Transcription
He was kind of awkward. He was very goofy. He does not read like a Chinese spy. I, at least, had in my head this idea of a spy of James Bond. Somebody jumping out of airplanes, and that is not Ji.
This story is about aviation secrets, in particular, jet engine trade secrets. These are technologies that China wants very badly. It was in the paper every day. What China is alleged to be stealing en masse from the United States. The playbook is simple: Rob, replicate, and replace. We cannot tolerate a nation that steals the fruits of our brainpower.
Ji was almost like a pack rat when it came to electronic information. You have text messages, you have videos, you have photos, you have so much digital evidence about what he was doing. What type of real spy is going to take a photo of a top-secret blood oath? No one. Mr. Bean would do that. He was almost like a kid.
I think it was clear Ji was a stand-in for some of the bigger conflicts that were going on between China and the United States. His goal was to get US citizenship. To become an intelligence officer. Ji was on that path.
When I met Ji, I just thought he was this cute, quirky guy. He felt like an extrovert to me because he just, I don't know, was so goofy and would talk to anyone. He really did have a pureness to him. He just, you know, seemed like he just wanted to do good. To have such a happy-go-lucky personality takes so much energy; it feels like it would be authentic. But who's to say?
I've covered China for a long time, and Ji Chaoqun, in many ways, is kind of the prototypical college kid for most of this story. He goes to a very prestigious university, the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and he studied aviation engineering. This is a very important topic for the Chinese government. Jet engines are one of the hardest-to-replicate technologies. These were developed primarily during World War II, and for many decades, the US and Europe have held a monopoly. China has expended a lot of effort and energy on stealing those technologies, or trying to.
Ji is at a job fair about six months before he is set to graduate with his engineering degree, and he sees this kind of mysteriously labeled booth where there's a person who's purporting to be a professor recruiting for what he only describes as a confidential unit. It doesn't take long for Ji to realize that he's being recruited for the Ministry of State Security, China's premier intelligence agency.
MSS stands for the Ministry of State Security, and it's basically China's main intelligence agency. Think of a combination between the CIA and the FBI. The MSS doesn't really see a distinction between spying for the government and spying for Chinese companies and getting the kind of secrets they would be interested in in their attempt to catch up and surpass their competitors. The vast majority of the actual MSS officers stay in China and never leave China, and so there's zero risk to them. Ji is unusual in that he is someone who is recruited in China and sent overseas, really as an MSS agent.
There are two reasons the MSS was interested in Ji. One, he had technical knowledge that could help them identify trade secrets to steal, and the other was that he had a visa to travel to the US, and he was clean. So, in that sense, he's the perfect person to recruit to go spy in the US. They are really laying it on thick that this would be a really cool, kind of sexy, interesting opportunity. They're taking him out to dinners. They really wine and dine him. It was also something that appealed to his sense of helping his country. He was into, like, the military. He was into this idea of being a spy, like a James Bond-type spy, in some very basic way, and I think that was a lot of the allure. He travels to Nanjing, where the aviation trade secret theft is really kind of headquartered. That's where he gets his initial training.
Once Ji signs with the MSS, he's really excited about it. This might be the coolest thing that ever happened to him, to be recruited to be a spy. He sends his friend photos of his MSS registration form, and his friend even tells him, like, "Hey, are you supposed to be sending this to me?" He is sending pictures of all of these hundred-dollar bills, US dollars, and he's laid them out over what looks like possibly his living room. The sense is this kid is so excited to tell somebody that he's a spy, and he's not supposed to, but he can't help himself.
Mid-2013, Ji gets his visa. He travels to the US and he begins studying at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Ji's daily life in Chicago, to start, is pretty routine. He goes to school, he works out, he plays games online at night. He hasn't done anything yet. His girlfriend comes to visit him in Chicago. His parents come to visit him, and he travels. They traveled a lot. They went out west, and on one trip, they passed through Salt Lake City, and he has an encounter that really would wind up changing his life. He gets introduced to the Mormon church.
I don't feel like he took much time to make that decision to join the LDS church. He was so excited about it. We were 19, 20-year-olds, and we thought we were really cool. We would say things like, "Oh yeah, that's so gucci and stuff." And he would make fun of us for that, and so he'd be like, "We'd ask him how he is," and he'd be like, "I'm gucci." This is a picture of Chaoqun on his baptism day, and this is the program for Chaoqun's baptism. It has his favorite scripture on there, which is a scripture from the Book of Mormon. The scripture says, "Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Behold, thus saith the Father, ye shall have eternal life." Yeah, I gave the opening prayer for it, and then he was baptized. He would do as much as possible with the church with us, especially. We did get really close with him. He just seemed like the type of person that just knew exactly what he wanted to do. Always.
Ji was really enjoying his life in America. He had made friends. But he does have a secret. I knew this case was going to be one of the highlights of my career. Economic espionage is a significant national security threat to the United States, to us. Hopefully, people around the country and people around the world understand that, hey, we should be taking this seriously. I learned a ton about the MSS because of this case. What the MSS does, and how it's structured, and its history over time.
A lot of people who are being recruited have what's called, like, in this world, handlers. People who are experts who handle the individuals being recruited to make sure they're following the right processes and everything is going smoothly. He was being handled by Xu Yanjun, and Xu Yanjun's responsibility, we knew, was to steal aviation-related secrets. Xu is the one who's giving Ji directions about what he should be doing to help the MSS.
In August 2015 is when we first see a very specific tasking from the MSS, and specifically Xu Yanjun. Xu reaches out to Ji and asks him to gather information about certain scientists in the US. What Xu asked him to do was to log on to three different background check websites and download background checks on nine scientists. These are commercial websites. You enter a credit card number, you type in a name. This is all kind of public, commercially available data. And these were mostly Chinese nationals living and working in the US for major defense contractors. And what he was really trying to do was gather intelligence about scientists, especially scientists who worked on aviation-related technologies, to try to identify those scientists and help recruit them to steal American technologies and give them to the Chinese government.
This is a pretty simple task that Ji is given, but it takes Ji longer than it should have. Xu Yanjun is kind of pestering him, like, "Hey, do you have that stuff? Is it ready? Can you send it to me?" Ji eventually gets the background checks together, and he sends them in an email to Xu with the subject line, "Midterm exams."
Now Ji is facing a problem. He's here on a student visa, and that means once he's done with school, he's got to leave the country and, you know, go back to China. Ji comes up with a plan. He joins the military through this MAVNI program. It allows the military to recruit people who are not citizens but have special resources or talents that the military really needs. Ji is a fluent Chinese speaker. The benefit for him is that it really, really speeds up the citizenship process. If you join the MAVNI program, it could happen in six months or a year. Things are looking amazing for Ji. He's figured out a way to stay in the United States. He's joined the military, he's on the fast track to become a citizen, get access to sensitive information. Things are going phenomenal.
But then they come to sort of a screeching halt. In April of 2018, a guy in a red car outside Ji's apartment gets out and accosts him on the street. The man tells Ji that his friend from Nanjing is in trouble. Ji travels with the man to a hotel room in downtown Chicago. The man shows Ji a news article stating that "Chinese spy arrested in Belgium at the request of the United States." Ji's main handler, Xu Yanjun, he was increasingly disgruntled at work, and he starts taking bigger and bigger risks to gather trade secrets from abroad. He winds up traveling to Europe and he gets caught. The person Ji's talking to is saying that he's an MSS officer as well, and they need to figure out how Xu Yanjun got caught and how deep the penetration of this spy network has gone. These are not totally friendly interviews. Ji is kind of on the back foot. And thus begins this relationship between Ji and this guy who he thinks is his handler, but actually is an undercover FBI agent. The FBI agent is wearing a wire, so all of it's recorded. There are three meetings: one in April of 2018, one in May, and then one in September.
Ji is incredibly forthcoming. In a weird way, he's kind of eager to like show that he was good at his job, thinking that this guy is his new boss. He's got these, you know, big ambitions for what he's going to go on to do once he gets into the Army and once he gets his clearance. The FBI undercover asks him to sign a receipt on, which is written in Mandarin, like, "Receipt for MSS spy payment." The signal to affect the arrest would be that Ji signs another of these payment receipts, and that would be the moment where the FBI would, would, would knock on the door and arrest him. The problem was the FBI planned for everything except in the room there was no pen, so the undercover had to go into the hallway. Now he's given a pen by another member of the, the arrest team. He signs for the money that he's given for his work. The FBI go in and then arrest the undercover. I mean, pretend to arrest him. But you can hear the undercover actually kind of like scream in mock, like terror, I guess, as he's, as he's arrested. "There. Right there. Yes. Your name? Yes. Do you speak English?" Then they bundle him out of the room, and then these two FBI agents sit down at the table with Ji and start to have a conversation with him. The ruse is basically like, "Okay, this guy that we just arrested, he's been like working with the MSS. Why are you talking to him?" "Yeah. Okay. I understand. Yeah." There's some effort being made to see if Ji will cooperate and maybe become an asset for them. He doesn't decide to do that. And then they arrest him.
27-year-old Ji Chaoqun. He is being held right now in the Metro Correctional Center in the Loop. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in federal prison. I started getting Facebook message requests from different news reporters asking how I knew him. They saw pictures of me with Chaoqun, and they were writing stories. I did feel like it had to be a mistake. There's no way that Chaoqun would've been a spy, you know, that he would be trying to give secrets that would undermine a place that he loved. He loved the United States. He loved Chicago.
At this time, Xu had been extradited from Europe and was in jail in Ohio. Ji was in jail in Chicago, and they're both headed for trial. As it often does, China denied all the allegations. China will often accuse the US of, you know, kind of manufacturing these details and making things up. In private, however, China was lobbying behind the scenes to get these two guys back.
I've been involved in some of the bigger cases in Chicago. I've tried a lot of racketeering cases, complex fraud trials, murders. I represented Harvey Weinstein in his trial, and I've done everything in between. But this was my first, you know, representing an alleged spy. I don't want to say outside of my comfort zone because criminal law is criminal law, but it was definitely a challenge I wanted to take on. The first time I met Ji was at the MCC Chicago. It's both a jail and prison here, a few blocks away from the federal courthouse, and it's a giant triangle-shaped building with little slits of windows, and it's sort of ominous and foreboding. And there was no doubt he was nervous and scared, I think, in that moment. I saw him probably weekly, more or less, if not more often some weeks, over the course of four years, and developed a very close relationship with him. I went to meet with Ji, I think Ryan came with me, and we just hit it off. I liked him right away, and I think one of the things that he was concerned about was whether or not I would be comfortable representing somebody who was charged with essentially spying on the United States. And I certainly had no problems with the allegations in the case and told them that that is not a problem.
Ji was charged with several crimes that included conspiring to act as a foreign agent to the US, acting as a foreign agent in the US, committing wire fraud, and then lying to the US government. Ji always maintained his innocence. It was clear that he wanted to proceed to trial, and we were going to proceed to trial. There was a great deal of evidence that made us say, "This is going to be hard." We had his literal registration form registering as the MSS, him signing a receipt that says MSS, which showed that he knew he was part of the MSS. We tried to show that he was manipulated, that he was young, that he was naive, that he really didn't do anything here that would be tantamount to spying. We weren't dealing with issues of national security. We weren't dealing with classified information. We just weren't. We were dealing with background reports you could get off Spokeo.
Most of the scientists who were part of the list that Ji was collecting information about, we had most of them testify at the trial, and we saw them really as victims of this conduct. They had their personal information collected by a foreign spy agency, and they were going to be targeted. Was Ji contacted by members of the MSS? I think the government proved that. Was he planning on being a long-term overseas asset? I don't think so. Not for a second. Not for me.
Typically, we say a jury will deliberate for about a day for every week of trial. So we were expecting something like two days of deliberation, but they came back quickly. When I heard the first charge, "guilty," then I felt pressure and anxiety release because that was our main charge, and he'd been found guilty. Guilty on all counts, except for the wire fraud counts. He was found not guilty of those charges, and then it was off to sentencing. And I think that the government, if you look at their sentencing memorandum, 80% of it is about what China is alleged to be stealing en masse from the United States. That was what they wanted the judge to focus on. But at the end of the day, I disagreed with that. What was fair or what wasn't? You know, that's, that's not, I have my opinions on it for sure.
Typically, when someone is caught as a spy in another country, they're expelled. I mean, there's this idea that everyone does it. We want our spies to not be thrown in prison in other countries, but targeting companies animates this idea that it goes outside the bounds of traditional espionage. The FBI wanted to set an example with these guys, and they did. Xu Yanjun gets 20 years in prison. Ji Chaoqun gets eight years in prison.
Kind of the last thing we were expecting to see very late in the Biden administration, that both of them would be sent back to China. Tonight, Ji and his convicted Chinese spy handler are part of a spy swap with China, resulting in the return of three Americans, long held by Beijing. A couple of them also accused of spies. I definitely, through the years, have wanted to reach out, like, who doesn't want answers? How involved was he? Was it something that he just got roped into, like, in his innocence, didn't really know what it meant? I think about the, the flip side of, you know, like, if it was an American doing this, like looking for Chinese secrets, like we would be okay with it, right? Like that's the reality.
I saw him kind of as a kid that just grew up on the other side of the world. Like if he was born here, he'd be my neighbor. And just like anybody else, a great American, and probably a patriot. There's what he was charged for and what he was convicted for. And then there's kind of what could have been. Had Ji not gotten caught, what would his path look like five years, 10 years, 20 years down the line? Let's say he wound up working for a major aerospace company. Who knows what his career could have looked like?
Our focus is on illegal conduct of the Chinese government and not of people in China, and certainly not of Chinese Americans. People of every race, every ethnicity, every gender, everything have been prosecuted for these kinds of crimes. We want to be very careful about having preconceived notions about what a spy looks like. Most people don't live in the world of espionage. We think of it as an issue that's kind of out there somewhere. That's for the spy agencies. When it comes to trade secret theft, however, it could be the person next to you, and you'd have no idea. There's almost no way to know, and that's the really troubling, scary part.