A Taiwanese man pleaded not guilty in New York on Monday to charges of conspiring to smuggle restricted military equipment from the US to Taiwan, charges that could land him in a US prison for up to 80 years.
Peng Yen-po, also known as Yen Ching Peng (彭彥清) and Alex Peng, faces six counts of conspiring to smuggle the equipment without the required US State Department export license, and money laundering.
Peng, identified by US authorities as from Hsinchu, was arrested last December in Hong Kong at the request of US authorities and had been held in detention in the territory until his extradition to New York on Monday.
The US has accused him of trying to illegally smuggle US military equipment to Taiwan between July 2006 and last December.
Reuters quoted his lawyer as saying Peng was a “geek” who bought the illicit items because he is a personal collector of military gear and wanted to sell the items to other “geeky collectors.”
The lawyer, Reuters said, cited the collectors’ adoration of the so-called Top Gun look popularized by the 1986 Tom Cruise movie.
Peng was snared by an apparent sting operation involving transactions on eBay and its subsidiary PayPal by the US Homeland Security Department’s Immigrations and Customs Service (ICE). US investigators used undercover e-mail accounts to field queries from Peng on ways to buy and illegally ship the protected items.
In court documents, the US customs undercover agent who ran the investigation identified Peng’s address as Kuanshi, Hsinchu.
The complaint against Peng said the sting began when the chief US investigator arranged through an unnamed “cooperating defendant” to give Peng his e-mail address through the eBay system.
The aim was to get Peng to order the illicit military equipment exports through Peng’s Hotmail address. The ensuing exchanges of e-mails, through which Peng agreed to pay several thousands of dollars for the equipment, led to Peng’s arrest.
Details of the case, including the names of codefendants and background information on how the case and the sting came about, were lacking in the court documents, which were originally entered under seal. The main investigator told the court that he intentionally limited disclosure of information on the details of the case.
However, one section of the complaint against Peng seemed to indicate that efforts by Taiwanese to illegally import US military secrets may have been broader, if not widespread.
During an e-mail exchange between Peng and the main ICE investigator conducting the sting, the agent asked Peng for a US$100 fee to falsify export documents to enable the military items to be shipped as “toys.”
Peng responded that he “could understand” the fee.
“In all my experiences. There were No problem of export from US to Taiwan. I bought many NGVs, IR lasers, and Thermal WS. There were smooth. There problem is importing to US! Your Gov. Was more afraid of importing things than exporting one,” Peng wrote, according to the US complaint against him.
The items that Peng was referring to included infrared laser aiming devices, which project a laser beam from military rifles invisible to the naked eye but visible with military night vision goggles; thermal weapon sights, which mount on rifles and pinpoint targets in low-light conditions; and advanced fighter pilot helmets, which permit a pilot to accurately aim weapons at an enemy while under high-stress maneuvers.
Those were the items Peng is alleged to have tried to smuggle to Taiwan through an intermediary, Liu Kang-tai, who was arrested with Peng and sentenced in a New York court earlier this month to 30 months in prison.
The items are on the list of US munitions that cannot be exported without a license from the State Department.
The US complaint did not indicate why Peng wanted to import the items to Taiwan, who the end-users might be, or whether Taiwanese government officials were involved.
In the complaint prosecutors said that Taiwanese authorities cooperated in the investigation.
Information on the case was “passed onto the Taiwanese authorities. The Taiwanese authorities were able to provide biographical information identifying Yen Ching Peng [Peng Yen-po] as a resident at” the Hsinchu address, the US complaint against Peng said.
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