nalysis  ·  National Security  ·  May 2026

Intelligence & Counterintelligence

From a small-town California mayor to Navy sailors, CIA officers, Harvard professors, and secret police stations in Manhattan — the known cases are alarming. What modeling tells us about the undetected ones is far worse.

May 13, 2026  ·  Long Read

By Jeffrey A. Newman Esq. and Claude.ai

On May 12, 2026, Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, California — a quiet, affluent suburb of Los Angeles — resigned from office and agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China. Wang, 58, and an associate named Yaoning “Mike” Sun had operated a website called “U.S. News Center” that posed as a community news source for Chinese Americans but was, in reality, a propaganda vehicle operated at the explicit direction of Chinese government officials. Directives arrived through the encrypted messaging app WeChat. Content was posted to promote pro-PRC narratives to an unsuspecting community. The charge carries up to ten years in federal prison.

“Mayor Wang admitted to acting as a foreign agent from at least 2020 through 2022 — promoting PRC propaganda in the U.S. and acting at PRC’s direction to promote their interests,” FBI Director Kash Patel posted on the social media platform X. “FBI and our federal partners continue to move aggressively to root out this kind of influence in American institutions all over the country.”

The Wang case made national headlines. But to counterintelligence professionals, it was anything but surprising. It was merely the latest data point in a pattern so vast, so systematic, and so deeply embedded in American institutions that a former U.S. diplomat who spent thirty years tracking Chinese intelligence described it as the biggest espionage operation against the United States in the country’s entire history. The real question is not how many spies America has caught. It is how many it hasn’t.

224

Reported espionage
cases since 2000

~5,000

Active FBI counter-
intel cases (2020)

$5.6T

Estimated annual
IP theft (modeled)

25:1

Undetected-to-
detected ratio

I. The Scope of What Has Been Stolen

Chinese espionage against the United States is not a single campaign with a single goal. It is a multi-layered, multi-decade, whole-of-government effort spanning military secrets, cutting-edge commercial technology, political intelligence, the surveillance and harassment of dissidents on American soil, and the pre-positioning of cyber capabilities inside critical infrastructure for use in a future conflict. The information obtained in known cases alone — the ones where agents were caught and charged — is staggering in its breadth and devastating in its implications.

Military and Defense Secrets

Some of the most damaging cases have involved the direct theft of classified military information from inside the U.S. armed forces themselves. In January 2024, Navy servicemember Wenheng Zhao was convicted of transmitting sensitive U.S. military information to an intelligence officer from the People’s Republic of China in exchange for bribery payments. The information Zhao passed included details about radar systems stationed in Okinawa, Japan — a critical node in America’s Pacific defense posture — as well as operational plans for a Pacific Ocean military exercise. He was sentenced to 27 months in prison and ordered to pay a $5,500 fine.

Zhao’s case was announced at the same time as, but was separate from, that of fellow Navy servicemember Jinchao “Patrick” Wei, who was convicted in August 2025 on six counts — including two of espionage and four of conspiracy — for providing sensitive information about U.S. warship capabilities to Chinese intelligence. Wei’s case is particularly alarming because warship capabilities represent the kind of technical intelligence that allows an adversary to develop specific countermeasures. Such data, in the wrong hands, does not just reveal a secret — it effectively degrades the combat effectiveness of the entire U.S. naval fleet by enabling targeted weapon development, tactical planning, and electronic warfare preparations.

Dongfan Chung — Boeing Engineer (Arrested 2008)

Perhaps no single case better illustrates the patience of Chinese intelligence than that of Dongfan Chung, a former Boeing engineer charged with economic espionage for stealing trade secrets related to the Space Shuttle program, the C-17 military transport aircraft, and the Delta IV rocket — three of the most significant programs in American aerospace history. Prosecutors determined that Chung had been acting on Chinese orders since at least 1979. That is nearly three decades of undetected espionage inside one of America’s most sensitive defense contractors. Chung made numerous trips to China over the years, giving lectures and meeting with officials, all while systematically extracting classified information about the systems he worked on. His indictment noted that he kept handwritten instructions from Chinese handlers in his home, alongside the classified documents he had accumulated over decades. His case demonstrates a defining characteristic of Chinese intelligence: patience measured not in months but in generations.

Chenguang Gong — Defense Contractor (2025)

At the other end of the timeline spectrum, Chenguang Gong — a 59-year-old dual U.S.-China citizen and former engineer at a Southern California defense contractor — pleaded guilty in July 2025 to stealing military trade secrets. Hired in January 2023 as an application-specific integrated circuit design manager, Gong transferred over 3,600 files — many marked “proprietary” and “for official use only” — to personal devices between March and April 2023. He accomplished this massive exfiltration in just two months on the job, illustrating how rapidly a motivated insider can extract enormous quantities of sensitive material from organizations that rely on trust-based access controls. Where Chung’s case demonstrates patience, Gong’s demonstrates velocity — and both are equally devastating.

The military theft extends far beyond individual agents. In 2003, Chinese hackers exfiltrated national security information from Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, one of the U.S. military’s premier weapons development centers. The stolen data included nuclear weapons test and design data, as well as stealth aircraft specifications — information that took decades and billions of dollars to develop. In another case, Ko-Suen “Bill” Moo pleaded guilty in 2006 to acting as a covert agent of China after attempting to purchase an astonishing shopping list of American military hardware: an F-16 fighter jet engine, an AGM-129A cruise missile, UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter engines, and AIM-120 air-to-air missiles. He was caught only because the “sellers” were undercover U.S. agents. One can only wonder how many similar transactions with real sellers have succeeded without detection.

Aerospace and Aviation Technology

China’s ambition to build a world-class aerospace industry has been significantly accelerated by the systematic theft of Western technology. The single most dramatic case involved Yanjun Xu, a Deputy Division Director for China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), who became the first Chinese intelligence officer ever to be captured and extradited to the United States for trial.

Xu’s methodology was sophisticated and representative of how MSS recruitment operations work. He identified and cultivated aviation experts at GE Aviation and other American firms, inviting them to China under the guise of delivering university presentations. These were not spontaneous academic invitations — they were carefully planned intelligence operations designed to build relationships with individuals who had access to proprietary knowledge about jet engine technology, including fan blade designs that represented billions of dollars in research and development investment. The FBI ultimately turned the operation around, luring Xu to Belgium in 2018 with the promise that one of his recruited experts would deliver sensitive information. He was arrested upon arrival, extradited to Cincinnati, convicted, and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

Xu’s case was far from isolated. Chinese hackers conducted a multi-year cyber-espionage campaign between 2010 and 2015 specifically to steal intellectual property from foreign companies that could support the development of the Chinese C919 airliner — Beijing’s bid to compete directly with Boeing and Airbus. The C919 program, which China promotes as a symbol of indigenous innovation, is in significant part built on technology stolen from Western firms. When the airplane entered commercial service, it carried within it the fruits of state-directed theft on a massive scale — a pattern that has repeated across industries from telecommunications to semiconductors to biotechnology.

Intelligence Community Betrayals

The most corrosive category of espionage involves Americans with high-level security clearances who betrayed their own intelligence agencies. These cases do not merely compromise specific secrets; they compromise entire networks, methodologies, and the trust that underpins intelligence cooperation between agencies and allied nations.

Ex-CIA officer Kevin Mallory passed classified materials to Chinese intelligence using a covert cell phone provided to him during a trip to Shanghai. Mallory, a former Army officer and experienced intelligence professional, possessed the kind of access that represents a nightmare scenario for counterintelligence: he understood how the system worked, knew what was valuable, and was familiar with secure communication methods. His motivation was distressingly mundane — he was behind on his mortgage and overwhelmed by debt. The Chinese paid him $25,000. After his arrest, Mallory claimed to be a double agent helping the U.S. government, but after the FBI cracked his phone, they discovered he had concealed information and passed more material than he had disclosed. A jury convicted him of espionage in 2018, and he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, another former CIA officer, was arrested at JFK Airport and charged with providing Chinese agents with classified information from his years at the agency — including what prosecutors alleged were the real names and locations of covert assets operating inside China. The consequences of this betrayal may have been catastrophic. Between 2010 and 2012, the CIA experienced a devastating loss of its human intelligence sources inside China. At least a dozen informants were reportedly killed or imprisoned in what intelligence professionals describe as one of the worst counterintelligence disasters in the agency’s history. While the full story remains classified, Lee’s subsequent conviction for conspiracy to deliver national defense information suggests his betrayal played a role in the systematic identification and elimination of American agents inside China.

“He was an agent. He worked with the Chinese government to identify targets for them to surveil and compromise… That’s the scary part — the Chinese are very good, and so he was not number one on the list of assets to protect. That means there are other assets who are being protected.”— Jim Lewis, former U.S. diplomat and China intelligence analyst, CBS News, May 2025

The longest-running known case in American history offers a sobering lesson in the limits of detection. Larry Wu-tai Chin worked inside the U.S. intelligence community for nearly 35 years while feeding classified information to Beijing. He was recruited in 1944 — during World War II — while working as a translator for the Americans in Fuzhou. In 1948, he started as an interpreter at the U.S. consulate, and from that modest foothold, he built a career that took him progressively deeper into the American intelligence apparatus. He was not caught until 1985, four decades after his recruitment. Convicted on 17 counts of espionage, conspiracy, and tax evasion in February 1986, including two life terms, Chin killed himself before he could be sentenced. His case remains a stark illustration of how long a disciplined, well-placed agent can operate entirely below the threshold of suspicion.

Technology and Trade Secrets

China’s industrial espionage campaign extends far beyond the military-intelligence complex into virtually every sector of the American economy where technological advantage translates into strategic power or commercial profit.

Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department and a pioneer in nanotechnology, was charged with lying to federal authorities about his participation in China’s Thousand Talents Plan and about receiving approximately $1.5 million from Wuhan University of Technology while simultaneously receiving $15 million in U.S. government research grants. Lieber is the highest-profile academic to be arrested in connection with Chinese-American technological rivalry, and his case sent shockwaves through the American research community, prompting universities nationwide to review their foreign engagement policies.

In the pharmaceutical sector, Chenyan Wu and Lianchun Chen — a married couple who both worked as research scientists at a major American pharmaceutical company — pleaded guilty in 2022 for stealing confidential mRNA research to advance the husband’s competing laboratory in China. The theft of mRNA technology, occurring during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when such research was among the most valuable intellectual property in the world, illustrates the opportunistic precision of China’s collection efforts. Beijing’s intelligence apparatus does not merely follow a static target list — it adapts in real time to identify and pursue whatever technology is most strategically valuable at any given moment.

A former researcher at Coca-Cola, You Xiaorong, was charged with stealing proprietary research on BPA-free coatings for beverage containers, allegedly intending to set up a competing firm in China to replicate the materials. A 2022 report by Strider Technologies found that over the previous two decades, China had recruited at least 154 scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory — one of America’s premier nuclear weapons facilities — to support China’s development of military technologies that pose direct threats to U.S. national security.

The breadth of targets across the technology sector is remarkable: semiconductor designs, agricultural biotechnology, medical devices, autonomous vehicle technology, artificial intelligence research, quantum computing algorithms, advanced materials science, and telecommunications infrastructure. In July 2021, the Justice Department charged four Chinese nationals accused of working for the MSS with a global hacking campaign targeting government, academic, and private institutions across multiple sectors simultaneously. The message embedded in the sheer diversity of these targets is clear: nothing is off-limits, and the Chinese state does not distinguish meaningfully between military and commercial espionage — all technology serves the state.

· · ·

II. Political Infiltration and Influence Operations

The Eileen Wang case in Arcadia fits a pattern that security experts have identified as one of the most insidious and difficult-to-counter dimensions of Chinese espionage: the systematic targeting of local, state, and federal officials to build influence, shape policy, and gather political intelligence from the ground up.

The most dramatic example prior to Wang was Linda Sun, a former officer in New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration. In 2024, Sun was charged with acting as a secret agent of the Chinese government. The details of her case reveal how deeply an agent can embed within state government. In March 2020, as COVID-19 was devastating New York, state officials held a private conference call to discuss their pandemic response. Sun allegedly added a Chinese government official to the call without authorization. During the call, she sent the official a written message: “Keep your phone muted.” This single anecdote — a Chinese intelligence officer listening live to a confidential government pandemic briefing, connected by an agent inside the governor’s own staff — encapsulates the intimacy of the access that China’s operations seek and sometimes achieve.

Sun’s relationship with Chinese intelligence was handsomely compensated. She and her husband, Chris Hu (who was also charged), lived in a $3.5 million home in a gated community in Manhasset on Long Island. They also purchased a $1.9 million home in Honolulu and luxury cars, including a 2024 Ferrari. Federal prosecutors allege all of this was funded by the Chinese government in exchange for her services as a covert agent placed within the state government of one of America’s most consequential states.

At the federal level, the penetration has reached into the most sensitive institutions. A State Department employee with Top Secret clearance was found in 2017 to have provided copies of internal State Department documents to Chinese intelligence officers. Ronald N. Montaperto, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, pleaded guilty to mishandling classified documents; U.S. officials said his disclosures coincided with the loss of a major electronic eavesdropping program that had been successfully monitoring Chinese government communications about illicit arms sales — a devastating operational blow that cost years of collection effort.

One of the most disturbing influence operations targeted the Chinese-American dissident community itself. Wang Shujun, a U.S. citizen who had helped start a pro-democracy organization in Queens, New York, spent almost 20 years secretly working as a spy for China’s Ministry of State Security. He used his trusted position within dissident communities to collect names, contact information, and details of private conversations, which he faithfully passed to his MSS handlers. His case was profiled on CBS News’s 60 Minutes in 2025, where former diplomat and China intelligence analyst Jim Lewis made a chilling observation: Wang was not even close to the top of China’s priority list for protected assets. If someone that expendable operated undetected for nearly two decades, what does that imply about the agents Beijing considers truly valuable?

A May 2025 study by researchers at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies revealed yet another recruitment vector: a Chinese government-backed intelligence operation targeting laid-off U.S. government employees through fake job postings on LinkedIn and social media. Former government workers, many still holding active security clearances and carrying valuable institutional knowledge, were being approached with job opportunities that served as recruitment tools for Chinese intelligence services. The vulnerability is systemic: recently unemployed cleared personnel are financially stressed, psychologically vulnerable, and possess exactly the kind of knowledge Beijing seeks — knowledge about how American government agencies work, who makes decisions, what systems are used, and where the gaps in security lie.

· · ·

III. Operation Fox Hunt and Secret Police Stations on American Soil

Perhaps nothing illustrates the brazenness of Chinese operations in the United States more starkly than the discovery of secret police stations operating in American cities and the sprawling network of coercion campaigns collectively known as Operation Fox Hunt.

In 2014, under the personal direction of President Xi Jinping, China launched Operation Fox Hunt — publicly described as an international anti-corruption campaign to repatriate Chinese nationals accused of financial crimes who had fled abroad. Within its first six months, 680 people were reportedly returned to China. A parallel program called Operation Sky Net was established in 2015 to apprehend overseas Chinese dissidents accused of financial crimes. By 2023, Chinese authorities had reportedly compelled some 10,000 overseas individuals to return to China, and the broader “110 Overseas” campaign had persuaded over 230,000 Chinese suspects to return to the mainland.

The FBI has a very different assessment of Fox Hunt’s true purpose. According to the Bureau, the program provides cover to target not just corruption suspects but political dissidents, critics of the Chinese Communist Party, and anyone Beijing considers a threat. Former FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that “hundreds” of Fox Hunt targets live in the United States, many of them American citizens or green card holders. The tactics are varied and often brutal: detaining and threatening family members in China, conducting covert surveillance and harassment on American soil, hiring local private investigators to track targets, sending Chinese police officers into the United States on tourist visas to conduct operations, and in some documented cases, engineering what appear to be coerced returns disguised as voluntary surrenders.

The New Jersey Fox Hunt Operation

In one of the most thoroughly documented cases, a Wuhan police officer named Hu Ji arrived in the United States in 2016 on a tourist visa. Remarkably, he identified himself as a Chinese police officer on his visa application — a fact that apparently raised no flags. He then recruited a team of operatives living in the U.S., including Michael McMahon, a former New York City police officer working as a private investigator. Their mission: to track down two Chinese nationals living in New Jersey who were on Fox Hunt’s “top 100” list.

The team conducted extensive surveillance, identified the couple’s residence, and launched a sustained intimidation campaign. In the operation’s most dramatic moment, Hu’s team flew the target’s elderly father from China to New Jersey and brought him to confront his son — with orders to communicate how much the entire family would suffer if the son didn’t surrender and return to China. ProPublica’s subsequent investigation revealed that Hu’s Wuhan-based Fox Hunt team had roamed coast to coast for several years, largely without the knowledge of U.S. law enforcement, exploiting fear and silence in immigrant communities.

The case of NYPD officer Baimadajie Angwang added another dimension. The former Marine was arrested at gunpoint in September 2020 on federal charges of allegedly spying for China by infiltrating the Tibetan community in New York. He spent six months in federal detention before being freed on bail. In a puzzling turn, federal prosecutors abruptly dropped the case against him in January 2021 without public explanation — a decision that itself became a subject of speculation and concern within the counterintelligence community. Angwang was subsequently fired from the NYPD in 2024 for refusing to cooperate with internal investigators.

But perhaps the most audacious revelation came in late 2022, when the human rights organization Safeguard Defenders published an investigation identifying at least 102 known or suspected Chinese overseas police stations operating in 53 countries worldwide. In the United States, stations were identified in New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco, and smaller cities in Nebraska and Minnesota. In Manhattan’s Chinatown, two New York residents — Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping — were indicted for operating a secret outpost of China’s Ministry of Public Security. The FBI raided the location in the fall of 2022, seizing materials in what was the first public raid of a Chinese police station on American soil.

The stations operated above shops, inside community associations, and through nonprofit organizations. They were hiding in plain sight — and many members of the Chinese diaspora community understood them to exist. For some, they served as a constant, visible reminder that the long arm of the Chinese state extended even into the heart of American democracy. As one former counterintelligence official told ProPublica: “You have to understand the Chinese intelligence services. They will tap literally anyone with access in the community where the fugitive may be hiding and working. China has the largest security apparatus in the world.” For those living under the shadow of these stations — many of them dissidents, activists, or simply people who had fled an authoritarian system — America’s promise of safety and freedom rang hollow.

· · ·

IV. The Typhoons — Cyber Espionage at an Unprecedented Scale

If traditional espionage — human agents passing secrets through dead drops, safe houses, and encrypted messaging apps — represents the visible tip of China’s intelligence campaign, cyber espionage is the vast, dark mass beneath the waterline. The scale of Chinese cyber operations against the United States defies easy comprehension, and the most alarming discoveries of recent years suggest that much of America’s critical infrastructure has already been penetrated — some of it for years before anyone noticed.

Salt Typhoon: Inside America’s Phone Networks

In early October 2024, media outlets reported that Chinese state-sponsored hackers had infiltrated United States telecommunications companies, including major internet service providers. The U.S. government subsequently confirmed both the intrusion and the existence of an ongoing investigation. The hacking group responsible was designated “Salt Typhoon” — a name assigned by Microsoft under its convention for attributed threat actors with PRC state sponsorship, a convention the U.S. government has adopted.

What investigators discovered was unprecedented in scale. Salt Typhoon had compromised at least nine of the largest U.S. telecommunications providers: Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Spectrum, Lumen Technologies, Consolidated Communications, Windstream, and others. The campaign targeted core network components, particularly Cisco routers that handle large portions of internet traffic. The intrusion had been underway for an estimated one to two years before discovery — though some intelligence assessments suggest the group may have maintained persistent access for as long as five years.

The most alarming aspect was not the breadth of the breach but what Salt Typhoon specifically accessed: the lawful intercept systems mandated under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). These are the systems that enable law enforcement and intelligence agencies to conduct court-authorized surveillance. By compromising these systems, Salt Typhoon gained access to the most sensitive category of telecommunications data imaginable — including lists of individuals under U.S. surveillance, intercepted call content and text messages, and network-level metadata revealing the communication patterns and habits of intelligence targets.

The counterintelligence implications are catastrophic. With access to lawful intercept systems, Chinese intelligence could preemptively identify their own assets who had come under American surveillance and take steps to protect them or cut them loose. They could track dissidents, journalists, and foreign officials communicating with U.S. targets. They could map the communication patterns of the entire American intelligence community. Public reporting confirmed that the phone conversations of high-ranking officials were targeted, including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

The discovery prompted an extraordinary response: the U.S. government issued guidance urging senior officials to abandon standard telephone communications and use only end-to-end encrypted messaging services, effectively acknowledging that the nation’s telecommunications backbone could no longer be trusted. One analyst at the Royal United Services Institute described Salt Typhoon as “China doing a ‘Snowden’ to America — gaining vast access to the nation’s communications via a strategic spying operation of breathtaking audacity.”

The scope continued to expand as investigators dug deeper. By August 2025, the FBI determined that Salt Typhoon had targeted some 80 nations — not just the United States — and at least 600 organizations received notifications that the hackers had shown interest in their systems. The Global Cyber Alliance recorded more than 72 million China-origin attack attempts against decoy systems emulating telecommunications networks between August 2023 and August 2025. A joint advisory released in September 2025, co-signed by intelligence agencies from Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and other allied nations, concluded that Salt Typhoon had been active since at least 2021 and had extended its reach beyond telecom into government, transportation, lodging, and military infrastructure networks globally. A former NSA analyst described the group as “a component of China’s 100-year strategy.”

The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology Co., a Sichuan-based cybersecurity company with direct involvement in the Salt Typhoon group. In April 2025, the FBI announced a $10 million bounty for information on individuals associated with the operation. And yet, an FBI veteran expressed a concern shared by many in the counterintelligence community: “They’re still in various organizations and undetected.” Verizon and AT&T announced in December 2024 that they had contained the incident, but by June 2025, a U.S. senator was writing to both companies demanding documentation to prove that Salt Typhoon had truly been expelled from their networks — suggesting that confidence in the remediation was far from universal.

Volt Typhoon: Digital Bombs in American Infrastructure

If Salt Typhoon is about intelligence collection, Volt Typhoon is about something far more ominous: preparation for war. Uncovered in 2023 and 2024, Volt Typhoon is a separate Chinese military-led operation — attributed to the People’s Liberation Army rather than the MSS — that targeted U.S. critical infrastructure not to steal secrets but to embed persistent access capabilities that could be activated in a future conflict, particularly one over Taiwan.

Volt Typhoon’s target list reads like a blueprint for crippling a modern society: water treatment plants, electrical power grids, transportation systems, manufacturing facilities, construction companies, maritime infrastructure, IT networks, educational institutions, and government systems. The U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that Volt Typhoon’s targeting of these systems carried limited espionage value and was instead preparation for future disruption. The implants were designed as “digital booby traps” — dormant capabilities that could be triggered on command to cause cascading failures across multiple sectors simultaneously.

The operation used “living off the land” techniques — leveraging built-in tools already present on target networks rather than installing detectable malware. This approach mimics normal network activity so closely that detection is extraordinarily difficult. FBI Director Christopher Wray’s 2024 congressional testimony emphasized the potential for real-world physical harm: disrupting power grids could halt hospital operations or ammunition production, targeting seaports could delay Pacific reinforcements, and compromising water systems could threaten public health. All of this could be accomplished without firing a single shot at a military target.

U.S. officials, supported by Five Eyes intelligence partners, characterized the Volt Typhoon implants as strategic deterrence assets — designed to make America calculate the civilian cost of intervening in a Taiwan scenario. The message from Beijing, translated from the language of cyber operations into plain English, is: if you fight us over Taiwan, we can turn off your lights, poison your water, and shut down your ports.

The Broader Cyber Ecosystem

Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon are merely the most publicly discussed operations in a much larger cyber-espionage ecosystem. In March 2025, the Department of Justice indicted 12 Chinese nationals for their alleged roles in an extensive campaign of attacks on U.S. federal and state agencies, including the Treasury Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Commerce, two New York-based newspapers, a U.S. government-funded news service, and the New York State Assembly. The accused included two officers of China’s Ministry of Public Security, eight employees of a hacker-for-hire firm called i-Soon, and two members of the Chinese state-backed threat group APT27. The indictments revealed that i-Soon operated essentially as a menu-priced espionage service, charging China’s intelligence agencies between $10,000 and $75,000 for each email inbox it successfully penetrated.

The 2015 breach of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — attributed to Chinese hackers — remains one of the most consequential cyber operations in history. It exposed the personal data, security clearance applications, and fingerprints of approximately 21.5 million current and former federal employees. Security clearance applications contain the kind of deeply personal information — financial difficulties, relationship problems, substance abuse history, foreign contacts — that intelligence services use to identify recruitment targets and develop leverage. A decade later, the OPM data is still believed to be actively exploited by Chinese intelligence for targeting and recruitment purposes.

The FBI has stated that China operates the world’s largest hacking program, surpassing all other foreign governments combined. In 2020, FBI Director Wray revealed that of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases underway across the country, almost half were related to China. He was opening a new China-related counterintelligence case every ten hours.

“The counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States. Confronting this threat is the FBI’s top counterintelligence priority.”— FBI.gov, “The China Threat”

· · ·

V. A Timeline of Notable Cases

1944–1985

Larry Wu-tai Chin recruited as translator in Fuzhou. Spies inside U.S. intelligence for 35 years. Convicted February 1986 on 17 counts of espionage; commits suicide before sentencing.

~1979–2008

Boeing engineer Dongfan Chung begins passing Space Shuttle, C-17, and Delta IV rocket secrets to China. Not arrested until 2008 — nearly 30 years later.

2003

Chinese hackers exfiltrate nuclear weapons test data and stealth aircraft designs from Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake.

2006

Ko-Suen “Bill” Moo pleads guilty to attempting to purchase F-16 engines, cruise missiles, and Black Hawk engines for China. DIA analyst Ronald Montaperto pleads guilty; his disclosures linked to loss of a major electronic surveillance program.

2010–2015

Chinese hackers conduct multi-year campaign to steal IP supporting the C919 airliner program. Separately, the CIA loses dozens of human sources inside China.

2014

Xi Jinping launches Operation Fox Hunt. Five PLA officers indicted for hacking U.S. companies including Westinghouse, U.S. Steel, and Alcoa.

2015

Office of Personnel Management breach exposes 21.5 million federal employee records — the largest theft of government personnel data in history.

2017–2018

Ex-CIA officers Kevin Mallory and Jerry Chun Shing Lee arrested for passing classified material to China. MSS officer Yanjun Xu extradited from Belgium — first Chinese intelligence officer captured abroad for U.S. trial.

2020

NYPD officer Angwang arrested for spying on Tibetan community. Harvard professor Charles Lieber arrested. Houston consulate ordered closed for espionage coordination. FBI Director Wray says a new China case opens every 10 hours.

2022

DOJ charges 13 in three separate Chinese espionage cases. FBI raids secret Chinese police station in Manhattan. Safeguard Defenders identifies 102+ overseas police stations in 53 countries. Navy sailors Zhao and Wei charged.

2024

Linda Sun (NY Governor’s aide) charged as Chinese agent. Salt Typhoon telecom breach discovered across 9+ carriers. Volt Typhoon infrastructure pre-positioning revealed. Navy’s Zhao convicted.

2025

12 Chinese nationals indicted for cyber-espionage spanning federal agencies. Navy’s Wei convicted on espionage charges. Chenguang Gong pleads guilty to defense trade secret theft. FBI offers $10M bounty for Salt Typhoon operatives. Salt Typhoon confirmed active across 80+ countries and 600+ targeted organizations.

2026

Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang charged with acting as an illegal foreign agent; resigns and agrees to plead guilty.

VI. The Iceberg Problem: Modeling What We Don’t See

Every counterintelligence professional will say the same thing: caught spies represent only a tiny fraction of actual espionage activity. But how small a fraction? This is the central question that separates a serious national security challenge from an existential threat to the American economic and technological order.

The 25:1 Ratio

Glenn Chafetz, a retired CIA Chief of Station with over 30 years of intelligence experience and the Director of the 2430 Group — a non-profit, non-partisan research institution focused on state-sponsored espionage against the U.S. private sector — has produced the most rigorous publicly available analysis of this question. His methodology is both ingenious and sobering.

Chafetz recognized that the fundamental challenge in estimating undetected espionage is the absence of data from the victim’s perspective — by definition, you cannot count what you don’t know about. However, there exist historical records that provide data from the perpetrator’s perspective: records of intelligence operations that were known to the spy services that conducted them but not to their targets. Specifically, Chafetz draws on the Mitrokhin Archive — a vast collection of handwritten notes smuggled out of the KGB archives by defector Vasili Mitrokhin — and the Venona papers, which consist of Soviet diplomatic communications from the 1940s decrypted by U.S. and British intelligence decades after the fact.

By comparing the operations documented in these sources against what Western counterintelligence knew at the time, Chafetz could calculate a ratio of detected to undetected intelligence operations. His finding: a very conservative cursory count yields a ratio of approximately 25 undetected, unreported intelligence operations for every one that was detected by the victim. Chafetz emphasizes that this number could be considerably higher — but is unlikely to be lower. It is, by design, a floor estimate, not a ceiling.

Detected: ~$225B/yr

▼ DETECTION THRESHOLD ▼

Suspected but unproven

Undetected cyber intrusions & insider theft

Total modeled losses: ~$5.6 TRILLION/yr

From Ratio to Dollar Value

The most commonly cited estimates of annual Chinese IP theft from the United States come from a range of authoritative sources. The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property and former NSA Director Keith Alexander — in his famous Senate testimony — placed the figure between $225 billion and $600 billion per year. Alexander called it “the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.” In 2021, then-acting NCSC Director Michael Orlando estimated a similar range of $200 billion to $600 billion annually.

If the 25:1 ratio is applied to the lower bound of that estimate, the modeled true figure climbs to approximately $5.6 trillion per year. That would represent roughly 20% of annual U.S. GDP — a number that, at first glance, seems almost too large to be credible.

Chafetz argues that the apparent implausibility dissolves when the theft is measured against the right baseline. The appropriate comparison is not annual GDP but the total equity value of American businesses — the accumulated stock of technological and intellectual wealth from which China is systematically drawing. U.S. corporate equity runs into the tens of trillions of dollars. Viewed against that denominator, the idea that China is siphoning a significant percentage annually becomes not just plausible but consistent with the observable evidence of China’s extraordinarily rapid technological advancement — advancement that outpaces what domestic R&D investment alone would predict.

Chafetz’s conclusion is unsparing: the most common estimates of $225–$600 billion in annual losses are “absurdly low, bordering on inconsequential.” He argues that no responsible government would assess its risk of espionage based solely on what it learned from spies it caught — yet this is effectively how the American private sector views the problem. Operating on fundamentally incomplete data, corporate managers systematically underestimate their exposure, underinvest in security, and inadvertently subsidize their Chinese competitors’ research and development. The result, Chafetz writes, is that even profitable American companies are “leaving money on the table and hemorrhaging trillions of dollars every year in forfeited market share, revenue, and profit.”

Corroborating the Model

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, which maintains the most comprehensive public database of Chinese espionage cases, explicitly acknowledges the limitations of its own data: “Since these are only reported cases, and given the clandestine nature of espionage, it is likely that this underestimates the actual scope of the problem.”

The Salt Typhoon operation provides powerful empirical support for the 25:1 thesis. Chinese hackers maintained undetected access to America’s largest telecom networks for an estimated one to five years before discovery. During that entire period, every annual assessment of Chinese espionage activity was — by definition — undercounting what was actually happening, because the single most significant operation in the telecommunications sector had not yet been identified. The Global Cyber Alliance’s data showing 72 million attack attempts over two years against telecom-emulating honeypots confirms the extraordinary volume of probing activity, most of which goes unnoticed by real-world targets that lack purpose-built detection systems.

How many other Salt Typhoons are currently operating inside American networks, unknown to defenders? There is no way to answer that question with precision. But the 25:1 ratio offers a framework for disciplined estimation: for every operation that surfaces, approximately twenty-five remain submerged. And the CSIS data reveals a characteristic that makes Chinese collection particularly resistant to detection — China tasks a large number of individuals to collect small pieces of information, which are aggregated and analyzed centrally. Each individual act of collection appears innocuous. A shared data set here. An emailed specification there. A photograph of a laboratory setup. None triggers the alarm that a missing classified document would. But the aggregate effect is massive and, critically, almost impossible to quantify using traditional counterintelligence metrics.

VII. The Method Behind the Scale

What makes China’s espionage apparatus fundamentally different from historical precedents — including Soviet intelligence during the Cold War — is not just its scale but its organizational philosophy. The KGB operated primarily through a relatively small cadre of professional intelligence officers who ran carefully vetted, deeply embedded agents. China’s approach is radically different: it mobilizes an enormous, diverse apparatus spanning professional intelligence services, military cyber units, state-owned enterprises, nominally private technology companies, academic researchers, and ordinary citizens to collect information across an almost impossibly wide front.

The Ministry of State Security’s eighteenth bureau is specifically dedicated to espionage against the United States. But the MSS is only one element of a much larger network. The People’s Liberation Army’s Strategic Support Force conducts offensive cyber operations. State-owned enterprises and technology firms — Huawei being the most prominently cited example — serve as both collectors and beneficiaries of stolen technology. The United Front Work Department, a Communist Party organization charged with spreading influence and propaganda overseas, coordinates influence operations that deliberately blur the boundaries between diplomacy, propaganda, commercial engagement, and intelligence collection. The Chinese Communist Party views all of these activities as facets of a single comprehensive strategy — a concept that defies neat categorization by Western analytical frameworks accustomed to distinguishing between military, intelligence, diplomatic, and commercial activity.

The recruitment vectors are correspondingly diverse: academic exchange programs, talent recruitment plans such as the Thousand Talents Program, trade missions, scientific cooperation agreements, commercial joint ventures, social media platforms, fake job postings, and even direct approaches at international conferences. China’s approach recognizes that in the modern knowledge economy, the most valuable secrets frequently exist not in classified vaults but in corporate laboratories, university research departments, and the open interstices between classified and unclassified information. A pharmaceutical formula, a semiconductor manufacturing process, a battery chemistry, or an AI training methodology can be worth billions — and none of it is protected by the security apparatus that guards classified military information.

This diffuse collection philosophy creates a target surface that is almost impossible to comprehensively defend. As counterintelligence researcher Nicholas Eftimiades has documented, China tasks its collectors to gather individually small pieces of information that appear innocuous in isolation. Each piece is small enough to slip beneath the threshold of suspicion. But when thousands of such fragments are aggregated, cross-referenced, and analyzed by professional intelligence officers, the result is a mosaic that can rival — and sometimes surpass — what traditional high-access espionage produces. The beauty of this approach, from Beijing’s perspective, is its resilience: losing any individual collector is inconsequential, because each one is expendable and replaceable. The system does not depend on any single agent. It depends on volume.

The regulatory and commercial environment amplifies these structural advantages. American and foreign companies operating in China have long faced systematic pressure to transfer technology, capital, and manufacturing expertise to Chinese partners as a condition of market access. This “forced technology transfer” operates in a gray zone between legal business practice and state-directed appropriation. Joint venture requirements, mandatory technology sharing agreements, and opaque regulatory approvals all serve as mechanisms through which commercially valuable knowledge flows — sometimes willingly, sometimes under duress — from Western firms to Chinese competitors with close ties to the state. The aggregate result is indistinguishable from espionage in its economic effect, even when individual transactions technically comply with Chinese law.

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VIII. What It All Means

Former NSA Director Keith Alexander called Chinese intellectual property theft “the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.” FBI Director Christopher Wray has repeated that assessment with increasing urgency year after year. But what the Chafetz modeling — and the unrelenting drumbeat of new cases, new breaches, and new revelations — suggests is that even those alarming characterizations may have significantly underestimated the scale of the problem.

Consider what the catalogue of known cases, taken together, actually reveals about the scope of China’s ambitions. The Eileen Wang case shows that no level of government is too minor to target — a city council seat in a Los Angeles suburb is worth cultivating. The Salt Typhoon operation shows that no infrastructure is too fundamental to penetrate — the very backbone of American telecommunications was compromised for years. The Kevin Mallory and Jerry Lee cases show that no security clearance guarantees loyalty — the CIA itself was penetrated. The Volt Typhoon revelations show that China’s objectives now extend beyond theft to the capability to inflict physical harm on American civilians in a future conflict. The secret police stations in Manhattan show that Beijing’s authoritarian reach extends physically onto American soil. And the 25:1 ratio derived from historical modeling suggests that for every case that makes the news, approximately twenty-five others remain in the shadows, their damage unrecognized and uncounted.

The United States faces an adversary that operates on a fundamentally different time horizon than American institutions — political, corporate, or military — typically plan for. China’s intelligence apparatus does not report to quarterly earnings calls or face reelection cycles. It operates on generational timelines, measured in decades, not fiscal years. Larry Wu-tai Chin spied for 35 years before being caught. Dongfan Chung served Chinese handlers for nearly 30 years inside Boeing. Salt Typhoon operated inside American telecom networks for years before anyone noticed. A former NSA analyst described the operation as part of “China’s 100-year strategy.” Against an adversary with this kind of strategic patience, detection systems calibrated for speed and urgency are structurally disadvantaged.

The implications extend well beyond national security in the traditional sense. When a competitor nation systematically appropriates the intellectual property of American companies — at a scale that may reach trillions of dollars annually — it does not merely steal secrets. It steals the economic return on innovation that provides the fundamental incentive for research and development investment. Companies that spend billions developing breakthrough technologies find themselves competing against Chinese firms that obtained equivalent capabilities for free. Over time, this dynamic erodes the innovation ecosystem that produces both American prosperity and American power. It is, as Chafetz argues, not merely a counterintelligence problem — it is a business problem of the first order, and one that the private sector has been catastrophically slow to recognize.

The cases we know about are disturbing enough to fill this article many times over. A mayor running propaganda websites. Navy sailors selling warship specifications for pocket money. CIA officers betraying colleagues to imprisonment and death. A Harvard professor secretly cashing Chinese checks. Secret police stations operating above noodle shops in Chinatown. Hackers living inside America’s phone networks for half a decade, reading the wiretaps of the country’s own intelligence agencies. But the modeling tells us that what we know represents perhaps four percent of what is actually happening. The invisible war is not approaching. It has been underway for decades, waged on a scale that most Americans — and, more critically, most American institutions — have yet to fully comprehend. The question is no longer whether this constitutes an emergency. It is what the country intends to do about it.

An important note on fairness and precision: It is essential to emphasize, as the FBI itself consistently does, that the adversary described in this article is the programs and policies of the Chinese government — not the Chinese people, nor Americans of Chinese descent or heritage. Many of the cases described above involve American citizens of diverse ethnic backgrounds, and some prominent prosecutions of Chinese Americans have collapsed due to insufficient evidence, including the case of hydrologist Sherry Chen, whose charges were dropped entirely, raising legitimate concerns about racial profiling in espionage investigations. The Department of Justice’s “China Initiative,” launched in 2018 to prosecute China-related espionage, was itself disbanded in 2022 amid widespread criticism that it disproportionately targeted researchers of Asian descent without sufficient evidence. Vigilance against state-directed espionage must never become a license for ethnic prejudice. The threat comes from a government apparatus, not from an ethnicity. Getting this distinction wrong doesn’t just harm innocent people — it actively undermines the counterintelligence mission it purports to serve, by alienating the very communities whose trust and cooperation are most essential to identifying genuine threats.

Jeffrey Newman, JD, MBA, a former prosecutor, is a whistleblower lawyer whose firm represents physicians and other healthcare providers who become whistleblowers in healthcare fraud cases. The firm also takes cases involving tariff fraud and export control fraud. Whistleblower laws in the U.S. allow individuals with information about export control violations or tariff fraud to report it under the False Claims Act, which, if successful, awards the whistleblower a percentage of the amount collected. The Firm’s website is www.JeffNewmanLaw.com. Attorney Newman can be reached at Jeff@Jeffnewmanlaw.com or at 978-880-4758. For other blogs, see: http://JeffNewmanLaw.com