Announcer (00:00:01):
Due to the themes of this podcast, listener discretion is advised.

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Lock your doors, close the blinds, change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies.

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Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue. This episode is presented by Matt Fulton and produced by Chris Carr.

Matt Fulton (00:00:36):
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Secrets and Spies.

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In the early 2000s, a quiet engineer in Southern California was living what looked like a textbook American immigrant success story. He owned a modest home, went to work every day at a defense contractor supporting the U.S. Navy, and kept a low profile. His name was Chi Mak. For decades, he had access to some of the most sensitive technologies in the U.S. submarine fleet. Behind that ordinary facade, the FBI eventually concluded Mak and his family were at the center of one of the most prolific Chinese espionage operations ever uncovered on American soil.

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Today’s guest, former FBI Special Agent Jim Gaylord, led the multi-year investigation that brought Mak and his co-conspirators down. This new book, CHASING CHI, is a rare insider account of what it actually takes to hunt a spy inside the United States — how it works, how quickly it can all go wrong, and just how much patience and luck are involved. We’ll talk about how the case unfolded, what it revealed about China’s approach to stealing American technology, and what it tells us about the threat landscape we’re facing today, from intellectual property theft to pre-positioned malware and critical infrastructure. And we’ll end with a harder question: if a real crisis with China emerges, how prepared are we psychologically and practically for that fight to come home?

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Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. Take care.

Announcer (00:01:55):
The opinions expressed by guests on Secrets and Spies do not necessarily represent those of the producers and sponsors of this podcast.

Matt (00:02:18):
Jim, welcome to Secrets and Spies. It’s such a pleasure to have you with us finally.

Jim Gaylord (00:02:23):
Thanks, Matt. Been looking forward to it.

Matt (00:02:25):
Yeah. So you’re here today because you’ve written a new book, CHASING CHI, which pulls back the curtain on the investigation you led for the FBI into Chinese spy Chi Mak, one of the most consequential espionage cases uncovered on U.S. soil. It’s an extraordinary story about patience, tradecraft, and how China goes after American technology. But before we get into the book and the case itself, I’d love to start with you. So you spent a big chunk of your FBI career in counterintelligence. What pulled you into that world in the first place, and once you got there, what most surprised you about what the work was actually like?

Jim (00:03:06):
Well, when I got into the Bureau, I hadn’t decided whether it was criminal. I don’t think I even considered the counterintelligence side of it, although I was a huge fan. I took in a lot about the Cold War, so I guess you’d call me a Cold Warrior. When I joined the Bureau, basically the decision was made for me because my first office was Minneapolis, and after that, everyone from Minneapolis was going to go to New York, and they weren’t paying COLA back then. So agents were living way on the outskirts to get into New York, and it was a horrible commute. I heard about it and I saw an availability to take Vietnamese, learn it, and then go to Orange County, California. I’m from Southern California, so I put in for that. I ended up over two and a half years learning Vietnamese and I worked in Little Saigon and it was all counterintelligence and I loved it. I loved it. And besides Vietnamese, I’d also worked China, Russia, Iran, and others, and I kind of backed into it. And once I’d started, I loved the work and that’s basically how I went into counterintelligence. By 2001, I was also working counterterrorism, because our squad handled both for Orange County, and by 2001, the Vietnamese target kind of died down, and China was the huge concern. And so I started working a lot of Chinese cases.

Matt (00:04:34):
So when you’re running a CI case, how does that differ from a traditional criminal investigation in how you build evidence, the timelines you’re working on and the kind of risks that you’re managing?

Jim (00:04:44):
Well, a criminal case can be a lot more out there. Most counterintelligence work, the vast majority of it, is classified. So you’re not going to judges, you’re not going to prosecutors; you’re on your own as far as it’s just the Bureau. No other agencies other than other counterintelligence agents, CIA and NSA and such. But you’re working that and you’re doing the best you can. Typically you get a lead and you’re not sure if it’s true or not. This person’s working, or there’s some indication they’re working for another government, or there’s some indication they’re taking things from work, or they’re trying to influence a local community like the Vietnamese community. And so you’re looking into it. You can go and interview people, get a sense of what this person’s all about. Is it true or not? You start, you do record checks. I did lots of trash covers.

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As you go through people’s trash, you get a lot of tidbits people throw out, and you’re trying to figure out if this person’s an agent and, if they are, do you have evidence that’s not classified. Normally, you can’t bring classified evidence in a court unless you get it declassified. That’s a lot of work, and it’s an uphill battle. So you’re trying to figure out if they’re an agent and, if you can’t prosecute ‘em, how else are you going to neutralize their effectiveness? Maybe you go and interview their employer and the people around them that they’re getting information from or trying to influence. Maybe they’re here illegally or if they’ve overstayed their visa, in which case I’d contact ICE and try to get them deported, things like that. But there’s no clear-cut solution normally like there is in a criminal case, which is either up or down. Do we have the evidence?

Matt (00:06:20):
So over the course of your career, when did China start to move from one of several players that you’re focused on in CI to the dominant counterintelligence concern? And how did that show up in the cases coming across your desk at the bureau?

Jim (00:06:35):
Well, in the ‘80s it was all Russia, and then once the ‘90s came and the Clinton administration came in and China started its influence operations in the United States, that’s when I first became aware that this country’s a problem. And once they started becoming a commercial rival to the United States, that’s when we started seeing a lot more students and diplomats and businesspeople coming over and trying to take technical information, now that their economy was up to the ability to copy and duplicate and try to surpass our industries. So that’s in the ‘90s is when I first noticed them coming on, and the Bureau as a whole noticed this. And then once we got towards the end of the ‘90s, we started having cases pop up — cases that ended up failing usually because of prosecutors and the United States Attorney’s Office locally or the Department of Justice just didn’t have a stomach for going after these subjects. And so there was failure after failure, but we knew that was the major threat, that they had surpassed the Soviet Union as the major intelligence threat to the United States.

Matt (00:07:52):
I guess that kind of leads nicely into the subject of the book we’re talking about. So for listeners who may have only have a vague memory of those headlines from, well, approaching 20 years ago now or have never heard of this case, who was Chi Mak as you first understood him, this quiet engineer and a Navy contractor, and why did this particular case matter so much once you started to peel it back?

Jim (00:08:15):
Well, we had a very vague lead about there being a leak out of a facility in Anaheim called Power Paragon. We didn’t know it was Chi Mak at the time. So the way we tracked him down was we knew what technologies were being stolen and we narrowed it down to just a few people that were possibilities. And then Mak turned out was traveling to China and in fact was in China when we started the investigation. And once we narrowed it down further onto him, we started getting all sorts of confirmations that we were onto the right guy, but Mak himself, to his coworkers, was a popular guy. He wasn’t a Mr. Socialite, but he was very friendly, gregarious, very helpful. He was not one of those standard stereotypes that we would look for — someone, a disgruntled employee who’s unhappy at work and maybe wants to get back at his employer or he is greedy and wants to earn money. No, he clearly loved his job and he volunteered to go to other facilities across the country to troubleshoot. Anybody who wanted to ask him a question had an engineering problem, he would help them. And so when we went to that facility and eventually when we were able to be open about it and interview other people, they all liked Chi and said, no, it can’t be true about him. I’ll help you, but I know I’ll be showing you that you’re wrong. This isn’t the guy. He wouldn’t do this. So he was well-liked by management and coworkers.

Matt (00:09:45):
Right. So you said this case of course, began with a tip, could have easily been dismissed or mishandled, didn’t seem like an obvious suspect. What sort of made you and your colleagues take it seriously then and how did it escalate from, we’ll look into this. Yeah, he doesn’t seem like a Robert Hanssen type we’ll say into this full-blown multi-agency task force with real resources behind it.

Jim (00:10:12):
Well, what made us take it seriously is once we started checking out the lead that these technologies are being stolen and they weren’t very important technologies, once we saw that he was in fact collecting these, he was collecting these in the home, we knew we had the right guy, and this was serious because all the information we were given, we checked out, it all checked out. So basically to get the coverages in counterintelligence, like I said, you can’t go openly to a judge. You have to go to the FISA court, and it’s a judge who’s been rotated onto the FISA court so they can, they’ve been cleared so they can see classified information. So once we showed them our initial collection, what the trash was showing, what our surveillance was showing, they started giving us incrementally more intrusive coverages. The first being microphones, well actually the first being telephone taps on their phone lines.

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And once we got that and we proved a little more, this guy’s collecting just these technologies that we’d been told are going to China, then we eventually got permission to implant microphones and do covert searches of the house. And that’s what we did. And once we got in that house, that blew any doubt out of our mind because he had piles like a foot high, two foot high, of technical documents around his house by the front door, dining room table, bedroom, their second bedroom, everywhere. That verified for us, okay, we’re on the right track. This guy’s dangerous. And of course we had documented he had just been to China and that he had multiple trips to Asia, but his methodology was he would never fly directly to China. So our records will always stop at Taipei or Manila or Singapore or South Korea, Seoul. But we did see that one time coming back from China and basically it’s obvious he’s going to China each time and he’s cleaning himself by taking a separate flight to China.

Matt (00:12:09):
So he was a contractor for the U.S. Navy, or he worked for a U.S. Navy contractor–

Jim (00:12:16):
His company was, yeah.

Matt (00:12:17):
Yeah. Focused on U.S. submarine technology. I was wondering if you could say a little bit more specifically about that technology and what it would’ve meant if the Chinese got their hands on it.

Jim (00:12:27):
Sure. The key technology we first were told about is Quiet Electric Drive, which is a new way to not only quiet but control the acoustic signature of submarines. And that’s an area we’ve always had a big lead over the Soviets or the Russians now and the Chinese, and a submarine’s only defense is how quiet it is so we can track theirs. Hopefully they can’t track ours, and he was trying to give that information away when we actually arrested him. Others we discovered along the way were electromagnetic weapons and platforms. Specifically, our newest aircraft carriers are going to be using electricity, not steam catapults, to launch and land, and not hooks to launch and land planes. It means the planes can be lighter, fly farther with more fuel, more armaments, more ammo, weapons, that’s another one. Then DDX was our newest destroyer. It was going to be an all electronic ship, and that’s information he was also giving away along with survivability studies on how to survive a battle for a battleship and then Aegis radar, which was, we were decades ahead of everyone else on that, and I didn’t realize until the trial how important that technology was and what a lead and advantage it gave our U.S. Navy. So all that stuff going to China means if we ever get into conflict, that’s American soldiers in the water dead. It should enrage most people. It enrages me. We had to get this guy. We had to stop him.

Matt (00:14:00):
Yeah, absolutely. So Chinese intelligence collection, we will get more into this a bit later, very sort of non-traditional in the sense that our community is structured, but I guess their intelligence operations look at acquiring this sort of technology A to figure out how to defeat it against us, but also how to gather it for themselves to increase the survivability and effectiveness of their own platforms too. They’re doing both at the same time.

Jim (00:14:29):
Oh, yes, absolutely. And they’re trying to surpass us. At least they want to be able to make the Seventh Fleet step down if they ever do decide to retake Taiwan or assert themselves more aggressively in the South China Sea.

Matt (00:14:44):
Right. So Mak looked like the definition of a low key model immigrant engineer. He had this access for years, as you said. In hindsight, do you think there were warning signs and why do you think someone like that could have operated for so long without tripping alarms?

Jim (00:15:01):
Well, one of the ways he did that is he tried to steal items that were still being researched and hadn’t yet been classified. When they’re attached to a platform, they’re classified. But if you classified all the research done for any of our military branches, it would just bankrupt us. They’ve got to keep that at a lower level of classification. So he would steal things that weren’t quite classified yet, but showed promise and we were developing. And QED was one of those things. There were some classified items he stole, but for all those years, he tended to steal things that weren’t classified and therefore didn’t have as much scrutiny under them. He also was very careful. He and his wife, Rebecca, they didn’t mix with anybody. There wasn’t socializing outside of a few other people who are also intelligence agents or officers. And so there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to see him that way.

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Now at work, there were a couple of suspicious signs. Again, he was very friendly and helpful, that wasn’t it. But once in a while he would go to the IT officer at the company and say, Hey, I’ve got this information. I want to share it with somebody. He didn’t say China, he was implying other engineers there at work. He said, I need to share it with ‘em, but so can you put it on a disc for me or can you put it, they had a limit to the size of their emails could be sent out, so I can’t send it to him that way. Can you put it on a disc and I’ll send that to him? And so this IT officer trusting Chi who had a clearance himself did that. It felt really bad later what he learned that Chi was actually doing that so he could take it home, copy it, and then send an encrypted disc of that same information to China. So he was never reckless. Probably the most reckless thing he did, which I don’t call it as much, but it was throw away a tasking list in the trash, tore it into tiny pieces, each piece smaller than a dime. And it was out of anger from his tasking. He didn’t like that they were tasking him what was obvious, and he already knew what was needed. So he just tore it up and threw it away.

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After nearly two years of going through the trash and finding very mundane everyday items, our agents thankfully were still conscientious enough to do a good job on a tough task, stinky task, and found these tiny bits of paper. We put it all back together and that was probably the most foolish thing he did. That’s the only thing that revealed him to the outside world, and that’s only if we were already onto him and looking through his trash.

Matt (00:17:39):
Let’s take a break and we’ll be right back.

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So once you were into the investigation, this of course became a long resource intensive operation. You know, wiretaps. You mentioned the trash pulls. Really glamorous work that you surely were not paid enough for. These covert entries into his house. Cameras, the works. Can you walk us through, I guess to the extent that you can, the tradecraft and the operational tempo, what that looks like and how you kept something that intrusive both legal, so it’s permissible in court as evidence and invisible across the multiple agencies that were involved. And I think you partnered with NCIS quite a bit on this, of course.

Jim (00:18:36):
Yes. We brought them in right away because of all the Navy assets involved. So as far as the investigation itself, I know some people will hear about this case and say how outrageous that was. You covertly searched their house and planted microphones and cameras in there. And I want to emphasize this is not a regular thing. I’d been a counterintelligence agent for over 20 years and I’d never done a covert entry, nothing like that. This was the first and last case where we did that because we had so much evidence about the drastic harm that was being done. So as far as workup to it, like I said, there was stages. First we’re putting GPS trackers in the cars and tapping telephones, then we put microphones in the cars. Then we were able to go into the house to plant microphones and do a covert search.

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And to do that, we basically have some experts back at Quantico, Virginia, most of ‘em former agents that were hired back because they were very good at this, and they travel around the country for different cases, terrorism and counterintelligence, and help us do covert entries like this. Beforehand, my squad and support people were fantastic. They put together this whole profile of the whole neighborhood. It’s not like the movies. We don’t dress like black ninjas in black and sneak in and sneak out. That’s too dangerous of getting seen. And if there’s witnesses, we don’t kill people. So our case is blown. So we had to be really careful, so we’d see who the smokers were. There was a guy across the street who would come out at three in the morning, smoke on the porch, people next door to their bathroom, face the house. We’d time basically when they tended to get up and use it at two in the morning, that sort of thing.

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We knew we’d have to be out of there by five because it was a blue collar neighborhood, lots of contractors getting up to go to work. And we generally couldn’t go before midnight. Usually it was closer to two o’clock. So we had a very small window to get into that house. And to do that, we needed to, as I said, you had to figure out the rhythms of the neighborhood. We figured out, we saw and noticed that Chi and Rebecca would always park their car on the curb in front of their house at night. Well, because they were such solitary people and didn’t really talk to their neighbors, the neighbors didn’t know when they weren’t at home. And there were three trips they took one on Alaskan cruise, one to Europe, one to Hawaii, where we were able to use that week to get into the house.

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And to do that, we actually bought a car, a 1998 Plymouth Voyager. It was the same as theirs, beat up the same, same color. And when they drove theirs to LAX and parked it for their flight, we would use that vehicle, our vehicle to drive to the front curb. We pulled out the back seats, jammed all the agents, up to six agents in the back, all in fetal positions, lying on their sides so no one would see ’em park in front of that house. And then our lookouts, our surveillance and people watching pole cameras that we had up on the house to see what neighbor activities were.

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We’d get the all-clear signal and then we’d slide that door open, quickly walk across the lawn and walk into the house in single file hoping to expose ourselves as little as possible. Once inside, you can’t open windows. This is the summer, the first entry in Southern California. The house is very small, 700 square feet. They never improved anything in there and hot. And we’re all sweaty and can’t turn on the air conditioning, can’t turn the lights, obviously. And basically we have these small flashlights with red covers on them to make it less visible. And basically I got to keep those lights below the windows and any windows and doors and very slowly walk around the house. You can’t disturb anything that’s going to be left that way. You don’t want them to know you were there. One of the hardest things we had is they were horrible housekeepers, layers of dust covering everything. So if you disturbed anything, you’re leaving a trail. So we had to proceed very carefully.

Matt (00:22:57):
Their upbringing, you mentioned the way how modest the house was, how small it is despite working for a contractor with these big Navy contracts, he made pretty good money, especially for the time, but yet lived so modestly. And he and his wife had sort of an interesting upbringing in China that ingrained in them to live this way far below their means. I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about that. I found that pretty interesting.

Jim (00:23:26):
Yes. Well, once we had microphones in the house, we could hear their conversations and they spoke very lovingly of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin were talking about how these poor guys were misunderstood and they did so much good for the world. And part of that I mentioned that because these were hardcore Maoists and they’d grown up under the worst times in China, they survived very well because of their intelligence connections through the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward when millions starved, they were well fed, so they had no empathy or understanding of what communism really does. But they also, being from that background, they were extremely frugal, just unbelievably frugal. I’ve never seen anybody live this way. And one of the benefits of living that way is you’re able to save a lot of money. So by the time we arrested him, he had a million dollars in the bank, which he lost a lot of it to attorney’s fees, which made me very happy because they wanted a free government lawyer, and we fought that.

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We made them buy their own attorneys and spend a lot of money. We also actually seized some of that money under a unique theory of they defrauded the government and their company all these years being agents. So we seized a couple hundred thousand dollars that way, but I’m getting off track there. So they did a lot of things that were really strange behavior that initially we thought was operational. It’s got something to do with intelligence behavior. But it turned out most of that, almost all of it was because they were so cheap, they would switch hotel rooms from one hotel to another in Vegas when he was there for work, because they would save one to $2 a night at the other hotel every Saturday. They would go to a gas station and fill up for the week, and it wouldn’t just gas up and they wouldn’t just clean the windshield.

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They would clean the whole car with what the station provided. We thought they were looking for surveillance. You’re walking 360 around your car, you can look everywhere. No, they didn’t want to expend hose soap, water money at home. And we saw that evidence in home as well. And then they would go on from that gas station to a hardware store which had one entrance, and they’d go in and go to the lumber section. They’d stay there for 15, 20 minutes and then they would leave and they’d never buy anything every week. We thought, okay, they’re going back to the lumber section. They’re probably looking back at the entrance to see if they see the same faces each week coming and going, or they’re servicing a dead drop back there. They’re picking up information or messages or leaving them. Now, once we’ve sent a team in there, there was free coffee being served every Saturday at the location, they would grab that coffee and they’d go in the back and drink it and throw it away in the lumber. Maybe they didn’t want the employees seeing that they were never buying anything, just drinking their coffee and they left. That’s the sort of behavior we got used to. So after a while when we had some other agencies helping us, and they’d say, that’s operational behavior. No, these people are just cheap. And we’d explain to ‘em, and after a while, they got on board with, okay, we don’t have to worry about that behavior. So that really threw us in the beginning.

Matt (00:26:49):
Right. So I guess as you're spending months, years potentially watching a suspect, a subject, digging through their trash, listening to phone calls, maybe you get a warrant to go inside their house, you're observing a lot of really suspicious behavior. As you said, Occam's razor is pretty obvious. They're real operational indicators of what's going on here, but yet you haven't quite hit legally that bar where you or other agents on the task force can break out the handcuffs and bring these guys in and put them in front of a judge. Where is that sort of bar when you're running an investigation like this? What are you looking to observe to the point where you can say, okay, let's take a minute and let's end this?

Jim (00:27:37):
Well, it's a great question because early on that first year, as I said, we found stacks of documents. Now, it was against regulations to have it there. He wasn't storing it properly, but if we arrest him for that, he'll get a slap on the wrist. He probably won't do any time at all. He'll just go back to what he's doing. We would look discredited, like we claimed more than was there. So the first big notch we needed was we have to show that he's operating on behalf of China. He's following their directions. And that's where the trash I earlier mentioned came in big because once we put together two lists that he had thrown, torn, and thrown away, we found one was a list one through nine listing technologies they wanted in China. And the last one was DDX, the destroyer information. And we found another list where he is actually being told, Hey, we want you to go to conferences.

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We want you to gather that information, that sense of information on this, and then send it to us and we'll use it for research purposes. And below that was another list of a bunch of electromagnetic technologies they wanted. So that was the first big. Now we had intent and direction and evidence of following tasking, but we had to show not only was he collecting it, but did he deliver it. So we kept watching him. By this time we had cameras in his house, over his dining room table, and over his computer desk in their second bedroom. And we're watching 24/7, and early Sunday morning I get a call at home from one of our watchers. We call them lookouts, saying, Hey, we've got him copying discs onto his laptop and then making more discs. Now they're speaking Chinese. So the lookout doesn't know what they're saying yet, and our linguists aren't there at that moment.

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But he says, this is the behavior that we saw him being tasked to do in the tasking list. So I call an emergency meeting for the following morning, early morning. We get together. I tell the linguists, who through no fault of their own — it's really that our Los Angeles office and FBI headquarters hadn't provided us enough linguists — they're about two weeks behind. I tell them, okay, start with Sunday and work forward. We got to know why they're doing this. And later that afternoon they gave me summaries, and sure enough, Chi and Rebecca are copying together. They're both fully involved in doing this, and they're saying, okay, here's the stuff we're sending to Pu Pei Liang, who turns out to be their handler in China. He won't understand it — he's a computer guy — but when I retire in a couple months and go back, we'll explain everything. And they talk about that they're going to give it to Tai — who's going to encrypt it?

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And because of that, they're going to hide it on the disc so that if customs stops them, they won't find anything. And Tai's got his duties. We've got our duties. And so then the hairs on my neck stood up — okay, now they're attempting to transmit it. Those are all the elements we need to bring this to court. And I had assurances from my headquarters managers that if we find all those elements, they'll work to declassify all of our coverage so that we can use this in court, which normally is not the case. That's why counterintelligence cases don't normally go to trial. Because normally, if you have to declassify your source, you're revealing a capability you don't want to reveal. But the fact that we can plant microphones and cameras in houses — they do that for the mafia and other organized crime — so that's not something that has to remain classified.

(00:31:04):
So that's what you need. You got to show each step because, for instance, all the information was encrypted. It was encrypted with a program that was nearly unbreakable. We were told it might take years and years to break that code. So if we hadn't recovered the encryption discs and the encryption laptop from Tai's house, we wouldn't have been able to break that. And then we couldn't have proven what was on the disc. All we could say is, yeah, they mentioned QED and they mentioned this conference, but we can't identify which one it is or what the specific information is. So we wouldn't have a charge. So even at that point, we didn't have a case until we decrypted that and could prove he was sending sensitive information per Chinese tasking.

Matt (00:31:52):
I want to illustrate the chain of command here for folks. At the time you were supervising a CI squad in the Orange County Resident Agency, was it?

Jim (00:32:02):
Well, I wasn't actually a supervisor yet. I was the case agent, which was actually a bigger job because there were hundreds under me. My supervisor was Sal Valdez, and I mention him only because he was fantastic. I've had so many bad supervisors that as soon as we get pushback from anybody above them, they throw the agent under the bus and we had to fight. As I talk about in my book, we had to fight constant battles every day, and Sal was always there to back us up, but I was a case agent.

Matt (00:32:31):
Right. So I'm glad you mentioned that. Okay, so above you guys working this in Orange County, right, is the Los Angeles Field Office, third largest field office in the country with its own counterintelligence division. Of course, above that is headquarters with the big counterintelligence division. There's a lot of specialized resources that come to bear in a case like this: the special surveillance groups on the ground, aviation assets, technical folks back at Quantico, you mentioned the linguists that you get on this case. And the Bureau, of course, has greater resources than any other law enforcement agency in the country, but it's still not unlimited. And of course, Chi Mak at the time was not the only serious counterintelligence investigation in the country — probably not the only serious one even in Southern California at the time, given the size of the defense industrial base in the area. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to that friction of having to keep all these resources on this one case for such an extended period of time versus people up the chain of command trying to pull this away, thinking it would be better served for this other case that probably is showing better leads at the time. That's pretty difficult.

Jim (00:33:55):
And to be fair to them, in the beginning ours is one of many cases, as you imply, around the Bureau that were being worked, but eventually it did become the number one Chinese espionage case in the country for the Bureau. And yet we still had those resource issues. Initially, it was pushback all from the Los Angeles Field Office, which usually is the most supportive when I've had past cases that use resources. But there had been a major case that collapsed a year before — the Katrina Leung/J.J. Smith case — and it had left such a bad taste in the Bureau's mouth that they really didn't want to put in so many resources like they had with the previous case. So they fought tooth and nail. And so every linguist we tried to get, and every lookout, for instance, they'd say, well, we've got other important cases and we need these lookouts to watch these cameras. And I'd say, are those people identified, known intelligence officers? And they'd say, well, no, we're working to see if they are. I said, we have one, and he has already sent information to China. He's going to do it again. We are top priority. That wouldn't be the argument in and of itself — I had to have backing again from Sal. But then normally headquarters is the problem. Well, we had direct supervisors, first Randy Coleman and Sandy Kable, who were fantastic, and they fought tooth and nail to get and keep us those resources. Another time the head of the linguist unit in headquarters, a very imperious woman, tried to pull our linguists and say, we'll just farm your work out around the country. And she said, they're all cogs, they're all equal. Every linguist is the same as the other. Not true.

(00:35:47):
First, they tried to give us some guys who were so old they couldn't hear. They had the headphones on — they couldn't hear. The microphones weren't the best, to be fair to them, but they couldn't hear what was being said. We needed young ears who could hear, even though we were already boosting the signal and such. And so she came out and I told the linguists — and there was a culture that was encouraged, like: all the Farsi translators are here, and Mandarin, and Shanghainese, and Russian — and they were allowed to run themselves. And so it ended up being all these old world groups with their own hierarchies, and bringing the cultural restraints with them. So, for instance, among the Chinese speakers, all the good jobs — the ones that were higher profile — were given to the older ones, whether or not on merit, but on age. And if the younger one said anything, they were ridiculed by the older ones.

(00:36:39):
We had to change that. So we actually pulled our linguists out of those special groups that were off-site and brought them on-site next to the agents. And that was revolutionary because now we weren't just a disembodied voice on the phone. We were the agents there talking to them, exchanging ideas with them, asking them for cultural references — what they meant — and it was invaluable. And they became full-fledged, enthusiastic team members. We had three to four linguists that we stuck with, and they ended up testifying, but we had to fight tooth and nail to keep them throughout the case. Same with the lookouts. As I said, same with surveillance, although the surveillance people were better about that. So yes, every morning, Sal and I and my co-case agents, Fong and Gunnar Newquist, we would meet and say, okay, what challenges are we having now?

(00:37:29):
Who do we have to talk to? How do we handle it? And we actually developed strategies to do that. Gunner, who's our NCIS agent, sometimes he would go to NCIS and say that the FBI is tying up all these resources. We haven't really done anything other than offer me and a couple of other things. We really got to hold up our end. Then other times I'd go to headquarters and say, look, NCIS is small compared to us, and yet look at all the things they're doing. We can at least do this. And I would go to LA with the same issues and, by hook or crook, we certainly didn't get everything we wanted, but we got enough to keep the case going. And those tasking lists from the trash kind of silenced a lot of the naysayers who had said, ah, this isn't going anywhere. You're never going to get anywhere with this.

Matt (00:38:16):
And just to sort of touch again on the importance of the linguists there. Yes, Mandarin is so difficult for people who don't speak it — people who don't speak it well — the nuance of it, the way it's pronounced, can totally change the meaning of a word. And for, I guess, Johnny America G-Men, that's so impenetrable. I know someone who's sort of familiar with this field a bit, and he once described to me: Mandarin is China's first line of encryption. What they discuss internally amongst themselves is very different from what they discuss when it's being broadcast outward to an English-speaking audience. So that, I guess, speaks to the importance of having really good linguists who understand how the language works and the cultural nuance behind it.

Jim (00:39:15):
If I can add in, it's a great point too. And a lot of people don't understand how difficult that part of it was. It's a tonal language, and if your microphones aren't picking up well, then it's tough to tell a rising tone from a falling tone — a different word, same pronunciation, different word. So that's tough. But then they were using three different dialects, and it's not dialect. We think of like a southern accent or a Northeastern accent. The printed language is the same. But we also had Shanghainese and Cantonese, which were spoken often, and sometimes in the middle of a sentence they'd switch dialects, and the word is pronounced completely differently. So a Mandarin speaker, unless he's been to the Shanghai area, doesn't understand Shanghainese when they're speaking — it's not just a heavy accent; it's different pronunciation. So we had to have linguists who can understand all of them, or one of them — and then another one for a different dialect. And Shanghainese was especially hard to find linguists for because it's not as common as Mandarin or Cantonese. So that multiplied the issue. So these people we used were fantastic. They made the case.

Matt (00:40:30):
Yeah, without giving away every beat of the book, of course, because folks still need to read it after they hear this. Is there a particular moment in the operation where you felt, if we blow this whole thing collapses, years of digging through this dude's trash, it's just a waste of time?

Jim (00:40:49):
Yes. Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know. I've never been asked that. I didn't address that specifically in the book that way. But the moment came when we saw what and heard what they were doing and copying this, and we knew we were going to have to make an arrest, that's when I was surprised. I would've thought that's when I would be the most satisfied. We've got everything. But that's when I was the most worried because we were being told we had to make the arrest immediately. And most people out listening to you would say, well, yeah, of course you did. Well, no, we didn't, but we were made to do it anyway. And when you rush an operation like this from zero to sixty in just a few days, all sorts of mistakes, legal ones or otherwise can be made that can weaken or destroy the case.

(00:41:40):
And so we had a plan. What I haven't mentioned is we've mentioned Chi Mak, his wife, Rebecca, his brother, Tai, his wife Fuk Li, and his son Billy were also involved. Billy did the encryption. Fuk Li was part of his cover — she would travel with him when Tai was carrying Chi's information back to China. Well, Fuk Li was also engaged in her own marriage fraud business here. She would hook up rich Chinese with poor Americans who were willing to be paid to marry the person so they could get here. And then, of course, they'd divorce and then that person would stay. Well, she was heavily involved in that. And we heard this on the phones, and she was worried that she was going to get arrested because her colleagues in the Alhambra and Monterey Park area who were doing the same thing were getting arrested.

(00:42:31):
So we thought, okay, we're going to arrest her and Tai at the airport with a disc, and we'll take everything and we'll search the home under the marriage fraud violations. They won't know. She won't know that we know about the spying activity. And so we'll collect all that time to make a bigger, better case — take our time. And the problem was the Tuesday after this revelation of what was happening at the home with the copying of the disc, passing to Tai, was that we brought in NCIS, the FBI, and the Navy — Navy experts on what we're going to be charging him with stealing eventually. And they said, no, you have to arrest him immediately. We can't take a chance of QED leaving the United States.

(00:43:15):
I said, there is no chance we're going to arrest them. We're going to seize everything, and then maybe we'll screw up the disc and give it back to them. That's unusable. And they'll just — because Billy hadn't made some writing errors when he made the disc — so we're good. And they said, no, no, you have to arrest. I didn't understand why my FBI supervisors weren't sticking up for us, and we lost that battle. They wouldn't give us a vote. So the higher-ups voted and said, oh, you have to arrest him on Friday, days away. And I asked later, why didn't you support us? Sandy said, look, these guys said if we don't do what they want, they're not providing the experts. They're not providing the people to testify about the sensitivity of technologies. They're not cooperating. So either we do that or we lose their ability to try him for this stuff. I thought that was crazy — not him, but their reasoning. But that's why I was furious. But that's why we ended up being rushed, which means we have to use a lot of people for all the searches who don't know about the case.

(00:44:17):
We're going to be interviewing five people, four of whom do not speak English. Chi Mak was the only one who we could interview in English. So we're going to have to get agents who speak it, who don't know the case, because we don't have that many — we only have a couple on squad who speak Mandarin. And so they're not going to know the right questions to ask. We're going to be rushed in everything. And it almost happened not only because of that, but again, I understand these past cases that failed because of the U.S. Attorney's Office and the Department of Justice. On Friday, when I was supposed to go in Friday morning and sign the warrant — and Friday night we're going to make the arrest — they argued for over seven hours that day about what charges to bring. We told them, easy: we got the acting as an agent of a foreign government charge.

(00:45:01):
All you have to show is tasking and that he's fulfilling that tasking. You don't have to show the sensitivity of that technology. You don't show any of that. But always, most of these attorneys think they're smarter than agents. So they said, no, no, we got to do this. They picked a charge that was legally indefensible, and they told us this at four o'clock. They said, okay, here's the charge you're going to use. Well, by that time, we have no time if we're going to arrest them before they fly to China. So there was actually a concern: we're not going to get to them in time because of the dithering of these high-level, executive-level attorneys. We barely got there in time. We were able to make the arrest, but our whole timetable was set way back by these attorneys arguing all day about the right charge, and then coming up with the wrong one. And the way I can say with confidence it was the wrong one is because immediately they withdrew it and they brought the charge that we had wanted them to use all along. And it got us in trouble with the press and the judge, because they all thought, oh, that means it's a weak case — they're changing charges. No, it was attorneys who picked the wrong charge. I'm not an attorney. I went to law school, finished. I could see — and you could see, if you looked at the statute — that it did not cover the information that he had stolen yet. That's what they went with.

Matt (00:46:20):
You mentioned the--

Jim (00:46:20):
There were a couple times during that week when I thought, man, we were in trouble.

Matt (00:46:24):
Yeah, yeah. You mentioned US attorney's offices a couple times, sort of blowing CI investigations. Is that a common point of failure, them picking the wrong charges?

Jim (00:46:34):
Not so much. Well, yes, I should say yes, picking the wrong charges, but the biggest weakness — when I say picking the wrong charges — they're not picking the right charges. For instance, before this case, I had tried to bring charges before against people in the Vietnamese community who were working for Vietnam and were threatening and trying to influence the community and U.S. policy. And I'd say, let's bring this acting as an agent of a foreign government. I can show the tasking. I can show what they're doing. They'd say, oh, no, that's a BS charge. Nobody brings that charge anymore. That's only got five years maximum for prison. I'd say, I'll take it. We just need to highlight them in the community as being agents of a foreign government. They'd say, no. And I'd say, well, how about when they make misstatements to us — a 1001 charge of lying to an agent?

(00:47:22):
No, no, we need something more. So all these people were not charged because most of what they were doing wasn't at the level of stealing classified. So that's one thing. And so they didn't want to do Chi Mak, and that's originally why they didn't do it that way. But since the Chi Mak case, they're charging it now because it works — it's an easy charge to bring, and it's an easy charge to prove. And we did it with all five defendants in Mak, and with Greg Chung, the associate. And we saw it later after that: the Chi Mak case and the Greg Chung case opened the doors, showed prosecutors — I'm not talking about the lowest-level ones; I'm talking about the executives that run them — that these are charges we're bringing. We have to put people in jail if we're going to deter this behavior. We can't just let them do six months or go on probation. It doesn't teach them anything.

Matt (00:48:15):
Yeah. So take us back into that night of the arrest at LAX. What exactly was at stake in those hours, and how close did you feel you were to watching critical naval secrets literally fly out of the country?

Jim (00:48:33):
Well, in one way, we were very close. We weren’t going to let that happen. So we were going to arrest even if we had to be on our own initiative, but those kinds of charges wouldn’t stick. We’d be embarrassed. The case would fall apart. But we’d do it because we weren’t going to let that information go. But we also wanted to get a conviction. So I was set so far behind by this arguing by attorneys that the judges had all gone home. Well, it would’ve been a five-minute drive to Santa Ana that morning to swear before the judge. I had to go up to the northern San Fernando Valley on a Friday rush hour, which is a three-hour drive. I was cursing them as I was driving. I was driving on the shoulder, driving in the median. People were honking at me, mad, but I had to get there. I was actually hoping a patrol would pull me over. I’d tell them the problem and they’d escort me. But as I said in the book, there’s never a cop when you need one. In this instance, I wanted to get pulled over because I’ve got lights, but I’m in an undercover car and it just wouldn’t sell if I put those on.

(00:49:37):
So I get up to the judge, and the whole drive up I’m getting calls because we’re watching Billy, the son, drive his parents to LAX, and we haven’t even gotten before the judge yet. And I race up there; I’m all sweaty, disheveled. I go to his house. His wife is very nice, brings me in. He comes in, he starts reading, but it’s a long warrant, long affidavit. As he’s reading, I’m taking calls on my radio, my cell phone — panicked people saying, “He’s getting off at Century Boulevard, he’s almost at LAX,” or “Do we have signed orders?” And no, we don’t. But fortunately, the judge hears it. And he’s finished reading and he has to sign many duplicates of these orders for the various locations we’re going to search and people we’re going to arrest. And he says, “Sounds like you got a problem there.” I said, “Yeah, yeah. They’re supposed to be on a midnight flight to China, and we’re a couple hours away, and they’re about to go to the airline counter and go through security where we need to arrest them.”

(00:50:39):
And he said, “Okay.” And he signs the first one. He says, “You tell them, as far as they’re concerned, all the orders are signed, and I’ll put it out.” And you can hear a sigh of relief go across Southern California. So now the agents are cut loose. So we’re waiting to arrest Chi and Rebecca at their house. Once we’ve made the arrest at LAX, we’re going to arrest everyone right away so nobody can destroy the evidence. Sheldon Fung is running — my co-case — and he’s running the arrest at LAX, and he tells the agents there, “Okay, we’re going to divide ’em up right away. So I want half of you on this side, half on this side. When they walk through, you come in and you take ‘em apart. I don’t want ‘em to say a word. You take everything out of their hands. They can’t push any buttons or send any calls, any emergency warnings, anything.”

(00:51:24):
And they did a great job. If you’ve seen the video, which I put up for the book’s website, it’s masterful. They just separate him. Nobody seems to see anything. Even the other passengers coming off don’t seem to notice what’s going on except one guy. One guy who we had — because we treated our surveillance people so well, they were again part of the team, like the linguists. The guys who had been watching them in the morning were off, but they really wanted to see this ending and they wanted to do a double shift. So we said, okay. We got our other people. We got your colleagues watching the main subjects. When they get arrested, we want you to do a perimeter and see anything else amiss. And they see this Asian male standing on the sidewalk at LAX outside videotaping Fuk Li, who’s in a bright yellow jacket near the airline counter.

(00:52:20):
And every time Tai — her husband, who’s in a line — turns towards him, that guy turns his camera away, and then he turns it back again. And so they report this and they say, “Okay, you stay on him. And once we’ve done the arrest, we’ll come and see about this other guy.” Well, it turns out this guy, Mr. Luo, is a counterintelligence agent — countersurveillance agent, I should say — for China. And he is videotaping them. Now, he didn’t admit to this, but we know what he was doing. He was videotaping them, looking for either signs that they’ve been compromised by us, meaning our surveillance guys. Fortunately our guys are better, and we saw him first, so he didn’t see us. Or he’s watching them to see if they’re working for us, if we’ve doubled them back — if I foolishly — and some people might be tempted to do this — said, “Hey, you’re doing us a favor, so let’s take you around security.”

(00:53:11):
He would’ve seen that and he would’ve reported that. And then they probably never would’ve come back from China if that had been the case. But instead, he films them and then gets right in line behind them through security. They actually look at each other and show no sign of recognition. If you or I were in line, I’d say, “Hey,” I’d talk to you or something. They just look at each other and look away. Well, in fact, they knew each other. She had gotten him into the country through her marriage fraud scheme. He had a wife and kids in China, but she married him up with someone in the United States, and he tried for a green card later. So we waited. We made the arrest of them, started interviewing them, and then another agent, Dennis Kim — great guy — he was supervising all this. He went over there, found out Mr. Luo was now in the bathroom, and he went and confronted him in the bathroom. We seized all the stuff off of him, found the film.

(00:54:04):
He’d done other countersurveillance filming at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Minnesota when Chinese delegations were visiting. And he didn’t admit, obviously, to a lot, but he gave us a few tidbits showing us that he in fact had had a link with the guy I’ve mentioned as a handler, Pu Pei Liang at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou. So we wanted to charge him, and again, the executives of the United States Attorney’s Office said, “No, no. We don’t have enough.” They’re worried they might lose, which always seems to be their overwhelming fear. And so we had to cut him loose. We didn’t give him his stuff back. He got on the same flight. He was supposed to be on the flight with them. He got on that flight and went back to China, never came back, tried to get his stuff back through an attorney, and we said, “You can have it now, but you’ve got to come back to the United States to sign for it.” Of course, he never came. So that was a little frosting on the cake that we didn’t see coming. But right after that arrest at LAX, we arrested Chi and Rebecca and we drove ‘em out to the Los Angeles Field Office for questioning. All five of these people did not invoke their right to an attorney or to remain silent. They were willing to talk to us. All of them lied, which is fine. I’d rather them talk to us and lie than not talk to us. And it still provides a lot of information. The lies do.

Matt (00:55:24):
So this case, of course, has been described as a landmark in how the FBI handles Chinese espionage and how CI investigations are prosecuted more broadly. You spoke a bit about that earlier. There’s somewhat of a debate right now on which arm of the U.S. government should coordinate and be responsible for counterintelligence investigations more broadly — whether it should stay with the Bureau or whether the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence’s office, should be more responsible for that, doing this inside the intelligence community more proper. Just wondering, from a professional’s perspective, how do you feel about that? Where do you come down on it?

Jim (00:56:07):
Well, people will say I’m biased since I’m a former FBI agent, but it definitely needs to stay with us. Absolutely. I have no problem with NCIS or some of the other military intelligence agencies working with us. Absolutely — we need them. But we’re the only ones that make that jump, that hump, between classified and criminal, and we know how to try a criminal case. We do. I’m not saying the United States Attorney’s Office does, but no matter who it is that’s investigating, they’re going to have to deal with that same office. To me, that office is the problem — that Department of Justice and the way they run things as far as counterespionage investigations. That’s the problem. But the FBI should definitely keep it. That five days that we had to go from zero to 60 — CIA couldn’t have done that. NSA certainly couldn’t have done that. NCIS maybe, but again, we work better as partners. No, to me, you’re asking for disaster if you assign this to one of these other agencies.

Matt (00:57:10):
Is that just a matter of resources — the sort of nationwide and international reach that the Bureau has as compared to some of these more specialized agencies?

Jim (00:57:18):
Well, yeah, you could certainly make that argument as well. If I had time, I could give you a lot more arguments, but you make a good one because we have our 52 main field offices and then, like where I worked, Santa Ana, that’s a resident agency, which is basically a satellite office of Los Angeles. So we have coverage over the entire United States and its territories. We have people in Guam, Puerto Rico obviously has a field office there. But the point is, your point is well taken, is that we have the coverage and we have the relationships with local police departments. For instance, when we did a covert entry —

Matt (00:57:52):
Right.

Jim (00:57:52):
— We went to Downey PD’s chief of police. We said — and he was great about it — we said, “We’ve got this house. We don’t want to tell you which one because it’s still classified, but we have this house. We need to look. We need to go through their trash. We are actually going to do covert entries.” And he said, “Okay. I’ll tell you what: I’ll give you a squad car. You don’t have to tell me the house. Just give me the neighborhood and then your agent can ride with us.” And if any problems result that night from your covert entry — your neighbor sees something and reports it and we’re supposed to check it out — then you can do it, your agent in our car, like a ride-along, and it worked perfectly. And that’s just a small example of the kind of things you’re not going to get if you move this to especially an agency that sees itself as purely intelligence. That will be a disaster. They don’t know the rules of evidence. They don’t know how to handle evidence. They don’t know how to make that transition.

Matt (00:58:48):
Let’s take a break and we’ll be right back.

(00:59:06):
Hey, everyone. Before we jump into the rest of my conversation with Jim, just wanted to remind folks that at our next Espresso Martini episode, Chris and I will be taking listener questions. So we would love to hear from you guys. Any questions you may have for us on Secrets, spies, any of the sort of topics we cover on the show. There’s a lot of crazy stuff in the news to talk about too. So if you want to ask about that, or anything you’d like to know about us, if you’re so inclined, we would love to hear from you. You can reach out to us via email at Secrets and Spies podcast@gmail.com or give us a shout on our social media profiles. All of those links will be in the show notes down below on this episode. If you’re going to send us a question, trying to get that in by no later than December 4th — that’s when we’re supposed to record our next episode together. Again, we would love to hear from you. Thanks.

(00:59:59):
So I wanted to zoom out now and shift from this one operation to the bigger picture of the threat and sort of what it portends for the near future, potentially. If you draw a line from Mak to what you see today, how has China’s approach to espionage evolved both in scale, sophistication, and the kinds of targets that they care about? And how would you explain their whole-of-society approach to intelligence that a Western audience would find pretty alien — just that whole concept?

Jim (01:00:34):
Well, as far as evolved, they’re still doing exactly what they did with Chi Mak, and that is sending — well, first of all, they’ve always been sending students, academics, businesspeople, all that. And of course they want companies to come to China and then sign contracts where they’re going to get access to the technology they want. Once they do, that company’s done. So some U.S. companies are being very foolish and, for short-term gain, they’re blowing their long-term profits or viability. But there are still hundreds and hundreds — thousands — of large U.S. companies that are on the cutting edge, not only with military technologies but medical technologies. And years after this, our squad handled something very similar: midnight arrest, arresting a guy who had made a contract with the Chinese government. He was a naturalized U.S. citizen, ethnic Chinese. He wasn’t ideological like Chi Mak. He just wanted money. He was an American, otherwise through and through. But he was selling secrets from these different employers to China. In exchange, they let him start a business over in China so that he could use all this research and development he’d stolen to develop his own. In this case, heart catheters, and undercut the company he worked for in the United States. But it has — when you say evolved — it’s expanded now. I think the greater danger is cyber warfare.

(01:02:10):
They’re attacking our infrastructure constantly and they keep saying they’re friends, but friends don’t do this. They’re constantly undermining, poking, prodding, trying to get into various systems — and have succeeded: U.S. government systems, private company systems — to steal technology, steal information about employees. That will come in handy later. Those employees travel to China. They can use that information against them. Maybe they need money. Maybe they’ve got a bad marriage and they’re going to do a honeypot or something. The point is they’re constantly stealing from the United States in a very aggressive, hostile manner with the total goal of supplanting the United States. But it’s just become broader. Me, I’m not a policymaker, but we don’t need tens of thousands of Chinese students in our technology areas in universities working on cutting-edge research that they’re going to send back to China. They’re obligated to do that. They’re told when they leave China that when you come back, we’re going to have some questions for you. We expect you to give us the answers. So it’s a problem we’re not really addressing as broadly as we should.

Matt (01:03:33):
And since leaving the Bureau, of course, you’ve briefed contractors, academic institutions on this threat. Exactly. Where do you see our biggest blind spots? Is it on campuses, Western companies partnering with Chinese firms? Is it more the cyber threat on our critical infrastructure that you mentioned a bit earlier?

Jim (01:03:58):
Well, the cyber threat is huge, and I know we’re trying to address it, and I’m not a cyber expert, so that’s one area. I know what’s happening, but I don’t know the details of it. I would speak more to the business side of it. If we’re going to remain a free country, companies generally should be able to do business with who they want, but we need to be warning them more heavily than we are — more emphatically — that you are going to lose not only the technology, but the market share. If you do this. I would address the student issue, because they are used in research companies and the U.S. government uses these research universities in the beginning — like QED things. And if you have Chinese students working that who are going to go back to China and they’re going to share everything they learned, then you’re letting them in on the beginning. If China copies our latest fighter, that’s bad, but that’s a fighter that’s already been made and now we’re working on the next technology.

(01:05:08):
But at the college/university research level, that’s the beginning of the next generation. And to let them be involved in any way in that research is a huge mistake, I think, because you’re letting them in on the ground floor. They’re not seeing it after the fact. They’re seeing it before we’ve even developed it. And that’s what EMALS was all about. They actually, I believe, put the first EMALS on their aircraft carrier before we did ours. Now, I believe ours is better, but the point is they got in on the ground floor because Chi Mak gave that to ‘em when it was still just a concept. And that’s what college students will be able to do when they go back to China.

Matt (01:05:47):
So when someone finishes Chasing Chi, what do you hope stays with them about how espionage really works in the United States and about the human side of the people who spend their careers chasing it?

Jim (01:05:58):
Well, we see it so infrequently in the news that it becomes a point of interest, but I don’t think it sinks home what the cost is. And I’d like them to leave with what the cost is. If every time one of these spy operations is successful against the United States, what Chi Mak gave them means — and I mentioned it before — it means dead Americans if we ever get in conflict with China, which is likely if they ever try to retake Taiwan. That loss of Aegis and vastly improving the ability of their aircraft carriers, which they had none of at the time of the Chi Mak case — now they’re building their fourth.

Matt (01:06:37):
Yeah.

Jim (01:06:37):
That means dead Americans, and that means their kids. My co-case in Sheldon Fung — his daughter went to Naval Academy and she’s actually working off the coast of Asia as a submarine acoustics officer. She’s not on a submarine, but she’s working on that area. She would, on one of the aircraft carriers, she would be one of the victims. There’s been estimates that if there was a battle over Taiwan, we could win that, but it would be at huge cost. Maybe a couple of aircraft carriers lost, and each aircraft carrier has up to 10,000 people on it — small cities.

(01:07:15):
So to me, that’s what they need to take away — that this is really serious and they need to pass that on to the government officials, especially the Department of Justice, who keeps wanting to undercharge these cases. And some people object to, “Well, Chi Mak only got 24 and a half years. That wasn’t enough.” I agree. I had to fight tooth and nail to get that. And the reason I wanted it is, number one, I wanted the technology to be old by the time he got out of jail, so he couldn’t tell them anything that would be helpful. And number two, he was an old guy. He was in his sixties. I say old — I’m in my sixties — but I wanted him to die in jail. And that’s exactly what happened. He died in jail.

(01:07:53):
And Greg Chung, the other main spy — I call ‘em main, the two that had access to the secrets — they both died in jail. And that’s the message that needs to be sent to anybody who’s going to do this. You’re not going to spend your golden years with your grandchildren. You’re going to be in jail and you’re going to die there. So because of how serious what they’re doing is, that’s the message I want to get: this is serious. It’s going to mean American lives, so let’s start treating it like that and charging and convicting and sentencing people accordingly.

Matt (01:08:21):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Anything else you’d like to cover today that we haven’t so far that I might’ve missed?

Jim (01:08:29):
No, it’s not that you missed it. There was a very important spinoff case, Greg Chung, because he was friends with Chi Mak. That’s how we came onto him. And he was giving away aerospace secrets and space secrets. He actually helped the Chinese avoid investing billions of dollars in a space shuttle program because they figured out through him the United States was going back to capsules — cheaper, safer, and safer. He gave them all sorts of fighter technology and gave them enough information to help them start their own commercial airline business, which is not a threat to life and limb like the others are, but it severely undercuts Boeing and Boeing’s ability to sell airliners around the world. So it’s a huge economic loss. And he was convicted of economic espionage. And the reason I bring it up is that was also historic. Chi Mak turned things around. We started charging people with serious crimes and seeking serious sentences.

(01:09:28):
And Kevin Moberly, who was the case agent of that case, sought that, and we got the very first trial conviction of economic espionage. Again, it had been passed 10 years before — the statute — but no prosecutor wanted to touch it. They were afraid it was new law; they might lose the case. And because of the Chi Mak case, we were able to tell ‘em, “You’ve got to do this,” because this applies perfectly to Greg Chung’s case. And because we’d gotten convictions, we’d have the same jury, the same judge, the same agents. After a lot of cajoling, we got them to agree, and they charged ’em with economic espionage — $2 billion worth of damage done to Boeing — because they also gave away rocket technology. And he went to jail and he died in jail as well. So two good examples. So I want to throw that in there because it was one after another and it really helped set the stage for later prosecutions.

Matt (01:10:22):
Absolutely. Yeah. No, these are great, great, great cases that sort of set up these patterns that we see today. It really comes through in the book. Jim, this has been terrific. Before I let you go, where can listeners find more about your work and what you’re doing now and keep up with news about CHASING CHI?

Jim (01:10:42):
Well, you mentioned the book’s coming out on December 2. I think it’s — I know it’s available for order now — but it gives all the backstory. As you well know, I’ve skimmed over a ton of stuff and haven’t mentioned a lot of funny stories, dramatic stories, anger-inducing stories. You want to get your blood boiling. So I urge them to read the book. But if they’re not sure yet and they want to figure out if they’re interested in the book, they can go to chasingchibook.com and they can see a lot of the videos. I’ve talked about the arrest videos, the other videos — so they can see kind of the results if they want the background. That’s what the book is for. But the website shows them — I think they’ll find lots of interesting video and photographs of the evidence we used at both trials. Well, eventually I’m going to add the Greg Chung case to it, and you’ll be able to see both, but that’s where they can go to decide if they’re interested.

Matt (01:11:39):
Yeah, sure. So once more, the book is called CHASING CHI: THE FBI’S GROUNDBREAKING PURSUIT OF CHINA’S MOST PROLIFIC SPY FAMILY. As you said, it’s out in the U.S. on December 2 and the U.K. on the 16th, if I have that right, at least according to Amazon.

Jim (01:11:55):
I didn’t know that. So thanks — I didn’t know that.

Matt (01:11:57):
Yeah, that’s just what Amazon says. I’m not sure. But that’s what’s on there right now. And of course the book draws from — there’s so much more in there than we’ve had time to cover today. We could have gone on for hours more, but of course I want people to go check it out for themselves. It draws from —

Jim (01:12:13):
It covers the trial, and the trial was very entertaining. We had a fantastic — I’ve downplayed the United States Attorney’s Office, but the individual prosecutor, Greg Staples, was fantastic, funny, and did a great job prosecuting both cases. Sorry, sorry for the interruption, but I got to give him credit.

Matt (01:12:32):
Yeah, absolutely. No, no, thank you for that. Yeah, of course. As you said, it draws from your own notes, the case files, court records — which he didn’t get into much now, but that’s all still in there. There’s a trove of photos from the case in there too, so you can sort of see the people that we’ve been talking about. Links to learn more about all this stuff and pre-order the book will be in the show notes. Really recommend checking it out if you want a rare detailed look at how counterintelligence actually works inside the U.S.

(01:13:02):
Jim, thanks again for joining us. It’s been great to have you.

Jim (01:13:06):
Thanks. It was a lot of fun. I appreciate you letting me go on and on about stuff, but yeah, have fun.

Matt (01:13:12):
Yep.

Jim (01:13:12):
Thank you, Matt.

Matt (01:13:13):
Thank you. Bye.

Announcer (01:13:45):
Thanks for listening. This is Secrets and Spies.