China's U.S. Espionage Efforts Revealed By Number Of Cases
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
05/08/2011 12:01 AM ET
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The young man stood before the judge, his usually neatly trimmed hair now long enough to brush the collar of his prison jumpsuit. Glenn Duffie Shriver had confessed his transgressions and was here, in a federal courtroom with his mother watching, to receive his sentence and to try, somehow, to explain it all.
When the time came for him to address the court, he spoke of the many dreams he'd had to work on behalf of his country.
"Mine was to be a life of service," he said. "I could have been very valuable. That was originally my plan."
He had been a seemingly all-American, clean-cut guy: No criminal record. Engaged to be married. A job teaching English overseas. In letters to the judge, loved ones described the 29-year-old Midwesterner as honest and caring. His fiancee called him "Mr. Patriot."
Such descriptions make the one that culminated in the courtroom all the more baffling: Glenn Shriver was also a spy recruit for China. He took $70,000 from individuals he knew to be Chinese intelligence officers to try to land a job with the State Department and the CIA.
Shriver is just one of at least 57 defendants in federal prosecutions since 2008 charging espionage conspiracies with China or efforts to pass classified information, sensitive technology or trade secrets to intelligence operatives, state-sponsored entities, private individuals or businesses in China, according to an Associated Press review of U.S. Justice Department cases.
Of those, nine await trial and two are considered fugitives. The others have been convicted.
Most of these prosecutions received little public attention — especially compared with the headline splash after last summer's arrest of 10 Russian "sleeper agents" who'd been living in suburban America for more than a decade but, according to Attorney General Eric Holder, passed no secrets.
Contrast that with this snapshot:
• In Honolulu, a former B-2 bomber engineer and one-time professor at Purdue gets 32 years in prison for working with the Chinese to develop a vital part for a cruise missile in a case that a high-ranking Justice Department official said resulted in the leak of "some of our country's most sensitive weapons-related designs."
• In Boston, a Harvard-educated businessman is sent to prison, along with his ex-wife, for conspiring for a decade to illegally export parts used in military radar and electronic warfare systems to research institutes that manufacture items for the Chinese military.
