An elderly Chinese-born engineer convicted of economic espionage for hoarding sensitive documents that included space shuttle details faced sentencing yesterday, with prosecutors seeking a 20-year term.
A judge found Dongfan “Greg” Chung, 74, guilty in July of six federal counts of economic espionage and other charges for keeping 300,000 pages of sensitive papers in his home. The documents also included information about the fueling system for a booster rocket.
Despite Chung’s age, prosecutors have requested a 20-year sentence, in part to send a message to other would-be spies.
Assistant US Attorney Greg Staples noted in sentencing papers that Chung amassed a personal wealth of more than US$3 million while betraying his adopted country.
“The [People’s Republic of China] is bent on stealing sensitive information from the United States and shows no sign of relenting,” Staples wrote. “Only strong sentences offer any hope of dissuading others from helping the PRC get that technology.”
Chung’s attorney, Thomas Bienert, did not return a call for comment. He has said his client would appeal.
Defense attorneys also filed a motion last week accusing prosecutors of withholding a report about an FBI interview with a Chinese professor with whom Chung corresponded.
The attorneys requested an evidentiary hearing yesterday on the matter. It was unclear if US District Judge Cormac Carney would grant the motion.
The government accused Chung, a stress analyst with high-level clearance, of using his 30-year career at Boeing Co and Rockwell International to steal the documents. They said investigators found papers stacked throughout Chung’s house that included sensitive information about the booster rocket — documents that employees were ordered to lock away at the end of each day. They said Boeing invested US$50 million in the technology over a five-year period.
During the non-jury trial, Chung’s lawyers argued that he may have violated Boeing policy by bringing the papers home, but he didn’t break any laws by doing so, and the US government couldn’t prove he had given secret information to China.
In his ruling, Carney wrote that the notion that Chung was merely a pack rat was “ludicrous” and said the evidence showed that he had been passing information to Chinese officials as a spy.
The government believes Chung began spying for the Chinese in the late 1970s, a few years after he became a naturalized US citizen and was hired by Rockwell International.
Chung worked for Rockwell until it was bought by Boeing in 1996.
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