Another Chinese immigrant, one of many over the years, has been arrested for spying for Red China. Just the last one in a long list. Philip Chaohui He was apparently arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations (ICE HSI) for attempting to export sensitive technologies using a Red Chinese government owned vessel out of Long Beach. One wonders why HSI was invovled when the Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security, Office of Export Enforcement has primary jurisdiction over export control investigations. It appears that rather than arrest illegal aliens, ICE HSI wants to do something else, outside of its primary jurisdiction. Title 8 in ICE HSI's myopic view appears to be fo' sukkas.
SFGate February 27, 2012 by Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross
As usual, the headline tells us nothing other than a deracinated "engineer" did something "bad." Sounds like some headline in Pravda during the Great Terror. Engineers were particularly bad back then. Old Stalinists from the 4th Estate like that olde time religion. Not acceptable is "Chinese Immigrant Steals Technology For China." Similar to a vague New Jersy Man... The lesson being nothing bad is to be ascribed to immigrants or minorities.
There's a politically awkward but intriguing link between a former Caltrans employee accused of trying to smuggle U.S. satellite technology to China and the Chinese company making the new Bay Bridge eastern span.
And He apparently tried to hid his Chineseness by changing his name. Not great tradecraft either:
At the center of the case is ex-Caltrans engineer Philip Chaohui He, also known as Philip Hope, who was indicted in Colorado this month for allegedly trying to smuggle high-tech parts out of the country in boxes marked "milk powder."
Front companies are quite common in espionage and typical of Chinese intelligence agencies:
Besides working on the Bay Bridge, He allegedly moonlighted as the only employee of an electronic-instrument company on Webster Street in downtown Oakland.
On Dec. 11, according to the 18-page indictment, He showed up at the Port of Long Beach with five boxes of high-tech components - labeled in Chinese - in the trunk of his car. He then parked in a secure area where a ship owned by Zhenhua Port Machinery Co. Ltd., or ZPMC, was docked.
ZPMC - which is owned by the Chinese government - is the fabricator of the huge steel tower and road decks for the new $6.3 billion Bay Bridge eastern span. He worked on the project as a technical engineer.
Use of State owned shipping companies to export the end product of espionage is a well worn tactic going back to the early days of the NKVD.
Caltrans appears to be in denial, which is neither a river in Egypt or in China.
Caltrans spokesman Bart Ney said He never had occasion to travel to China for work in the 3 1/2 years he was employed by Caltrans. Nor did the engineer have any contact with ZPMC in his assignment reviewing bridge documents and answering questions for the project's joint-venture contractor, American Bridge/Fluor Enterprises, Ney said.
And surprise, another bit of tradecraft common to the Ministry of State Security, using private corporations as fronts to gather technology:
Well, that's not quite the story we got from Jim Yang, the ZPMC representative on the Bay Bridge project. As he tells it, he got to know He while working on the bridge job, and although they didn't socialize, they had a "working relationship."
And Yang appears to be another one of the "Overseas Chinese" that the MSS assiduously recruits and deploys.
In early December, he said, He "called me to say he had some stuff ... like clothing and gifts and fish oil ... which was left by our employee previously on the job site - all personal stuff."
According to Yang, He said he had heard there was a ZPMC ship docked in Long Beach, and asked if he could bring the personal belongings down south to be shipped back to China.
Yeah, right, and I got a bridge over the Yangtze to sell you. Even stranger than driving seven hours to deliver some fish oil is meeting someone to accept that fish oil.
And at the same time we were buying steel from these people. Why? Ask another alien, Arnold Schwartzenkennedy, who made that decision.
