A day doesn’t pass that somewhere in the U.S. there is political discussion or news stories about China and its targeting of American firms for technology. Corporate theft. Spying.
Even in Oklahoma where a 35-year old Chinese national faces charges of stealing trade secrets from Phillips 66 in Bartlesville.
But the Bartlesville case is no surprise. Here’s why.
In an earlier life, I was an investigative reporter and as such, came into contact with a government informant who was paid to monitor and target Chinese students at the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma City University.
It was in the late 1980s when the man who I wrote about in a book entitled “Dixie Cup Assassin” first made contact with me.
“A little of this and a little of that,” is what he told me when I questioned him about what he did. He finally admitted he was a man who had served time in prison and worked as an undercover operative for the Internal Revenue Service and the FBI. It proved to be true. It was how he made his living.
I was able to later confirm his claims and in fact, met with at least one of the IRS agents who “handled” him for 13 years while together, they targeted a number of individuals, including some in organized crime in Las Vegas.
The operative only wanted to be known as MH and that’s how I wrote about him. Through the course of years of meetings and telephone conversations, I learned how certain Chinese students at OU were constantly seeking military information and intelligence, especially at Tinker Air Force base in Oklahoma City.
He nicknamed one “the Dragon Lady.”
They even supplied him with a shopping list of the kind of technology they wanted to learn more about regarding the AWACS planes based at Tinker.
Over the years, MH met with other Chinese contacts who arrived at Will Rogers World Airport where MH had arranged for me to observe from a distance.
The FBI later had him wine and dine the wife of a Chinese scientist who worked for a defense contractor in California. Actually, it was more than ‘wine and dine’ but that’s beside the point.
Two women from China visited him and he took them on a tour of Washington D.C. and Gettysburg.
He posed as a businessman and was requested several times by one Chinese contact named “Frank” to visit mainland China. It wasn’t allowed by the FBI but MH claimed there was a serious proposal by the Clinton Administration Justice Department at one point to pay him an outrageous sum of money to defect to China, all in the name of counter espionage. It didn’t happen.
The pattern of attempts by Chinese students and others in Oklahoma and other states to carry out missions of stealing trade secrets was revealed in a December 1989 Reader’s Digest article. The story reported how Chinese agents made repeated attempts to penetrate America’s most sensitive scientific laboratories—Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico.
The Digest story indicated the Tianamen Square massacre in June of 1989 produced more evidence of Chinese espionage when enraged Chinese in the US called the FBI to tell of spy missions assigned to them and their colleagues.
A year earlier, China had detonated a neutron bomb whose radiation could kill tank crews shielded by armor. China’s spies went to work in U.S. research centers and stole the data needed to build the bomb.
The FBI at the time concluded 200 to 300 trained Chinese “overseas intelligence workers” a day plied their trade in the U.S. They were hidden among the 40,000 students in American universities in the late 1980s as well as the thousands of Chinese delegations that visit the country every year.
It only confirmed the kind of work that MH had been doing in Oklahoma.
