Chinese spies recruited a young American student to work for them by paying him to write an essay on US-Taiwan relations US court papers show.
The student, Glenn Duffie Shriver, now 28, of Detroit, Michigan, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to communicate national defense information and will be sentenced to five years in prison under a special plea bargaining deal.
Now US intelligence experts are using the case as a warning to other American students who go to China to learn Mandarin.
Prosecutors revealed details of Beijing’s espionage plot when Shriver appeared before a US federal court near Washington this week.
“This is another example of the breadth and depth of Chinese operations,” said former US intelligence executive Kenneth deGraffenreid.
CYBER-ATTACKS
The operations range from sustained cyber-attacks to deep-penetration agents inside the US government like the kind of agent Shriver was meant to be,” he said.
Shriver first went to China when he was 21 years old, to study Mandarin at East China Normal University in Shanghai for a year.
He returned to China the following year for a visit and was approached by a woman called Amanda who offered to pay him US$120 to write a political assessment of how US-China relations were impacted by Taiwan.
According to court papers, Shriver was then introduced to two Chinese intelligence officers identified as Mr Wu and Mr Tang.
They persuaded Shriver to continue working for them by returning to the US and getting a job in either the US State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The intelligence agents told him: “If it’s possible, we want you to get us some secrets of classified information.”
Shriver went home and took the Foreign Service exam twice — failing both times — in order to apply for a job with the State Department.
To keep his spirits up, the Chinese agents gave him a US$30,000 bonus.
Next, he applied for a job with the CIA and the Chinese gave him US$40,000 more.
Shriver told the agency that he had no contact with a foreign government, but during the extensive background checks it performs on potential employees, the CIA discovered that he had held 20 meetings with Chinese agents from 2004 to 2007.
FALSE PRETENSES
US Assistant Attorney General David Kris told the court: “This defendant attempted to gain access to classified US national defense information by securing a position with the US government under false pretenses with the ultimate goal to providing that information to intelligence officers of the People’s Republic of China [PRC].”
“Through the diligent work of the agents, analysts and prosecutors assigned to this matter, the defendant’s scheme was detected and neutralized,” he said.
Prosecutor John Perren added that: “Shriver threw away his education, his career and his future when he chose to position himself to spy for the PRC. He failed to appreciate that the PRC simply created a friendship with him to use him. It’s a valuable lesson to others who might be tempted to do the same.”
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
BEIJING’S ‘PAWN’: ‘We, as Chinese, should never forget our roots, history, culture,’ Want Want Holdings general manager Tsai Wang-ting said at a summit in China The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday condemned Want Want China Times Media Group (旺旺中時媒體集團) for making comments at the Cross-Strait Chinese Culture Summit that it said have damaged Taiwan’s sovereignty, adding that it would investigate if the group had colluded with China in the matter and contravened cross-strait regulations. The council issued a statement after Want Want Holdings (旺旺集團有限公司) general manager Tsai Wang-ting (蔡旺庭), the third son of the group’s founder, Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), said at the summit last week that the group originated in “Chinese Taiwan,” and has developed and prospered in “the motherland.” “We, as Chinese, should never