Prosecutor: GE Aviation espionage involved Chinese
In 2018, Yanjun Xu and another man who prosecutors say was a Chinese spy traveled 8,000 miles from China to Belgium to meet with an engineer for GE Aviation.
Xu and the other accused intelligence officer, a federal prosecutor said this week in opening statements in Xu’s trial, believed the GE Aviation engineer was bringing a hard drive containing confidential information about commercial jet engines.
The alleged espionage was part of a Chinese government policy to steal trade secrets from aviation companies, Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Glatfelter told jurors. She said China wanted to build its own jet engine modeled after GE Aviation’s, which she called the most successful in the world.
China relies on spies, she said, “to steal what they cannot develop themselves.”
When FBI agents and Belgian authorities arrested Xu and the other accused spy, the two had multiple cellphones, photos of the engineer and his family and thousands of dollars in U.S. currency wrapped in brown envelopes, Glatfelter said. Xu also had been using an alias, she said.
Information on at least one of the phones, she said, was erased remotely after law enforcement confiscated it. That showed Chinese intelligence was involved, she said.
The GE Aviation engineer was not charged. For several months, he had been cooperating with the FBI. Glatfelter said agents used his email and messaging apps to communicate with Xu and others.
Glatfelter said Xu, 41, was a deputy division director for the Ministry of State Security, China’s intelligence agency.
Beginning in late-2013, she said he worked with other intelligence officers to obtain trade secrets from aviation companies. Among them: Honeywell
Aerospace and Safran, a French company that makes aircraft engines.
An onetime engineer for Honeywell has pleaded guilty in a separate case, she said
Between 2013 and 2014, Xu coordinated a cyber-attack on Safran, she said, involving an employee Xu recruited known as “the Frenchman.”
That cyberattack involved a USB drive plugged into a laptop that infected the laptop with malware, Glatfelter said.
‘A setup’
Xu is being represented by a team of attorneys, including three from the Taft law firm. One of those attorneys, Ralph Kohnen, a former federal prosecutor, gave opening statements Tuesday.
Kohnen said Xu wasn’t a spy and never asked for trade secrets. It was the FBI agents, posing as the GE Aviation engineer, who offered to disclose secret information. Agents lured Xu to Belgium, Kohnen said.
“This was a setup,” he said. “Our client is an unfortunate pawn in a trade war between the world’s two economic superpowers.”
Kohnen said China has been open about wanting to acquire more technology. One of the ways it does this is to invite Chinese nationals working for American and European companies to China to share what they can. Xu was doing that “out in the open,” he said.
Kohnen admitted that Xu worked for the Ministry of State Security, “as all people must do, if asked.” It’s part of their “service to the motherland,” he said.
Prosecutors say Xu and others with Chinese intelligence recruited experts to travel to China to give presentations with the intention of obtaining trade secrets “through illicit means.”
But Kohnen said information “exchanges” like that happen all the time, “all over the world.”
Many companies, he said at one point, “exploit” China in order to “keep China in its place.”
The trial, in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati before Judge Timothy Black, is expected to last several weeks. Xu faces charges including conspiracy to commit economic espionage.