Two Chinese intelligence officers tried to bribe a US law enforcement official as part of an effort to obtain inside information about a criminal case against the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, federal prosecutors alleged in an indictment unsealed on Monday.
The announcement of charges against the two alleged agents came as the attorney general, Merrick Garland, detailed two other cases in which Chinese intelligence operatives harassed dissidents inside the United States and pressured US academics to work for them.
Garland said that the cases showed that China “sought to interfere with the rights and freedoms of individuals in the United States and to undermine our judicial system that protects those rights.
“The justice department will not tolerate attempts by any foreign power to undermine the rule of law upon which our democracy is based,” he said.
Washington has long accused Beijing of meddling in US politics and attempting to steal intellectual property. But the move to unmask the espionage operation marked an escalation by the justice department after it accused Huawei in February 2020 of conducting racketeering and conspiracy to steal trade secrets.
“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,” Garland said at a news conference unveiling the indictment.
The Chinese intelligence officers Guochun He and Zheng Wang attempted to orchestrate a scheme to steal the prosecution strategy memo, witness lists, and other confidential evidence from the US attorney’s office for the eastern district of New York, the indictment said.
The charging papers against He and Wang referred only to an unnamed telecommunications company based in China, but the entity in question is understood to be Huawei, according to a source familiar with the matter.
According to the indictment unsealed in Brooklyn, the Chinese agents paid about $61,000 worth of bitcoin in bribes to a US government official whom they believed had been recruited to work for the Chinese government but in fact worked as a double agent for the FBI.
The FBI double agent provided some documents to the Chinese agents that appeared to present some of the information they sought – though the documents were actually prepared by the justice department and did not reveal actual meetings or trial strategies.
Starting in September 2021, the indictment said, He and Wang asked the FBI double agent about what he learned from the US attorney’s office in New York, and which Huawei employees had been interviewed by federal prosecutors as a way to gain insight into the case.
The following month, the FBI double agent sent them a document made to look like an internal strategy memo that was labelled “Secret” and discussed a plan to charge and arrest two Huawei employees living in China, for which He is alleged to have paid $41,000 in bitcoin bribes.
The initial bribe was followed with a second payment of $20,000 in bitcoin from He as a “reward” in September 2022, the indictment said.
US law enforcement officials have long warned about national security threats posed by China, including through human and cyber espionage, as part of increasingly brazen attempts to steal corporate intellectual property, trade secrets and influence US policy.
“The cases unsealed today take place against a backdrop of malign activity by the People’s Republic of China that includes espionage, harassment, obstruction of our justice system and unceasing efforts to steal US technology,” the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, said.
“China seeks to be a major power on the world stage and challenge the United States in multiple arenas. Today’s cases make clear that Chinese agents will not hesitate to break the law and to violate international norms in the process,” Monaco said.
Arrest warrants were issued for the two men, but it is unlikely they will ever be taken into custody.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though China and Huawei have both previously denied such allegations. He and Wang, understood to be based in China, could not be reached.
At the news conference on Monday, Garland also announced a second indictment newly unsealed in New Jersey that charged three Chinese intelligence officers with conspiring to act as illegal agents between 2008 and 2018 under the cover of an academic institution.
That indictment alleges the three intelligence officials had attempted to illegally ship US technology to China, as well as to undercut protests in the US that would have probably been embarrassing to the Chinese government.
Separately two people were arrested and five others charged with harassing a US resident in order to force them to return to China.
Part of the plot, prosecutors allege, involved having the person’s nephew travel to the US as part of a tour group to deliver threats that included, “Coming back and turning yourself in is the only way out.”
Chinese agents have pursued hundreds of Chinese nationals living in the US in an effort to force their return, as part of a global campaign against the country’s diaspora, known as Operation Fox Hunt, the FBI has said.
