critical of the Chinese Communist Party.

The announcement, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, comes as the U.S. continues its 2019 case against Huawei, which was expanded in 2020 to include racketeering and intellectual property theft charges in addition to bank fraud.

“The defendants believed that they had recruited the U.S. employee as an asset, but in fact, the individual they recruited was actually a double agent, working on behalf of the FBI,” Garland said on Monday.

At one point, two alleged Chinese spies, Guochun He and Zheng Wang, paid the agent more than $60,000 in bitcoin for what was actually bogus information about DOJ’s prosecution. The two men are still at large.

“[They] did so in the hope of obtaining the prosecution strategy memo, confidential information regarding witnesses, trial evidence, and potential new charges to be brought against the company,” Garland said.

“This was an egregious attempt by PRC intelligence officers to shield a PRC-based company from accountability and to undermine the integrity of our judicial system,” he continued, using an abbreviation for China’s formal name, the People’s Republic of China.

In the other two cases, Chinese nationals were charged in plots to recruit U.S.-based individuals to provide information to Beijing or to repatriate Chinese nationals living in the U.S.

“Ten of the 13 chart individuals we’re discussing today are Chinese intelligence officers and Chinese government officials. They’re charged in three different cases that might seem at first glance, to be about unrelated issues,” FBI Director Christoher Wray told reporters.

“However, this is something that I’ve been talking about for years now. Each of these cases lays bare the Chinese government’s flagrant violation of international laws as they work to project their authoritarian view around the world, including within our own borders.” 

One case charges four Chinese nationals, including three Ministry of State Security intelligence officers, in a long-running campaign to recruit new agents for the Chinese government.

Wang Lin, Bi Hongwei, Dong Ting, and Wang Qiang are accused of using the purported Institute for International Studies as a cover for contacting university professors and law enforcement agents. In one case they promised all-expenses paid trips to China in 2008 and 2018 and sought help cracking down on protests along the 2008 Olympic torch route seen as “embarrassing” to China.

The charges carry a maximum five-year sentence and a fine of up to $250,000.

And in an indictment unsealed Thursday, another seven Chinese nationals were charged in connection with an effort to “harass and coerce” a U.S.-based Chinese national known in court filings as John Doe to return to China.

That included pressuring a family member of Doe to travel from China to the U.S. to relay threats from the government. 

The action was part of the broader Chinese effort “Operation Fox Hunt,” which DOJ has deemed an “extralegal repatriation effort.”

—Updated at 3:25 p.m.