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| In March 2017, an engineer at G.E. Aviation in Cincinnati whom I will refer to using part of his Chinese given name — received a request on LinkedIn. Hua is in his 40s, tall and athletic, with a boyish face that makes him look a decade younger. He moved to the United States from China in 2003 for graduate studies in structural engineering. After earning his Ph.D. in 2007, he went to work for G.E., first at the company’s research facility in Niskayuna, N.Y., for a few years, then at G.E. Aviation. |
| 2017年3月，辛辛那提通用电气航空的一名工程师在领英上收到了一个添加联系人的请求。这名工程师的名字里有一个“华”字，下文我就这样称呼他。华今年40多岁，高大健壮，一张孩子气的脸让他看起来比实际年龄小了10岁。他于2003年从中国来到美国攻读结构工程研究生。2007年获得博士学位后，他去了通用电气公司工作，先是在该公司位于纽约尼斯卡尤纳的研究机构工作了几年，然后去了通用电气航空。 |
| The LinkedIn request came from Chen Feng, a school official at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (N.U.A.A.), in eastern China. Like most people who use LinkedIn, Hua was accustomed to connecting with professionals on the site whom he didn’t know personally, so the request did not strike him as unusual. “I didn’t even think much about it before accepting,” Hua told me. Days later, Chen sent him an email inviting him to N.U.A.A. to give a research presentation. |
| 领英上的请求来自陈峰（音），他是位于中国东部的南京航空航天大学的校方工作人员。和大多数使用领英的人一样，华习惯了在网站上与不认识的专业人士建立联系，所以他没有觉得这个请求有什么不寻常。“在接受之前我甚至没有考虑太多，”华告诉我。几天后，陈峰给他发了一封电子邮件，邀请他到南京航空航天大学做学术报告。 |
| Hua had always desired academic recognition. “When I did my Ph.D., I initially wanted to be a professor in China or in the United States,” he says. But because his studies were focused more on practical applications than pure research, a career in industry made more sense than one in academia. At G.E. Aviation, he was part of a group that designed containment cases for the rotating fan blades of jet engines. The use of carbon-based composites in fan blades and their casings, instead of metal, means lighter engines and a commercial advantage. |
| 华一直渴望学术上的认可。“念博士的时候，我原本是想在中国或美国当教授，”他说。但由于自己的研究更侧重于实际应用而不是纯粹的科学研究，因此更适合在企业找份工作，而不是留在学术界。在通用电气航空，他所在的小组设计喷气式发动机的旋转叶片机匣。在叶片和机匣中使用碳基复合材料而不是金属意味着发动机更轻且具有商业优势。 |
| “I felt honored to be invited to give a talk,” Hua says. Being recognized back home was especially fulfilling for Hua, who grew up poor in a small village and was the only child there from his generation to go to college. Beyond the prestige, the invitation also provided a free trip to China to see his friends and family. Hua arranged to arrive in May, so he could attend a nephew’s wedding and his college reunion at Harbin Institute of Technology. There was one problem, though: Hua knew that G.E. would deny permission to give the talk if he asked, which he was supposed to do. “Since G.E. is a high-tech company, it is difficult to get approval even to present at conferences in the United States,” he says. The company was concerned about giving away proprietary information. |
| “我很荣幸受邀做讲座，”华说。在祖国获得认可对华来说尤其有成就感，他来自一个小村庄，出身贫穷，他是他那一代唯一读大学的孩子。除了声望之外，那次邀请还给了他一次免费回国看望朋友和家人的机会。华安排在5月回去，这样他就可以参加侄子的婚礼，以及他在哈尔滨工业大学的同学聚会。不过，有一个问题：华知道，如果他告诉通用电气（他应该这么做），公司会拒绝让他发表演讲。“由于通用电气是一家高科技公司，即使在美国发表演讲也很难获得批准，”他说。该公司担心泄露专利信息。 |
| Hua made it clear to Chen that he would be able to discuss only research on composite materials generally, without going into the specifics of what he did at G.E. Aviation. To prepare, Hua told me, he went back over the work he had done for his doctorate and gathered additional information from scientific papers. He also downloaded a few G.E. training files onto his laptop. These contained instructions from G.E. experts on using composites; Hua thought they would help him save time when putting together his presentation, which he planned to do on his flight. |
| 华向陈峰明确表示，他只能笼统地讨论复合材料的研究，不能深入讨论他在通用电气航空所做的具体工作。华告诉我，为了准备讲座，他回顾了为攻读博士学位所做的工作，并从科学论文中收集了更多信息。他还在笔记本电脑上下载了一些通用电气的培训文件。其中包含公司专家关于使用复合材料的说明；华计划在他的航班上准备演示文稿，他认为这些文件会帮他节省时间。 |
| After he landed in China, Hua took a high-speed train from Beijing to Nanjing, where Chen drove him to a hotel on the Nanjing University campus. The next morning, Chen and Hua went to a meeting with a man who was introduced as Qu Hui, deputy director of the Jiangsu Provincial Association for International Science and Technology Development. Qu gave Hua a welcome gift: loose Chinese tea nicely packaged in a gift box. “I accepted it as an honor,” Hua says. “I’ve liked drinking tea since I was a kid.” |
| 到达中国后，华乘坐高铁从北京到南京，陈峰开车送他到大学校内的一家宾馆。第二天早上，陈峰和华去见了一个人，据介绍，此人是江苏省国际科技发展协会副主任曲辉（音）。曲辉送给华一份见面礼：用精致礼盒包装的中国茶叶。“我把它当成一份荣誉收下了，”华说。“我从小就喜欢喝茶。” |
| A few dozen students and faculty members attended Hua’s talk. They asked several questions that Hua was happy to answer. “I remember one student asked specifically about the architecture of the material I was talking about in my presentation,” he says. “I said: This is G.E. proprietary information. I am just using this picture as an example, but I cannot share the details of what we are designing or using.” |
| 几十名学生和教职员工参加了华的讲座。华很乐意回答他们问的几个问题。“我记得一位学生特别询问了我在讲座中谈到的材料的结构，”他说。“我说，这是通用电气的专利信息。我只是以这张照片为例，但我无法分享我们正在设计或使用的东西的细节。” |
| After the presentation, Chen handed Hua an envelope filled with $3,500 in U.S. dollars — reimbursement for his plane ticket and an honorarium for the talk. Then they went to dinner with Qu and a couple of professors. That night, Hua took a train back to Shanghai; the next day, he flew back to the United States. Once home, he realized he had forgotten to delete his presentation from the computer at the university auditorium in Nanjing. He was concerned because the slides included some pictures with G.E.’s logo. “So,” Hua told me, “I emailed one of the students and said, Hey, can you delete the presentation?” He thought that would be the end of the matter. |
| 演讲结束后，陈递给华一个信封，里面有3500美元，那是机票的报销费用和讲座酬金。然后，他们与曲辉以及几位教授共进晚餐。当晚，华乘火车返回上海；第二天，他飞回美国。一回家，他就想起忘了从南京的大学礼堂的电脑上删除自己的演示文稿。他很担心，因为演示文稿中包含一些带有通用电气标识的图片。“所以，”华告诉我，“我给其中一位学生发了电子邮件，我说，你好，你能删掉那个演示文稿吗？”他以为事情就到此为止了。 |
| The images of a Chinese spy balloon drifting through American airspace last month before being shot down by a fighter jet off the coast of South Carolina were a conspicuous reminder of the escalating geopolitical antagonisms between the United States and China. Although world powers spying on each other is hardly unusual, the impunity with which the Chinese were apparently conducting surveillance over U.S. military sites alarmed many. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning China’s “brazen violation of United States sovereignty” in deploying the balloon, which was fitted with antennas capable of collecting signals intelligence; the Chinese government condemned its downing as an overreaction. The incident — reminiscent of Cold War confrontations — inflamed tensions between two countries already locked in a race for military, technological and economic supremacy. |
| 上个月，一只中国间谍气球在美国领空飘过，随后在南卡罗来纳州海岸被一架战斗机击落，这一画面清楚地提醒着人们，美中之间的地缘政治对抗正在升级。尽管世界大国之间相互监视并不罕见，但中国对美国军事基地进行监视却似乎未受惩罚，这让许多人感到震惊。美国众议院通过了一项决议，谴责中国部署装有能收集信号情报天线的气球是“公然侵犯美国主权”；中国政府则谴责击落气球是反应过度。这一事件让人想起冷战时期的对抗，加剧了两个已陷入军事、技术和经济优势竞争的国家之间的紧张关系。 |
| The spy balloon’s flight over U.S. territory was a very public display of China’s intelligence gathering, but the Chinese government has for decades been conducting a much less visible and possibly more damaging campaign to steal American trade secrets and intellectual property. While weapons and military equipment have always been a focus — Chinese agents and civilians have been implicated in the theft or illicit transfer of various military technologies, including those related to radar, fighter jets, submarines and weapons systems — China’s espionage expanded in the 1980s and beyond to also target commercial technologies as diverse as pesticides, rice seeds, robotic cars and wind turbines. |
| 间谍气球飞越美国领土是中国情报收集的一次非常公开的展示，但几十年来，中国政府一直在进行一场不那么显眼、可能更具破坏性的活动，目的是窃取美国的商业机密和知识产权。虽然武器和军事装备一直是焦点（中国的特工和平民涉及各种军事技术的盗窃或非法转让，包括与雷达、战斗机、潜艇和武器系统有关的技术），但中国的间谍活动在20世纪80年代及以后不断扩大，目标涉及农药、水稻种子、自动驾驶汽车和风力涡轮机等各种商业技术。 |
| Although China publicly denies engaging in economic espionage, Chinese officials will indirectly acknowledge behind closed doors that the theft of intellectual property from overseas is state policy. James Lewis, a former diplomat now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recalls participating in a meeting in 2014 or so at which Chinese and American government representatives, including an officer from the People’s Liberation Army, discussed the subject. “An assistant secretary from the U.S. Department of Defense was explaining: Look, spying is OK — we spy, you spy, everybody spies, but it’s for political and military purposes,” Lewis recounted for me. “It’s for national security. What we object to is your economic espionage. And a senior P.L.A. colonel said: Well, wait. We don’t draw the line between national security and economic espionage the way you do. Anything that builds our economy is good for our national security.” The U.S. government’s response increasingly appears to be a mirror image of the Chinese perspective: In the view of U.S. officials, the threat posed to America’s economic interests by Chinese espionage is a threat to American national security. |
| 尽管中国公开否认从事经济间谍活动，但中国官员会在私下间接承认，从海外窃取知识产权是国家政策。前外交官、现供职于华盛顿战略与国际研究中心的詹姆斯·刘易斯回忆起自己在2014年前后参加的一次会议，会上美中政府代表讨论了这个问题，其中还有一名中国人民解放军军官。“美国国防部的一位助理部长解释说：听着，间谍活动是可以的——我们搞间谍，你们搞间谍，所有人都搞间谍，但都是出于政治和军事目的，”刘易斯向我讲述道。“这是为了国家安全。我们反对的是你们的经济间谍活动。一位解放军高级上校说：等一下。我们不像你们那样，在国家安全和经济间谍之间分那么清楚。任何能建设我们经济的事情都有利于我们的国家安全。”现在，美国政府的反应变得似乎越来越像中国的观点：在美国官员看来，中国的间谍活动对美国经济利益构成的威胁就是对美国国家安全的威胁。 |
| Like China’s economy, the spying carried out on its behalf is directed by the Chinese state. The Ministry of State Security, or M.S.S., which is responsible for gathering foreign intelligence, is tasked with collecting information in technologies that the Chinese government wants to build up. The current focus, according to U.S. counterintelligence experts, aligns with the “Made in China 2025” initiative announced in 2015. This industrial plan seeks to make China the world’s top manufacturer in 10 areas, including robotics, artificial intelligence, new synthetic materials and aerospace. In the words of one former U.S. national security official, the plan is a “road map for theft.” |
| 与中国的经济一样，代表它进行的间谍活动也是由中国政府指挥的。国家安全部负责收集外国情报，还包括收集中国政府希望打造的技术领域的情报。根据美国反间谍专家的说法，该部门目前的重点与2015年宣布的“中国制造2025”计划一致。这个产业计划旨在使中国成为10个领域的世界顶级制造者，包括机器人、人工智能、新合成材料和航空航天。用一位前美国国家安全官员的话来说，该计划就是一份“盗窃路线图”。 |
| The Chinese government relies not only on its intelligence services but also on businesses, institutions and individuals to gather proprietary information. A 2019 report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional committee, lists the myriad ways in which Chinese companies, often backed by their government, help transfer strategic know-how from the United States to China. The maneuvers range from seemingly benign (acquiring American firms with access to key intellectual property) to notoriously coercive (compelling American companies to form joint ventures with Chinese firms and share trade secrets with them in return for access to the Chinese market) to outright theft. Cyberattacks have become an increasingly common tactic because they can’t always be linked directly to the Chinese government. Over the past few years, however, federal agents and cybersecurity experts in the U.S. have identified the digital footprints left along the trails of these attacks — malware and I.P. addresses among them — and traced this evidence back to specific groups of hackers with proven ties to the Chinese government. |
| 中国政府不仅依靠情报机构，还依靠企业、机构和个人收集专有信息。国会美中经济与安全评估委员会2019年的一份报告列出了中国企业（它们通常有来自政府的支持）帮助将战略技术从美国转移到中国的各种方式。这些手段从看似中规中矩（收购拥有关键知识产权的美国公司），到臭名昭著的胁迫（迫使美国公司与中国公司组建合资企业，并分享商业机密以换取中国市场的准入机会），再到赤裸裸的盗窃。网络攻击已经成为一种越来越常见的策略，因为它们并不总能直接与中国政府联系起来。然而，在过去的几年里，美国联邦特工和网络安全专家已经确定了这些攻击留下的数字足迹（包括恶意软件和IP地址），并将这些证据追溯到与中国政府有明确联系的特定黑客组织。 |
| Perhaps most unsettling is the way China has sought to exploit the huge numbers of people of Chinese origin who have settled in the West. The Ministry of State Security, along with other Chinese government-backed organizations, spends considerable effort recruiting spies from this diaspora. Chinese students and faculty members at American universities are a major target, as are employees at American corporations. The Chinese leadership “made the declaration early on that all Chinese belong to China, no matter what country they were born or living” in, James Gaylord, a retired counterintelligence agent with the F.B.I., told me. “They started making appeals to Chinese Americans saying there’s no conflict between you being American and sharing information with us. We’re not a threat. We just want to be able to compete and make the Chinese people proud. You’re Chinese, and therefore you must want to see the Chinese nation prosper.” |
| 也许最令人不安的是，中国试图利用那些在西方定居的大量华裔。国家安全部和其他中国政府支持的组织花了相当大的精力从这些侨民当中招募间谍。美国大学的中国学生和教职员工，以及美国公司的员工，都是他们的主要目标。美国联邦调查局退休的反间谍特工詹姆斯·盖洛德告诉我，中国领导层“很早就宣布，所有中国人都属于中国，无论他们出生或生活在哪个国家”。“他们向华裔美国人发出呼吁，虽然你们是美国人，但还是可以同我们分享信息，二者之间没有冲突。我们不是威胁。我们只是希望能够参与竞争，让中国人民感到骄傲。你们是中国人，所以你们一定希望看到中华民族繁荣昌盛。” |
| Stripped of its context and underlying intent, that message can carry a powerful resonance for Chinese Americans and expatriates keen to contribute to nation-building back home. Not all can foresee that their willingness to help China could lead them to break American laws. An even more troubling consequence of China’s exploitation of people it regards as Chinese is that it can lead to the undue scrutiny of employees in American industry and academia, subjecting them to unfair suspicions of disloyalty toward the United States. |
| 撇开其背景和潜在意图，对于热衷为祖国建设做出贡献的华裔美国人和海外华侨们来说，这样的信息可能令他们产生强烈的共鸣。并非所有人都能预见到，他们帮助中国的意愿可能导致他们违反美国法律。中国对其所谓“中国人”的利用还有一个更加令人不安的后果——它可能导致美国工业界和学术界的雇员受到不适当的审查，使他们受到不公平的怀疑，认为他们对美国不忠诚。 |
| Hua didn’t regard his visit to China to share his technical expertise as extraordinary in any way. Many scientists and engineers of Chinese origin in the United States are invited to China to give presentations about their fields. Hua couldn’t have known that his trip to Nanjing would prove to be the start of a series of events that would end up giving the U.S. government an unprecedented look inside China’s widespread and tireless campaign of economic espionage targeting the United States, culminating in the first-ever conviction of a Chinese intelligence official on American soil. |
| 华并不认为到中国分享他的技术专长有什么特别之处。许多在美国的华裔科学家和工程师都获邀到中国去介绍他们的领域。华没有预料到，他的南京之行将成为一系列事件的开始，最终令美国政府前所未有地了解到中国针对美国广泛而不懈的经济间谍活动，并最终导致一名中国情报官员首次在美国领土上被定罪。 |
| Around noon on Nov. 1, 2017, a few hours after he scanned his security badge and entered his office at G.E. Aviation, Hua received a call from the company’s I.T. desk asking him to come meet with G.E.’s security officers. The call heightened a sense of anxiety he had felt since that morning, when he and others in his group were asked to hand over their removable hard disks for what I.T. described as a computer security review. A while later, they were asked to turn in their work laptops. Hua couldn’t help wondering if this had anything to do with the secret of his Nanjing trip that he had been keeping from his employer. |
| 2017年11月1日中午左右，华扫描安全识别卡，进入通用电气航空公司的办公室，几小时后，华接到公司IT部门的电话，要求他去见通用电气的安全官员。这个电话加深了他自有一天早上以来持续的焦虑，那个早晨他和他所在小组里的其他成员被要求交出自己的移动硬盘，接受IT部门所称的计算机安全审查。过了一会儿，他们又被要求上交自己的工作笔记本电脑。华不禁怀疑，这是否与他一直对雇主隐瞒的南京之行有关。 |
| Soon enough, his fears were confirmed: The G.E. security officers waiting to interview him in an auditorium wanted to know about his trip to China six months earlier. Where had he visited, and why? Hua told them he had gone back home for a college reunion and spent all his time reconnecting with friends and family. |
| 很快，他的担心得到了证实：在会议厅里等着与他面谈的通用电气安全官员想了解他半年前的中国之行。他去了哪里，为什么去？华告诉他们，他回家参加大学同学聚会，所有的时间都用来探亲访友。 |
| Then the security officers told Hua that the F.B.I. wanted to talk to him. Two F.B.I. agents, who were already in the building, entered the room. One of them was Bradley Hull, a bright-eyed man with a shaved head and a goatee. He started with the same questions that G.E. security had asked about Hua’s China trip. |
| 然后，安全官员告诉华，联邦调查局想和他谈谈。早已来到大楼的两名联邦调查局探员走进了房间。其中一位是剃着光头、留着山羊胡、眼睛明亮的布莱德利·赫尔。他先是向华询问有关他那次中国之行的情况，与通用电气安全部门的问题相同。 |
| Hua was shaking with nervousness, one of the agents told me in an interview. He repeated the answers he had given to his employer’s security officers. Hull proceeded to ask more questions about the trip, giving Hua several chances to amend his story and signaling that he didn’t think Hua was being truthful. Finally, he confronted Hua with evidence showing that Hua had met with people other than just friends and family. He had also paid a visit to the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. |
| 一位特工在采访中告诉我，华紧张得浑身发抖。他重复了对其雇主的安全官员的回答。赫尔继续问了关于这次旅行的更多问题，给了华几次机会来修正他的故事，并暗示他认为华没有说实话。最后，他向华出示证据，证明华曾与亲朋好友之外的人会面，还访问了南京航空航天大学。 |
| Hua sank into his chair as if knocked back. It was a crime to lie to a federal agent, Hull told him. He advised Hua to relate everything he could remember about the visit to N.U.A.A. Hua, in shock, wasn’t immediately forthcoming, but over the course of the interview, as Hull pressed him with follow-up questions, Hua ended up providing an account of why he visited Nanjing and what he did there. The agent who spoke to me described the interview as incremental truth telling. |
| 华瘫坐在椅子上，好像被打垮了。赫尔告诉他，对联邦探员撒谎是犯罪。他建议华详细回忆到访南京航空航天大学的所有细节，华震惊了，没有立即坦白，但在谈话过程中，随着赫尔不断追问，华最终讲述了他访问南京的原因，以及他在那里做了什么。根据与我交谈的特工对那次面谈的描述，他渐渐说出了实话。 |
| Hua finally disclosed that he had given a presentation at N.U.A.A. about designing airplane parts out of composite materials. He said he had been careful to not divulge any information that was proprietary to G.E., even though he had downloaded certain files that belonged to his employer to help prepare his slides. As Hua provided more detail about his visit, Hull became convinced that he had been hosted at Nanjing by Chinese intelligence officials looking to cultivate the engineer as an asset, someone who could steal trade secrets for them. |
| 华终于坦白，他曾在南京航空航天大学做过一场关于使用复合材料设计飞机部件的演讲。他说，自己一直非常小心，没有泄露任何通用电气的专有信息，尽管他下载了属于雇主的某些文件，帮助自己准备幻灯片。随着华提供了更多那次访问的细节，赫尔确信，他在南京受到了中国情报官员的接待，他们希望把这位工程师作为一个有价值的对象来培养，可以为他们窃取商业机密。 |
| Around 4:30 p.m., at which point the interview had been going for a few hours, Hull suggested taking a break to eat some pizza that he had ordered for everyone. He also made Hua an offer: The F.B.I. wouldn’t recommend that charges be brought against him if he agreed to cooperate and take part in a counterintelligence operation against the Chinese. Hua had already been informed that the F.B.I. had been carrying out a search at his home that afternoon, while he was being interviewed; his car had also been towed away to be searched. And here at work, the agents had already caught him lying, which he realized was enough to land him in trouble. Even though he hadn’t shared any trade secrets at his Nanjing presentation, some of the documents downloaded to his laptop before he went to China were marked export-controlled — a government-mandated designation — for which he could face criminal charges. He knew what he had to do to save himself and his family. |
| 下午4:30左右，谈话已经进行了几个小时，赫尔建议休息一下，吃点他为大家点的披萨。他还向华提出了一个条件：如果他同意合作，并参与针对中国人的反间谍行动，联邦调查局就不会建议对他提出指控。华已经被告知，联邦调查局当天下午在他正接受面谈时搜查了他的家；他的车也被拖走接受搜查。而在谈话现场，特工们已经发现他撒了谎，他意识到这足以让自己陷入麻烦。尽管他在南京的演讲中没有分享任何商业机密，但他去中国之前下载到自己笔记本电脑上的一些文件被标记为出口管制（由政府强制指定），他可能为此面临刑事指控。他知道自己必须做些什么来拯救自己和家人。 |
| “No one begrudges a nation that generates the most innovative ideas and from them develops the best technology,” John Demers, former assistant attorney general for national security, said in a 2018 hearing before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. “But we cannot tolerate a nation that steals our firepower and the fruits of our brainpower.” |
| “没有人会嫉妒一个产生最具创新性想法并且从中开发出最好技术的国家，“负责国家安全的前司法部助理部长约翰·德默斯在2018年美国参议院司法委员会的听证会上说道，“但我们不能容忍一个国家窃取我们的心血成果。” |
| The accusation that China has been relentlessly stealing intellectual property from American companies and institutions — although China is now a manufacturing giant, for technology it still relies heavily on the United States and Europe — is neither new nor unfounded. In 2008, a Chinese-born engineer named Chi Mak who worked for a defense contractor in California was sentenced to more than 24 years in prison for having stolen and passed on to China information about several sensitive technologies, including systems for the U.S. Navy. The Chi Mak investigation led to the uncovering of another Chinese spy, Dongfan Chung, an engineer at Boeing who gave his handlers in China thousands of documents containing designs and other technical specifications relating to American fighter jets, the U.S. space shuttle and the Delta IV rocket. In the past decade, individuals working for Chinese entities have been caught taking or trying to take trade secrets across many industries. One notable case involved six Chinese nationals in the United States attempting to steal proprietary corn seeds from fields in Iowa and Illinois. A California engineer named Walter Liew was caught stealing secrets relevant to the production of titanium dioxide, which is used as a whitener in paint and toothpaste. Individuals of Chinese origin have been indicted in recent years for the theft of proprietary information relating to locomotives, semiconductors, solar panels and other high-tech products. |
| 尽管中国现在是一个制造业巨头，但在技术上仍然严重依赖美国和欧洲，指责中国一直大肆窃取美国公司和机构的知识产权既不是什么新鲜事，也并非毫无根据。2008年，在加州一家国防承包商工作的华裔工程师麦大志（音）被判入狱24年以上，罪名是窃取包括美国海军系统在内的数项敏感技术情报，并将其泄露给中国。对麦大志的调查导致另一名中国间谍钟东蕃被发现。钟东蕃是波音公司的工程师，他向他在中国的联络人提供了数以千计的文件，其中包括与美国战斗机、航天飞机和德尔塔IV火箭有关的设计和其他技术规格。在过去十年中，在许多行业都发现了为中国实体工作的人窃取或试图窃取商业机密。有一个引人注目的案件涉及六名在美国的中国人，他们试图从艾奥瓦州和伊利诺伊州的田地里窃取专利玉米种子。一位名叫刘元轩的加州工程师被发现窃取了二氧化钛生产的相关机密，这种原料被用作油漆和牙膏中的增白剂。近年来，有华裔曾因盗窃火车头、半导体、太阳能电池板和其他高科技产品的专有信息而遭到起诉。 |
| In recent years, China has been recruiting those it considers expat nationals through hundreds of formal “talent” programs, which identify experts in American schools and industries to help fill specific gaps in knowledge back home. “It’s a vehicle to get them to travel back to China to attend conferences, to provide lectures, which allows the opportunity to develop a relationship with them and later take advantage of that relationship to get intellectual property,” Gunnar Newquist, a former counterintelligence agent for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, told me. |
| 近年来，中国一直在通过数百个正式的“人才”项目招募那些它认定的外籍国民，这些项目在美国学校和行业中寻找专家，让他们帮助填补国内特定的知识空白。“这是一个让他们回到中国参加会议、演讲的工具，提供机会与他们发展关系，然后利用这种关系获得知识产权，”海军刑事调查局前反间谍特工冈纳尔·纽奎斯特告诉我。 |
| The guests are often hosted in luxury hotels, driven around in limousines, taken on sightseeing tours. After receiving this lavish treatment, Gaylord says, some feel obligated to provide information that they might not have initially planned to share. While at the F.B.I., Gaylord interviewed many scientists and engineers of Chinese origin who had been courted in this fashion. Some of them described how they had been pressured. “They would say: ‘Everything in my presentation was approved by my company. After I finished it and stepped down, a gaggle of students surrounded me to ask more questions. And they kept pushing me for more and more sensitive information,’” Gaylord says. “And a lot of them say: ‘You know, after a while, you start to break down. You can’t keep saying, “I can’t talk about this.” You then start answering around the edges, giving away more and more.’” |
| 客人通常被安排住进豪华酒店，出门坐豪华轿车，还被带去观光旅游。盖洛德说，接受了这种慷慨的待遇后，一些人觉得有义务提供他们最初可能不打算分享的信息。在联邦调查局工作期间，盖洛德走访了许多华裔科学家和工程师，他们都曾受过这样的奉承。其中一些人描述了他们是如何受到压力的。“他们会说：‘我演讲中的所有内容都得到了公司的批准。讲完下台后，一群叽叽喳喳的学生围着我问更多的问题。他们不断向我索要越来越多的敏感信息，’”盖洛德说。“很多人说：‘过一段时间，你的戒备就开始松懈了。你不能一直说‘我不能谈这个’。然后你就开始避重就轻做出回答，说出越来越多的东西。” |
| The Chinese government also offers financial incentives to help Chinese expats start their own businesses in China using trade secrets stolen from their American employers. Gaylord told me about Wenfeng Lu, an engineer who worked at Edwards Lifesciences in Irvine, Calif. Lu’s employer reported him to the F.B.I. after discovering that he had been downloading proprietary information about the company’s heart catheters. Gaylord and his colleagues opened an investigation and discovered, among other red flags, that Lu was often collecting this material right before trips to China. Agents arrested him as he was preparing to leave the country for another visit. On the laptop and thumb drives that he was carrying, investigators found information he had taken from his employer. Searching his house, agents found more documents he had collected from two other U.S. medical device companies where he had worked. “Then, in his laptop, we found agreements between him and municipal government officials in China offering him research offices in an industrial park in Nanjing that would be rent-free for the first three years,” Gaylord says. “In other words, he steals the R. & D. cost our companies incur, and he goes there and develops it for a lot cheaper. And has the whole China market without any revenues going to the American companies.” Lu pleaded guilty to charges of unauthorized possession of trade secrets and in 2019 was sentenced to 27 months in prison. |
| 中国政府还提供经济激励措施帮助中国侨民利用从美国雇主那里窃取的商业机密在中国创业。盖洛德告诉我，陆文峰（音）是加州欧文市爱德华兹生命科学公司的工程师。他的雇主发现他一直在下载该公司心脏导管的专有信息，于是向联邦调查局举报了他。盖洛德和同事们展开了调查，发现除了其它种种危险信号，陆文峰经常在访问中国之前收集这些材料。特工在他准备再次前往中国时逮捕了他。在他随身携带的笔记本电脑和U盘上，调查人员发现了他从雇主那里获取的信息。在搜查他的房子时，特工们发现了他从工作过的另外两家美国医疗设备公司收集的更多文件。“然后，在他的笔记本电脑里，我们发现了他与中国市政府官员达成的协议，为他提供位于南京一个工业园区的研究办公室，前三年免租，”盖洛德说道。“换句话说，他窃取了我们公司的研发成本，然后去那里以更低的价格搞开发。并且拥有整个中国市场，而美国公司不会得到任何收入。”陆文峰对未经授权获取商业秘密的指控表示认罪，并于2019年被判处27个月监禁。 |
| The F.B.I. is loath to give away sources and methods, so the agency would not disclose to me how agents learned of Hua’s visit to Nanjing. But from the start it suspected that Hua’s hosts wanted more than an innocent academic exchange. As the investigators learned more about the trip, they could see that it had all the hallmarks of an intelligence operation — the initial contact through LinkedIn, the introduction to people who had weaker ties to N.U.A.A. The F.B.I. suspected that the Jiangsu science and technology association was a front for the Chinese government and that Qu Hui, the man who gave Hua the tea, was an intelligence officer. |
| 联邦调查局不愿透露消息来源和调查方法，因此没有向我透露特工们如何得知华对南京的访问。但从一开始，它就怀疑华的东道主想要的不仅仅是一次单纯的学术交流。随着调查人员对那次行程有了更多的了解，他们可以看出，它具备情报行动的所有特征——通过领英进行初步接触，将华介绍给一些与南京航空航天大学关系较弱的人。联邦调查局怀疑，那个江苏的科技协会是中国政府的幌子，送茶叶给华的曲辉是一名情报官员。 |
| The agents wanted to learn more about Qu, who seemed to be the key figure behind the Chinese attempt to recruit Hua, and they saw an opportunity to go further than just an investigation into Hua. The agent who spoke to me likened their counterintelligence operation to swimming upstream. And so, in exchange for an assurance that he wouldn’t face charges, Hua became an asset for the F.B.I., willing to communicate with his Chinese contacts at the F.B.I.’s behest. |
| 特工们想了解更多关于曲辉的信息，他似乎是中国试图招募华的关键人物，他们看到了一个机会，可以将对华的调查进一步扩展。与我交谈的特工将他们的反间谍行动比作逆流溯源。因此，为了换取不会面临指控的保证，华成了联邦调查局的线人，愿意在联邦调查局的要求下与他的中国联络人沟通。 |
| Deception often lies at the heart of espionage and counterespionage; success for both spies and spy hunters can hinge on finding a foolproof way to deceive their targets. Describing Hua’s communications with his hosts in China, the agent emphasized that the investigators didn’t type anything themselves. Hua wrote the messages himself, to give them the veneer of authenticity that the F.B.I. wanted. A team of agency linguists assisted Hull, who doesn’t know Mandarin, with figuring out what Hua might say and how to say it. Ultimately, though, they needed to rely on Hua’s own judgment about exactly how to phrase things. |
| 蒙蔽往往是间谍和反间谍活动的核心；间谍和间谍猎人的成功取决于能否找到一种万无一失的方法来蒙蔽他们的目标。在描述华与其中国东道主的通信时，这名特工强调，调查人员没有自己键入任何东西。那些信息都是华亲手写的，目的是让它们看上去显得真实，而这正是联邦调查局想要的。调查局的一个语言专家团队帮助不懂普通话的赫尔弄清楚华可能会说什么，会怎么说。不过，他们最终还是需要依靠华自己的判断来确定如何措辞。 |
| After his return from China, Hua stayed in touch with his hosts in Nanjing. “I will definitely contact you again if I have a chance to visit China in the future,” he wrote to Qu, keeping the door open for another academic exchange at the university. Now, at Hull’s direction, he sent Qu a message over WeChat on Dec. 20, a month and a half after the F.B.I. first interviewed him. He told Qu he would be willing to return for another visit in February, a week before the Chinese New Year. In earlier conversations with Qu, he talked about his responsibilities as the oldest son in the family, and so it made sense for him to want to visit home during the Chinese New Year. |
| 从中国回来后，华与南京的主办方保持着联系。“如果将来还有机会访问中国，我一定联系你，”他给曲辉写道，从而保留了去该校进行另一次学术交流的可能性。接着，在赫尔的指示下，他在12月20日通过微信给曲辉发了一条信息，此时距离联邦调查局对他进行首次问话已经过去了一个半月。他告诉曲辉，他愿意在2月份，也就是春节前一周再来一次。在早些时候与曲辉的谈话中，他谈到了自己作为家中长子的责任，所以他想在中国的春节期间回家是合乎情理的。 |
| Qu consented to the offer. “I will touch base with the scientific research department here to see what technology is desired and I will let you know what to prepare,” he texted Hua on Jan. 9, 2018. |
| 曲辉同意了这个提议。2018年1月9日，他给华发短信说：“我会和这里的科研部门联系，看看需要什么样的技术，告诉你该做什么准备。” |
| By now federal agents had obtained search warrants for two email address that Qu had used for his correspondence with Hua: jastxyj@gmail.com and jastquhui@gmail.com. In what would prove to be a lucky break, the investigators found that each email address was the Apple ID used for an iPhone, linked to an iCloud account where data from the phones was periodically backed up. The agents were later able to obtain search warrants for the two iCloud accounts. The one linked to jastquhui@gmail.com opened a treasure trove. |
| 那时联邦特工已经获得了对曲辉用来联络华的两个电子邮箱的搜查令：jastxyj@gmail.com和jastquhui@gmail.com。幸运的是，调查人员发现两个电子邮件地址都是iPhone的Apple ID，关联着一个定期备份手机数据的iCloud帐号。特工后来获得了对这两个iCloud帐号的搜查令，在关联jastquhui@gmail.com的帐号发现了重要信息。 |
| This included confirmation of what they had suspected all along: that Qu worked for Chinese intelligence. His real name was Xu Yanjun. He had worked at the Ministry of State Security since 2003, earning six promotions to become a deputy division director of the Sixth Bureau in the Jiangsu Province M.S.S. Like so many of us, he had taken pictures of important documents using his iPhone — his national ID card, pay stubs, his health insurance card, an application for vacation — which is how they ended up in his iCloud account. There, investigators also found an audio recording of a 2016 conversation with a professor at N.U.A.A. in which Xu had talked about his job in intelligence and the risks associated with traveling. “The leadership asks you to get the materials of the U.S. F-22 fighter aircraft,” he told the professor. “You can’t get it by sitting at home.” The discovery of evidence of Xu’s identity in an iCloud account makes for a kind of delicious reversal. The ubiquitous use of iPhones around the world — a result of America’s technological prowess — was helping to fight back against a rival nation’s efforts to steal technology. |
| 其中证实了他们一直以来的怀疑：曲辉为中国情报部门工作。他的真名是徐延军。他从2003年开始在国家安全部工作，经过六次晋升后成为江苏省国安厅六局的一名副处长。他和我们很多人一样，用iPhone拍下重要文件——他的身份证、工资单、他的医保卡、请假申请——这些信息就是这样存在他的iCloud帐号里的。在iCloud里，调查人员还发现了2016年与南航一位教授的谈话录音，其中徐延军谈到了他在情报方面的工作以及与旅行相关的风险。“领导要你拿美国F-22战机的材料，”他对教授说。“你待在家里是拿不到的。”在iCloud帐号中发现了徐延军的身份证据是个别有意味的重大转机。iPhone在全世界得到广泛使用——本身是美国技术实力的结果——帮助美国反击了一个敌对国的技术窃取。 |
| The revelation that the target of their investigation was a senior-level M.S.S. officer raised the stakes for the F.B.I. The agent characterizes the unmasking of Xu as a significant milestone in the effort to combat economic espionage by the Chinese, for reasons that go beyond this one case. When F.B.I. agents go out to talk to companies and universities about the threat, he says, skeptical listeners ask for the evidence that proves the theft of trade secrets is part of a campaign directed by China’s government. In Xu Yanjun, the F.B.I. now had the example it needed. Here was an intelligence officer working as a puppet-master, in one agent’s characterization of the events, cultivating people at American companies in order to steal trade secrets. The F.B.I. was determined to build a case against him and even arrest him if it could. |
| 目标人物原来是一名国安部高级别官员，这一发现提升了联邦调查局此次调查的重要性。前述调查局特工称，徐延军的身份揭示是打击中国经济间谍活动的一个重要里程碑，其意义并不仅限于这一个案件。他说，当联邦调查局特工到公司和大学谈论威胁时，持怀疑态度的听众要求提供证据证明窃取商业机密属于中国政府指使的行动。现在，徐延军就是联邦调查局所需的例子。现在有了这样一名情报官员，用一位调查局特工的话说，他就是一个傀儡师，在培养美国公司的人员以窃取商业机密。联邦调查局决心对他立案，如果可能的话，甚至逮捕他。 |
| Hua was put on leave without pay by G.E. Aviation right after the F.B.I. interviewed him in November 2017. As he struggled to find paid work in the weeks that followed, his efforts on behalf of the F.B.I. kept him engaged. Under the agency’s direction, he kept up his exchanges with Xu over WeChat and email, expressing eagerness to share information from G.E. “Just recently I’ve heard the speculation about laying off in my department. I, of course, don’t want to be affected, but the possibility is there,” he wrote in a message on Jan. 23. “That’s why I’m trying my best to collect as much information as possible.” Xu asked if Hua could send material relating to the specifications and design process for building an encasement for fan blades. Hua obliged with a document titled “G.E.9X Fan Containment Case Design Consensus Review.” It had the appearance of being useful but didn’t contain anything of real value — G.E. Aviation, which was cooperating with the F.B.I., had altered the document. This bait worked: Xu, emboldened, sent a list of “domestic requirements” that he wanted Hua to collect information for, such as the type of software used in designing composite structures. |
| 2017年11月受到联邦调查局问讯后，华立即被通用电气航空公司停薪留职。在接下来的几周里，他难以找到有偿工作，同时需要忙于为联邦调查局做事。在调查局的指示下，他通过微信和电子邮件与徐延军保持联系，表达非常想要分享通用电气的信息。“最近我听到传言，说我的部门会裁员，我当然不想受到影响，但存在这样的可能性，”他在1月23日的一条消息中写道。“这就是为什么我正在尽最大努力收集尽可能多的信息。”徐延军问华是否可以发送有关建造风扇叶片防护罩的规格和设计过程的材料。华奉上一份名为《GE 9X风扇防护罩设计共识审查》的文件。它看上去很有用，但并不包含任何真正有价值的东西——与联邦调查局合作的通用电气航空公司对这份文件做了修改。诱饵奏效了：徐延军胆子更大了，发送了一份“国内需求”清单，希望华按这个清单收集信息，例如设计复合结构用的是什么软件。 |
| On Feb. 5, about a week before Hua arranged with Xu to visit Nanjing again, Xu asked him to copy the table of contents of his G.E. laptop’s directory into a file that he could bring with him. He provided instructions on how to create the file in Notepad. The document would give a high-level picture of the work Hua’s group at G.E. was doing — and more important, it would indicate what information Hua had access to. |
| 2月5日，在华和徐延军约定再次前往南京大约一周前，徐延军要求他将他的通用电气笔记本电脑文件夹的目录复制到一个文件中，并一起带来。他提供了有关如何在文本软件中创建文件的说明。该文件将从概览的视角呈现华在通用电气的团队所做的工作——更重要的是，从中可以看到华能够获取哪些信息。 |
| The F.B.I. never intended for Hua to travel to China. On Feb. 7, he sent Xu a message saying he couldn’t make the trip because his boss had asked him to go to France in March for work. There was a lot to do in preparation for that trip, he explained, so he wasn’t being allowed to take any time off. “Because the ticket already booked is not refundable,” he wrote, “even my parents are very disappointed.” |
| 联邦调查局从未打算让华前往中国。2月7日，他给徐延军发信息说他去不了了，因为他的老板让他3月去法国出差。他解释说，要为那次出差做很多准备工作，所以他不能请假。“因为已经订好的票不能退，”他写道，“连我父母都很失望。” |
| He asked if he could still be reimbursed for the airfare. Xu, presumably disappointed that the meeting wasn’t going to happen, was noncommittal. He messaged in response: “Can we resolve all these issues the next time you come back?” |
| 他问他是否还能报销机票。大概对无法会面感到失望的徐不置可否。他回信息说：“我们能在你下次回来的时候解决所有这些问题吗？” |
| Xu’s interest was rekindled a week later, however, when Hua emailed him a copy of his laptop directory, stripped of any information that G.E. regarded as sensitive. Xu proposed that they get together somewhere in Europe after Hua traveled to France in March. Until this point, they had been communicating by email and WeChat, but on Feb. 27, apparently eager to finalize his suggested meeting, Xu attempted to make a video call to Hua when it was nearly 10 p.m. in Cincinnati. Hua was at home, but with no F.B.I. agents by his side to instruct him on what to do, he couldn’t risk answering. About an hour later, at Hull’s direction, he messaged Xu: “Sorry missed your call. I was trying to put the child to sleep.” He added that he would be visiting France from March 25 to April 6. |
| 然而，一周后，徐延军的兴趣被重新点燃——华通过电子邮件向他发送了一份笔记本电脑目录的副本，其中删除了所有通用电气认为敏感的信息。徐延军提议，他们在华3月去法国出差时在欧洲的某个地方见面。在此之前，他们一直通过电子邮件和微信进行沟通，但在2月27日，徐延军试图在辛辛那提时间将近晚上10点时与华进行视频通话，显然急于敲定他提出的会面。华在家，但身边没有联邦调查局特工指导他该怎么做，他不能冒险回答。大约一个小时后，在赫尔的指示下，他给徐延军发了一条信息：“抱歉没接到你的电话。我在哄孩子睡觉。”他还说，他将于3月25日至4月6日在法国出差。 |
| When Xu and Hua spoke the next day to arrange a meeting place, Hua suggested Belgium or Germany or the Netherlands — that way, he said, he could get away from his G.E. colleagues. |
| 第二天，徐延军和华谈到安排见面地点时，华建议比利时、德国或荷兰——他说，这样他就可以远离他的通用电气同事。 |
| The real reason was different. The F.B.I. wanted the meeting to happen in a country that would be amenable to arresting Xu. The French government was unlikely to agree. |
| 这并不是真实原因。联邦调查局希望会面发生在一个可以逮捕徐延军的国家。法国政府不太可能同意。 |
| Xu asked if Hua could bring along the contents of the directory he had sent. “I think that is pretty good stuff,” Xu said. |
| 徐延军问华能否带上他发来的目录的内容。“我觉得这是好东西，”徐延军说。 |
| Hua said he planned to bring his laptop to their meeting. |
| 华说他计划带着他的笔记本电脑去和他见面。 |
| “The thing is, can you export the stuff out?” Xu asked. |
| “问题是，你能把东西导出吗？”徐延军问。 |
| Hua confirmed that he could and assured him again that he would have the files with him. |
| 华确认他可以，并再次向他保证，他会把文件带在身边。 |
| “All right,” Xu said. “Let’s try our best to meet in Europe.” |
| “好吧，”徐延军说。“让我们尽量在欧洲见面吧。” |
| In the last week of March 2018, Hua flew to Brussels, accompanied by Hull and other agents. For months he had been playing an active role in their investigation; now he was about to participate in a field operation. His wife was worried. “I tried to explain to her that everything would be fine,” he told me. |
| 2018年3月的最后一周，华在赫尔等特工的陪同下飞往布鲁塞尔。几个月来，他一直积极配合他们的调查；现在他即将参加实地行动。他的妻子很担心。“我试图向她解释一切都会好起来的，”他告诉我。 |
| Xu had flown to Amsterdam. He wanted Hua to meet him there, but the F.B.I. wanted Xu to go to Belgium. Behind the scenes, U.S. authorities had been working to secure cooperation from a European country, which they ultimately got from the Belgian government. Hull had Hua explain to Xu that he couldn’t come to Amsterdam on March 31 as planned because his boss had asked him to visit a plant in Belgium. He could meet on April 1 instead, and it would have to be in Brussels. |
| 徐延军飞去了阿姆斯特丹。他想让华在那里见他，但联邦调查局想让徐延军去比利时。在幕后，美国当局一直在努力寻找一个愿意合作的欧洲国家，他们最终和比利时政府达成一致。赫尔让华向徐延军解释说，他不能按计划在3月31日来阿姆斯特丹，因为他的老板要他参观比利时的一家工厂。他可以改为在4月1日会面，而且必须在布鲁塞尔。 |
| The change of plans flustered Xu. It would be difficult for him to change his itinerary, he messaged back; he suggested they stick to meeting in Amsterdam. In a voice call to Hua over WeChat, he explained that traveling to a new country for the meeting without prior approval from his superiors in China would be considered serious misconduct. He then proposed they meet in Rotterdam — Hua could make it to the Dutch city and return to Brussels the same day. |
| 计划之变让徐延军感到慌乱。他回信说，他很难改变行程；他坚持在阿姆斯特丹会面。在给华的微信语音中，他解释说，未经上级事先批准前往另一个国家会面将被视为严重渎职。然后他提议他们在鹿特丹会面——华可以去这个荷兰城市并在当天返回布鲁塞尔。 |
| The F.B.I. had to come up with a reason for Hua to reject Xu’s proposal. “Sunday is Easter, which my boss takes seriously,” Hua messaged Xu over WeChat. “He has reserved an Easter lunch for the traveling team and asked us better to attend.” There was no way he could leave Brussels. |
| 联邦调查局不得不为华想出一个拒绝徐延军的理由。“周日是复活节，我老板很重视，”华通过微信给徐延军发消息。“他为出差的团队预留了复活节午餐，并要求我们最好参加。”他不可能离开布鲁塞尔。 |
| Xu finally gave in, and Hua sent him a photo of a coffee shop in the Galleries of Saint Hubert, a historic landmark in central Brussels whose grand, high-pillared architecture and arched glass-paned roof are a draw for tourists. |
| 徐延军终于让步了，华给他发了一张圣休伯特拱廊街一家咖啡店的照片，这条街是布鲁塞尔市中心的一个历史地标，宏伟的高柱建筑和拱廊玻璃屋顶吸引了众多观光客。 |
| The meeting was set for 3 in the afternoon. But Xu went to check out the coffee shop a few hours earlier, accompanied by a colleague from the M.S.S. The two men walked through the galleries. As they approached the coffee shop, Belgian federal police officers placed them under arrest. In addition to two smartphones and about 7,000 euros, Xu and his colleague had $7,000 in hundred-dollar bills — cash that they presumably planned to give to Hua that afternoon. Six months later, Xu was extradited to the United States to face charges of economic espionage. |
| 会面定在下午3点。但徐延军提前几个小时就在一名国安部同事的陪同下去咖啡店踩点了。两人穿过拱廊。当他们走近咖啡店时，比利时联邦警察逮捕了他们。除了两部智能手机和大约7000欧元外，徐延军和他的同事还携有价值7000美元的百元美钞——应该是他们计划在当天下午给华的现金。六个月后，徐延军被引渡到美国，面临经济间谍指控。 |
| I saw Xu at a pre-sentencing hearing on Aug. 23 last year, in federal court in Cincinnati, dressed in an orange-and-white prison jumpsuit. Despite being somewhat tall, Xu looks compact, with a squarish face that didn’t betray much emotion as the day’s proceedings got underway, except for one moment early on when he was struggling with shackled hands to review some papers his lawyers were showing him. At the judge’s direction, a federal marshal unshackled him. Freed, even if only in a limited sense, Xu gave a nod of gratitude. |
| 去年8月23日，在辛辛那提联邦法院的宣判前听证会上，我看到穿着橙白相间囚服的徐延军。虽然是个高个子，徐延军的身形并不显魁梧，方形脸庞在当天的诉讼中没有显露多少表情，只是早些时候戴着手铐查阅律师给他看的一些文件时有些困难。在法官的指示下，一位联邦法警解开了他的手铐。尽管只是非常有限的一点解脱，徐延军还是点了点头表示感谢。 |
| It was striking, based on a court filing submitted by Xu’s lawyers, to note the parallels in the early lives of Xu and Hua in China. Like Hua, Xu was born into a family of modest means. Like Hua, he devoted himself to the pursuit of good grades, studying late into the night and on weekends — excelling in academics was one way to build a better life. Like Hua, Xu became the first person in his family to go to college, where he earned undergraduate and graduate engineering degrees. That’s where the similarities between the paths of their two lives end. In 2003, the year Hua left for the United States, Xu started working for the Ministry of State Security. |
| 值得注意的是，根据徐延军的律师提交的一份法庭文件，徐早年在中国的生活跟华很相似。他和华一样出身贫寒，一样全身心投入学业，日夜苦读，周末也在学习——取得优异成绩是创造更好生活的一种方式。和华一样，徐延军成为家里第一个上大学的人，获得了工程学士和硕士学位。他们人生道路的相似部分到此为止。2003年，也就是华前往美国的那一年，徐延军开始在国安部工作。 |
| During a two-week trial in Cincinnati that began in October 2021 — more than three years after Xu’s extradition to the United States — federal prosecutors laid out their case. Xu was represented by a team that included five attorneys from Taft, Stettinius and Hollister, a leading Midwest law firm, which suggests that the hundreds of thousands of dollars required in legal fees was paid by the Chinese government. (The firm declined to comment for this article.) The defense argued that Xu had been tricked; the intent behind his correspondence with Hua was not to steal trade secrets but simply to facilitate an academic exchange between Hua and Chinese scientists. Ralph Kohnen, one of the defense attorneys, said in his closing argument, “What’s happened here is Mr. Xu, my client, has become a pawn, a pawn in the tense place between U.S. industries trying to exploit China and trying to get along with China.” |
| 在徐延军被引渡到美国三年多之后，为期两周的审判于2021年10月在辛辛那提开始，联邦检察官陈述了他们的控罪依据。徐延军的律师团队包括来自中西部顶尖的塔夫脱·斯泰丁纽斯和霍利斯特律师事务所的五名律师，意味着所需的数十万美元法律费用是由中国政府支付的。（律所拒绝就本文置评。）辩方辩称，徐延军被骗了；他与华通信的目的不是窃取商业机密，只是为了促进华与中国科学家之间的学术交流。辩护律师之一拉尔夫·科宁在结案陈词中说，“实际情况是，我的委托人徐延军先生成了一枚棋子，一方面美国产业界试图从中国榨取利益，另一方面又想与中国保持良好关系，而他成了这种紧张状态下的一枚棋子。” |
| The prosecution contended that Xu had been systematically going after intellectual property at aerospace companies in the United States and Europe through cyberespionage and the use of human sources. It’s not often that prosecutors find a one-stop shop for much of their evidence, but that’s what Xu’s iCloud account was — a repository of the spy’s personal and professional life. That’s because often Xu used his iPhone calendar as a diary, documenting not just the day’s events but also his thoughts and feelings. Several entries from 2017, for instance, indicate rising tensions with his boss, a man named Zha Rong. “Zha rejected a meal receipt today,” he wrote on March 27. Then, on April 28: “Relationship with Zha has dropped to freezing point.” Other entries from that period — when he started corresponding with Hua — reflect an unhappiness in Xu’s personal life. Such as one from Aug. 17, in which he lamented the breakup of what appears to have been an extramarital romance. She “saw me in the rain yesterday morning, didn’t stop and she walked away with her umbrella.” Things weren’t going well financially, either, as evidenced by a snippet from an entry on May 19: “I lost so much in the stock market. I got myself into this financial hole.” |
| 检方称，徐延军一直在通过网络间谍活动和利用人力资源，系统地在美国和欧洲的航空航天公司获取知识财产。检察官找到的大部分证据通常不会来自同一个地方，但徐延军的帐号就是这样一个地方——一个间谍个人和职业生活的存储库。这是因为徐延军经常将他的iPhone日历用作日记，不仅记录当天的事件，还记录他的想法和感受。例如，2017年的几条记录表明，他与自己的上级查荣（音）的关系日益紧张。他在3月27日写道：“查今天拒绝了一项餐费报销。”然后，在4月28日：“与查的关系降到了冰点。”那段时期的其他记录——那时他开始与华通信——反映了徐延军个人生活中的不如意。例如在8月17日的一则记录中，他哀叹了似乎是一段婚外情的结束。她“昨天早上看到我在雨中，没有停下脚步，她打着伞走开了”。5月19日记录的一个片段证明了他的财务状况也不佳：“我在股市上损失了好多。我让自己掉进了这个财务大坑。” |
| Also backed up to the cloud were messages that Xu had exchanged with several other U.S. aerospace-industry employees, which prosecutors laid out at trial. One of them was Arthur Gau from a Honeywell division in Phoenix, who testified at trial that Rong and Xu paid him $5,000 and covered his airfare to China for a 2017 visit to Nanjing to make a technical presentation. (In May 2021, Gau pleaded guilty in Arizona to a charge of exporting controlled information without a license. Bloomberg Businessweek covered Xu’s case extensively in an article published last September.) Another was an engineer at the aviation company Fokker, who accepted Xu’s invitation to visit China to share information with a Chinese research institute after Xu arranged to help the engineer’s parents, who had lost their home in China when their building was set to be demolished as part of a development project. An I.T. specialist from Boeing, who testified at the trial under the alias Sun Li, described how Xu attempted to cultivate a relationship with him, first reaching out through an email in which he mentioned having contacted the witness’s dad, an academic in China. The witness subsequently met with Xu, who repeatedly offered to reimburse his round-trip tickets to China in exchange for sharing his knowledge of and experience in I.T. The witness finally stopped communicating with Xu after realizing that Xu was not actually interested in his expertise, which was project management, but in “something else that I could not provide.” |
| 备份至云端的还有徐延军与其他几位美国航空航天业员工的信息往来，这些都由检方在庭审期间展示了出来。其中一人是在菲尼克斯一家霍尼韦尔分公司工作的亚瑟·高（Arthur Gau，音），他作证说查荣与徐延军给了他5000美元，并且为他支付了2017年前往南京作技术报告的机票费用。（2021年5月，亚瑟·高在亚利桑那州承认了未经许可对外提供受管控信息的罪行。《彭博商业周刊》去年9月的一篇文章对徐延军案进行了详尽报道。）另一人是航空工业公司福克的一名工程师，他接受了徐延军的邀请，前往中国与一家中国研究机构分享了信息。在此之前，他的父母在国内所住楼宇因涉某开发项目需要拆迁，失去了住所，但随即得到徐延军的帮助。一名以化名李尚（Sun Li，音）出庭作证的波音IT技术人员述称，徐延军试图培养与他的关系，徐先是通过一封邮件联系到了他，在邮件中表示已与这位证人的父亲——一位中国学者——取得了联系。该证人后来与徐延军见了面，后者多次提出要为其报销来回中国的路费，以换取他在IT方面的知识与经验。在意识到徐延军感兴趣的并非其项目管理专业，而是“一些我无法提供的东西”之后，他最终终止了与徐延军的联系。 |
| “What they call exchanges are not just a nice invitation,” Timothy Mangan, who led the prosecution, told me, encapsulating a point he made to the jury. “It’s part of a recruiting cycle. Some pan out, some don’t, but this is them throwing the fishing lines out, trying to vet people.” |
| “他们所说的交流并非只是好意的邀请，”该案主任检察官蒂莫西·曼根向我概括了他当时对陪审团提到的一点。“这属于整个招募环节的一部分。某些会有成果，某些则不然，但这是他们在抛出钓鱼线，是在打探对方的底细。” |
| At Xu’s trial, Mangan buttressed the argument about the so-called exchanges being anything but benign by citing an audio recording of a four-hour meeting between Xu and several Chinese engineers. Why Xu should have recorded this conversation is inexplicable — and surprisingly imprudent in hindsight, given that it ended up in an iCloud account — but in it he explains the approach to soliciting information from Chinese expatriates. “As experts abroad, it would be very difficult for them to directly take large batches of materials due to the fact that their companies’ security is very tight,” Xu tells the engineers, emphasizing the need to consider the risks involved for sources being targeted. At another point in the conversation, he talks about how to spot potential recruits while targeting specific technologies. “For example, if I am an aircraft person, then I would search into Boeing or Lockheed, right? Find it at Lockheed Martin,” Xu said. “After I found the person, I would find out if this person is doing something? Like in charge of overall design or avionics.” |
| 在对徐的审判中，曼根援引了徐和几位中国工程师之间一场长达四小时的会议的录音，以表明这绝非什么无伤大雅的交流。很难理解徐为什么要录下这段对话——事后看来此举之轻率令人惊讶，因为录音最终出现在一个iCloud帐号中——总之，他在录音中解释了从海外华人处获取信息的方法。“作为国外专家，他们公司安保非常严格，因此他们很难直接拿出大批材料，”徐告诉工程师们，强调需要考虑信源被盯上的风险。他在谈话中还提到如何在瞄准特定技术的同时发现潜在招募对象。“打个比方，如果我是搞航空的，那么我会去找波音或洛克希德，对吧？我会在洛克希德·马丁公司找到，”徐说。“在我找到这个人之后，我会弄清楚这个人是不是在做什么？比如是不是负责整体设计，或者航空电子设备。” |
| The messages in Xu’s iCloud account enabled investigators to make another damning discovery. Xu had helped coordinate a cyberespionage campaign that targeted several aviation technology companies. Those attacks — described in a report by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm — started in 2010, shortly after the state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) announced that it had chosen a joint venture between G.E. Aviation and Safran to supply a custom-made engine for China’s first domestically manufactured commercial airliner, the C919. The plan behind the campaign, which was directed against Honeywell, Capstone Turbine and Safran, among others, became clear only later when security researchers connected the dots. “When I started putting all these victims together — I was like, OK, these are all component manufacturers for different pieces of the C919,” Adam Kozy, a cybersecurity expert who runs the security firm SinaCyber and was the lead author of the CrowdStrike report, told me. Although COMAC was prepared to procure components needed to build the aircraft from these companies, the Chinese government was evidently also working to steal intellectual property from those suppliers in order to make domestic manufacturing possible in China, according to the report. |
| 徐的iCloud帐号中的信息使调查人员获得了另一个令人震惊的发现。徐曾帮助协调一场针对几家航空技术公司的网络间谍活动。根据网络安全公司CrowdStrike在一份报告的描述，这些攻击始于2010年，此前不久，国企中国商飞公司宣布，它选择了通用航空公司和赛峰集团的一家合资企业，为中国第一架国产商用客机C919提供定制的发动机。直到后来安全研究人员将这些点串起来，才看到了一场针对霍尼韦尔、凯普斯通涡轮公司和赛峰集团等公司的活动背后的计划全貌。“当我开始把所有这些受害者放在一起时，我发现，好吧，原来这些都是C919不同部件的制造商。”网络安全专家亚当·科兹说，他经营一家安全公司SinaCyber，也是CrowdStrike报告的第一作者。根据这份报告，尽管中国商飞准备从这些公司采购制造飞机所需的部件，中国政府显然同时也在试图从这些供应商那里窃取知识产权，以便实现在中国本土的生产。 |
| Xu played a role in these efforts, the prosecution argued at trial. In his iCloud account were several messages that Xu had exchanged with a manufacturing engineer employed with Safran named Tian Xi, indicating that they had been plotting to hack into the company’s computer network. The plan was to have Tian — who was working at a Safran plant in Jiangsu — install malware provided by Xu onto the laptop of a Safran employee visiting from France. It took many weeks for the plan to succeed. Tian sent Xu a triumphant text on Jan. 25, 2014, saying, “The horse is planted” — a reference to a Trojan horse, a type of malware. (Tian was indicted on related charges; the case is pending.) |
| 控方在庭审中主张，徐在这些行动中发挥了作用。在他的iCloud帐号中有几条与赛峰集团雇员、制造工程师田曦（音）的聊天记录，表明他们一直在密谋侵入公司的计算机网络。他们的计划是，由在江苏的某赛峰集团工厂工作的田曦将徐提供的恶意软件安装到一名从法国来访的赛峰集团员工的笔记本电脑上。该计划用了好几个星期才成功。田在2014年1月25日给徐发了一条短信报喜，说“木马已经植入”——这里指的是特洛伊木马，一种恶意软件。（田因相关罪名被起诉；案件正在审理中。） |
| At the end of the trial, Xu was convicted of conspiring and attempting to commit economic espionage and theft of trade secrets. In a sentencing memorandum filed last November, Xu’s lawyers painted a sympathetic portrait of the spy, describing him as a kind man who loved playing soccer with his son and routinely carried groceries up several flights of stairs for elderly neighbors. Xu was simply doing his job, they pointed out, adding that “he was not a rogue operator or criminal mastermind.” A lenient sentence would be appropriate, the memo argued, because the U.S. government couldn’t hope to deter China’s theft of intellectual property by harshly punishing a single intelligence officer. The judge wasn’t swayed. On Nov. 16 last year, Xu was sentenced to 20 years in prison. His conviction is now being appealed. |
| 庭审结束时，徐被判共谋和企图从事经济间谍活动以及窃取商业机密罪名成立。在去年11月提交的一份量刑备忘录中，徐的律师对这名间谍做出了令人同情的描绘，称他心地善良，喜欢和儿子一起踢足球，经常爬楼上上下下给年迈的邻居搬运日用品。他们指出，徐只是在做本职工作，并称“他不是胡作非为的行动执行人或犯罪主谋”。他们在备忘录中辩称本案宜从轻处罚，因为美国政府不能指望通过严厉惩罚某一个情报官员来阻止中国窃取知识产权。法官不为所动。去年11月16日，徐被判处有期徒刑20年。他正在对判决提起上诉。 |
| Xu’s arrest and prosecution could be likened to the capture of an enemy combatant who is then made a prisoner of war, but for an important distinction that U.S. officials make — that this war, or economic espionage offensive, is being waged unilaterally by China. The Chinese government, which maintains that America’s accusations of economic espionage are “slanderous,” has described the charges against Xu as “made out of thin air.” According to Mangan, the evidence laid out during Xu’s trial goes far beyond merely proving his guilt — it uncovers the systematic nature of China’s vast economic espionage. The revelation of Xu’s activities lifts the veil on how pervasive China’s economic espionage is, according to the F.B.I. agent. If just one provincial officer can do what he did, the agent suggests, you can imagine how big the country’s overall operations must be. |
| 对徐延军的逮捕和检控可以看做是抓捕敌方战斗人员，此人进而成为一名战俘，但美国官员认为有一个重要区别——这场战争，或者说经济间谍攻势，是由中国单方面发动的。中国政府坚持认为美国的经济间谍指控是“诽谤”，称对徐延军的指控是“凭空捏造”。在曼根看来，徐延军案审判中提出的证据远远超出了证明他有罪的范畴——它揭露了中国庞大的经济间谍活动的系统性本质。前述调查局特工说，通过对徐延军活动的披露，可以看到中国的经济间谍活动有多么普遍。如果一个省级官员就能做到他所做的事，你可以想象这个国家的整体行动规模有多大。 |
| A sense of that scale comes from a pair of indictments unveiled in federal court in the District of Columbia in 2019 and 2020 naming five computer hackers in China responsible for intrusions into more than 100 businesses, nonprofits and government agencies in the United States and other countries. The hackers belong to the group APT41, which the Department of Justice says is backed by the Chinese government, and it didn’t restrict itself to the theft of intellectual property and business information. Investigators say the hackers also purloined more than a million detailed call records from telecom companies. APT41 appears to have developed a data-modeling way to mine this type of information and map the social networks of specific targets, including a Tibetan monk living in India and pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. The cases are pending. |
| 从2019年和2020年哥伦比亚特区联邦法院公布的两份起诉书中就能感受到这种规模，起诉书指中国的五名计算机黑客入侵了美国和其他国家的100多家企业、非营利组织和政府机构。这些黑客属于APT41组织，司法部称该组织得到了中国政府的支持，而且其活动不局限于盗窃知识产权和商业信息。调查人员说，黑客们还从电信公司窃取了超过100万条详细的通话记录。APT41似乎已经开发出一种数据建模方式来挖掘这类信息，并针对特定目标绘制出社交网络，这些目标包括一名居住在印度的西藏僧侣以及香港的民主活动人士。这些案件目前正在审理中。 |
| One day last September, I traveled to Cincinnati to ask Hua about what he had gone through. He agreed to meet on the condition that I protect his identity. Even though he testified in court under his real name, he wanted to draw as little attention to himself as possible, especially out of a concern for his family. We met at a Chinese restaurant for lunch. Walking over to the table where I was sitting with his attorney, he greeted me with a gentle handshake and asked me to excuse him for speaking softly because of a rib injury he’d suffered while jogging. |
| 去年9月的一天，我到辛辛那提向华了解他的经历。他同意见面，前提是我要保护他的身份。尽管他在法庭上用真名作证，但他还是想尽可能不引人注意，尤其是出于对他家人的担心。我们在一家中餐馆吃午饭。他走到我和他的律师坐的桌子前，温和地和我握手打招呼，并请我体谅他说话声音乏力，因为他在慢跑时伤到了肋骨。 |
| Hua told me he had spent the past few years rebuilding his life. During the time he was helping the F.B.I. with its investigation, he was effectively unemployed — G.E. fired Hua after he was on leave for several months — except for a couple of weeks when he worked as a driver for Uber Eats. He finally found a job with an engineering company unrelated to his expertise. Still, he didn’t see himself as a victim. “Why did I have to accept the invitation without consulting my employer, my family?” he said. “I bear the consequences of what I did.” |
| 华告诉我，过去几年他一直在重建自己的生活。在协助联邦调查局的调查期间，除了开优步拉客的几周之外，他实际上处于失业状态——停薪留职几个月后，他被通用电气解雇了。他最终在一家工程公司找到了一份与自己专业无关的工作。尽管如此，他并不认为自己是受害者。“我为什么要在没有咨询雇主和家人的情况下就接受邀请？”他说。“这是我罪有应得。” |
| He brightened when I asked him about his interest in composites. “It’s a fascinating field,” he said. “You can design a composite in many ways. You can think out of the box, you have a lot of flexibility in engineering it.” When I asked if he’d thought about returning to the field, however, he shook his head. “I don’t want to,” he said. He seemed worried that going back to designing composite structures would somehow open a fresh portal to the trauma he was trying to leave behind. |
| 当我问到他对复合材料的兴趣时，他来了兴致。“这是一个迷人的领域，”他说。“你可以用多种方法设计复合材料。你可以跳出框框思考，你在设计时有很大的灵活性。”然而，当我问他是否考虑重返这个领域时，他摇了摇头。“我不想，”他说。他似乎担心回去设计复合结构会以某种方式打开一个新入口，触碰到他试图走出的创伤。 |
| A few times during our conversation, I saw his eyes glisten and his lips quiver. But whenever I pressed him to describe how he felt about what he had been through, his face would take on a stoic expression, as if he was trying to keep his emotions in check. “If you ask me, are there days when I have trouble falling asleep? Yes, there are. I regret what I did. But I always tell myself, that’s the past, what can I do? I can only look forward, to see what I can do tomorrow.” |
| 在我们的谈话中，我几次看到他的眼睛闪着泪光，嘴唇颤抖。但每当我要求他描述他经历那些事情的感受时，他就会露出一种坚毅的表情，似乎在努力控制自己的情绪。“如果你问我，是不是有时候会难以入眠？是的。我对我所做的事情感到后悔。但我总是告诉自己，那是过去，我能做什么？我只能向前看，看我明天能做些什么。” |
| When Hua told me how he agreed to assist the F.B.I. to save himself and his family, I couldn’t help thinking of him and Xu as chess pieces in a geopolitical game that they had little control over — two men of similar background whose lives had collided, with unfortunate results for both. I asked Hua if he felt any anger toward Xu for arranging his visit to Nanjing. “No,” Hua replied. “He was just doing what he was asked to do.”Weeks later, after Xu’s sentencing on Nov. 16, Hua relayed a message to me through his attorney to say that he was saddened to hear that Xu would be spending such a long time in prison. “He’s not my enemy,” Hua said. “We are all just normal people.” |
| 当华告诉我他是如何同意协助调查局来拯救他自己和他的家庭时，我不禁想到，他和徐是他们几乎无法控制的地缘政治博弈中的棋子——两个背景相似的人的生活发生了碰撞，两人的结果都是不幸的。我问华，他是否对徐安排他去南京感到愤怒。“不，”华回答道。“他只是在奉命行事。”几周后，徐于11月16日被判刑，华通过他的律师向我转达了一个信息，说他听到徐将在监狱中度过这么长的时间，感到很难过。“他不是我的敌人，”华说。“我们都只是普通人。” |
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