The Sixth Bureau Episode 6: Nothing Is Holy

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Hey everybody, this is the last episode of our show. If you haven't listened to the first five, you probably want to go back and start from the beginning. If you are up to speed, thank you so much for listening. We really hope you're enjoying it. We've had such a blast working on this series.

That's actually true, and if you like the show, tell your friends about it, share it. That's how the show will continue to grow. And of course rating and reviewing it helps too, So again, thanks. Here's the final act.

Let me just last Tree Engine. It might actually be this one. I'm three nine when ye had two Communia Tree Engine.

Just we have butterflies a little bit.

Yeah, this is an empty number.

Valid.

Jordan and I are in Bloomberg's New York headquarters. It's late, late enough that it's mid morning and Nanjing. We're here because we're trying to call Shoe Yan June, and we're with our producer and Amandarin speaking colleague to help us with translation.

Is invalid.

We have a bunch of phone numbers we found in the court documents for Shoe and all his aliases, as well as a bunch of his associates.

Three eight eight, two threes one six.

We've been going down the list, making these calls and getting nowhere for over an hour.

And then something funny happens with one of the shoe numbers. Instead of getting a recording that says the line has been disconnected, this number does something different. It rings a few times and then nothing, almost as if someone's picked up and is just sitting there without saying anything. It's just blank space, silence.

H it's weird.

That was weird.

Yeah, literally silence.

Yeah, it's getting weird.

Yeah.

Then the call ins whoever's on the other end hangs up, so we call again and the same thing happens. A few rings, then nothing. There's twenty six seconds of silence, and then finally our colleague stepts in and says, shoot, you.

Know what you want to s and juma uh ninshu the thing that's dumas PM go downham.

Wow.

So we just a call number that associated with Shrian Jing. Somebody picked up the phone and I asked him if he's Shuan Jin. He said who are you? I repeated, I'm looking for Shuan Jing, and uh he said again, who are you then I said, I'm a reported from Boomberg News.

He hang up on me.

What Wow, Well, I'll tell you what he didn't say is I'm not sure. Yeah, yeah, from Bloomberg New and iHeart podcasts. This is the sixth Bureau. I'm Jordan Robertson.

And I'm Drake Bennett. I did not expect that at all.

I didn't either. I don't think any of us. I don't think any of us. We don't know that that was Shoe on the phone, but it was his number and it sounded like him. We've heard Shoe's voice. You have two plus Taking a call from an unknown US number which was actually attached to a burner phone Bloomberg gave us solely for the purpose of making these calls. Seems a little like something he do. And our colleague mentioned another thing.

He has a little bit of local accent. I assume from jung Su area.

Jung Su Province is where Shoes from.

He's a little bit guarded like. He didn't confirm, neither deny or confirm who he is, just asked him, repeating the question.

Why are you?

Of course, this wasn't the first time we tried to reach him. Him two letters while he was incarcerated, and he'd responded by telling his lawyers to tell us that he didn't want to talk to us or ever hear from us again. But by the time we called this number from our offices, Shoe wasn't in an American prison anymore. He wasn't even in America. We'll get back to that first, we need to catch you up on the fall up from his arrest, which profoundly shook the MSS.

One place we can trace the ripple effects of Shoe's arrest is Chicago with G Chao Chun, the engineering grad student who still texted his parents for grocery shopping tips.

That is good c cucumber available now.

The boy spy who texted pictures of his MSS cash to his friends.

Fucker, are you even there to photograph this?

Photographed this sneakily delete after you see it, And.

Who worked as a spotter for Shoe Yen June.

Are you there?

I have a favorite to ask.

I'm here.

Please go ahead, brother Shoe, which.

Is why an undercover FBI agent approached him on the street in Chicago after she was arrested. Parker Wow, the undercover told G that was she arrested. He was his new MSS handler, and G believed him. The two of them met three times in that same Hyatt hotel room. Each time the FBI learned more about what G was doing, until they decided they'd learned enough. On September twenty fifth, twenty eighteen, G in the undercover's final meeting ended abruptly.

What's here, Copeland chief? Yes, yes, okay, So you.

Want a lawyer, a mind tuble, Well, that's what we want to talk about. Yeah, he was. He was arrested and went on trial in the fall of twenty twenty two, roughly a year after Shoe, and was convicted of acting as an agent of a foreign government and making a material false statement to the army. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.

G wasn't the only one in this roundup. There were other arrests and prosecutions of people connected to Shoe. A Chinese hacker who worked with the sixth Bureau was apprehended as he arrived in Los Angeles for a cybersecurity conference. An engineer working for Apple's self driving car effort was arrested in charged with theft of trade secrets. He was one of the engineers Shoe and g had done a

These cases were like tracers marking the outlines of networks that had previously been hidden, but innocent people would also get caught up in that hunt. A few weeks after Sho's extradition in late twenty eighteen, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced what he called the China Initiative, a Justice Department campaign to counter trade secret theft.

We are here today to say enough is enough. We're not going to take it any more. It's unacceptable. It's time for China to join the Community of lawful Nations. International trade has been good for China, but cheating must stop.

That led to a wave of aggressive, controversial prosecutions. Most of the defendants were ethnically Chinese academics working at American research institutions, and in most instances, there was no evidence that anyone was actually sharing trade secrets. As a result, many of the charges were for paperwork violations like failing to report ties to Chinese universities. Some of the cases were so weak that prosecutors would end up dropping the charges.

We have heard concerns from the civil rights community that the China Initiative has fueled the narrative of intolerance and bias.

To many.

That narrative suggests that the Justice Department treats people from China or of Chinese descent differently.

The rise in anti Marria.

But as we know, Shoe was an actual spy and when he was taken off the chessboard, it had ramifications. Perhaps the most striking one was what stopped happening. Right after Shoe's arrest, the FBI noticed that the MSS Industrial Espionage Machine essentially shut down.

The arrest of ju scared them into stopping what they were doing, essentially where they had to basically make it this large countrywide operational pause to try and figure out where or how you got caught.

Alan Kohler, the FBI's former head of counterintelligence.

They didn't want to put any other sources at risk, They didn't want to put any more intelligence officers at risk, so they just stopped to try and figure out what was happening. And that was incredibly beneficial to us because China wasn't luring Americans out of the US to meet them overseas anymore. At the time, that was our biggest unknown risk. We just didn't know how much and how often this was happening, but we knew it stopped in the aftermath of Hue.

From the US government's perspective, what was China doing in those moments of pause, What actually happens?

They're probably doing exactly the same thing that we would do whenever we experience a copper rise, right, And I can tell you I've been in the room. When that's happened a lot where let's say you have ten operations that you launch throughout the US and overseas, and one of them dramatically goes south, we would stop what we're doing for fear of putting those other operations at risk. Un Two, we figured out what the heck happened in this one operation that blew up in our faces, and

Alan says. The MSS hit pause for roughly three years as it struggled to pinpoint what exactly had gone wrong. That's a really long time to shut down an intelligence effort. And it stayed that way until Shoes trial.

The United States government had to show everything that they did in the case, and China is able to understand, Okay, here's our weak spots. Here is the person that lured him to Belgium. We see how that happened. Okay, you you shouldn't have recorded yourself and you shouldn't have put all this personal information into the.

Ice that you took that the FBI got access to.

No to self, do not record secrets by stuff on iPhone that you get arrested.

Withl This is where we know this case went sideways. We're just not going to make those mistakes again.

So they learned from the trial too. China learns from the trial as well.

Oh sure, and they may drag the process out to find out exactly what the US government has, how they got it, what the sourcing is, et cetera. And in this U case, it was just that on steroids.

So the pause ended and the machine started back up.

You know, green light go back at them again. They learned, they understood exactly what was happening, and they did what we do, right. You get smart, you understand what the adversaries are doing. You adapt, and you get better.

So, Jordan, you and I published a magazine feature about Shoes case back in twenty twenty two for Bloomberg Business Week.

Yeah, we did.

But even after the story came out, we couldn't stop thinking.

About it or talking about it or.

Reporting on it, and we kept finding more and more great stuff like ga June's not in the print story at all.

Right, I mean we learned about him after the fact.

Yeah, and Shoe's phone calls we had transcripts of the recordings when we were at the print story, but it wasn't until after that that we got the actual audio.

Which of course sparked the idea for this podcast.

Right. And while we were working on the pitch for the pod, like late twenty twenty four, you got a tip.

Yeah, it was quite a tip. So I get a call one day kind of late November from a source who suggested that I look at the Bureau of Prisons website and they said you should look up shoe Yen June there. And like so many of these calls, it was like unnecessarily crypto. I'm like, what am I gonna what am I gonna see? This man got sentenced to twenty years, Like I don't need to see it again. I know what happened. And so I go and look and like he's gone. Shoe Ya June was not there.

It wouldn't be the first time he tried that.

Yeah, Like I thought, maybe this time he'd actually succeeded. So I called the source back and the person was like, no, he didn't escape. He's been swapped.

Shu Yen June had been swapped, pardoned by President Biden, released from prison, and sent back to China. So Hadji Chau Chun and a third Chinese man convicted on unrelated charges. In exchange, three American citizens in Chinese prisons had been released and sent home to the US.

It was a prisoner swap, and it's how real life spy stories often end.

It was bound to happen. It's part of the deal making.

Federal Prosecutor Tim Mangan.

Even if we hadn't gotten a chance to indict him and we just caught a spy, this is what happened with spies.

I don't think anyone on our team was shocked.

Federal prosecut Emily Gruttfield.

You're always surprised to hear it at that moment, but it wasn't a shock that overall to think that this was something that might occur. Because he was such a valuable asset to the Chinese government.

I always thought it was inevitable that he was going to be traded, and its just a matter of when Alan kohlergan. What the case team did is they gave the United States a chip that we could play in the world stage. We put you in jail, we arrested his network, We learned a whole lot about how China targets Americans. We were able to tell the world how it happens. And then we actually had this intelligence officer in prison that we gave our president the opportunity to

But not everyone feels that way, even other spies.

I was disappointed. No, I was more than disappointed. I was angry.

James Olsen, former CIA clandestine officer Encounterintelligence chief.

By releasing Hu and his co op d G, I felt that much of their work was for naught by letting him go free. This trial, all that hard work, this brilliant operation that Bradley Hope pulled off, had no lasting impact.

And some people aren't sure exactly what to think.

Yeah, I was unhappy with that.

Art Cummings, former head of security at GEED.

He was very unhappy with that.

Why is that?

I just think it sets the wrong message again, you know, But again I'm contradicting myself a little bit because he was actually a representative of their government. So I don't like the fact that it was kind of a paper tiger moment. Yeah, he made all that effort and now bye bye, he's back. Kind of like wow, really, But at the same time, as a loyal Chinese citizen, I

Art saying if the situation was reversed, we would do everything we could to get that CIA officer back. And that's basically what China says they did. In a press conference at the time right after the swap, a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs made their message clear. Through the unremitting efforts of the Chinese government, three Chinese citizens wrongfully detained by the US have returned safely to China. It once again shows that never ever will China give

So once you're back in the motherland, what does that actually look like. Well, when it comes to g we know a little. He had a life in the US, he made personal connections, and he hasn't totally abandoned them.

They just told me about how he was quote unquote rescued from the China US prisoner swap.

Naomi Lyman met Ji chow Chun in Chicago when he joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. This isn't something he seems to have discussed much with either his real or fake MSS handlers, but it became a very important part of his American life, and so is Naomi.

I only ever saw him being gentle and kind. He would sit next to people on the train who just looked lonely, and he would just talk to them, just in a loving way, just how's your day going, where are you headed to?

They were really close friends. G was at Naomi's wedding and was the only person she invited into the Mormon temple for the ceremony.

My best friends weren't there. I had nobody in there with me that I chose, except for Chow Choon.

A month after the wedding, Naomi got a message from a reporter asking for comment on Gee's arrest. That's how she found out about it.

I got this message asking to be interviewed because they could see that I knew him really well based off of Facebook, and I was just shocked and really confused. I went on to Google and I just typed in his name and then arrest and started reading article after article after article that had been published about him, and watching all the videos, and I honestly was so devastated.

She put those feelings into a long letter and sent it to g while he was in jail awaiting trial.

And they did not have and read it because I didn't write it on white paper, and so they sent it back to me. And this was it was like a ten page letter that I poured my heart out to him in and I was so too straw I didn't even rewrite it and resend it to him.

But she kept wondering how he was doing.

Every once in a while, I don't know, maybe every other two or three months, I would go and google his name.

And then six years later, still doing her googling, something new finally pops up.

I saw that he had been released in a prisoner exchange program. And it was really just a week later that he messaged me saying hi, and that he knew that I sent him a letter, but he never got to see it because it wasn't on that white paper, and thank you for writing me a letter, even though I never got to read it.

He also told her a little bit about what he was up to.

Let's see, I'll look at his messages right now. I'm doing great. I'm in China now, just enjoying my time with my family. Dot dot dot dot dot. Will go to work in July, which we know where he's going to be working at because we know who rescued him. So I did ask. I did ask. I was like, where are you going to be working at? Just to see if I would get an answer, But there was no response.

As for Sho we know even less. He didn't live in the US, he didn't make friends here, and there's really no way of knowing what happened to him when he went back to China, but we can speculate.

I don't know. On the one hand, he was loyal, you know, he could have come knocking on our door and saying, hey, I'll tell you everything. I know. He didn't.

Former Federal Prosecutor Matt McKenzie.

But on the other hand, he was a catastrophic failure, an epic epic failure for them. The amount of information that we were able to gather about how China actually operates is mind boggling. And it's all because he was sloppy and greedy and we were able to catch him. And now the whole world can see how they operate because we put it all out in a trial. So I think you have to put him in a back room, give him a decent paying job, but don't trust him

No iPhones, Right, Yeah.

It's easy to laugh at she's carelessness and his mistakes. But we all do stupid stuff, don't we. We all cut corners. Most of the time we get away with it, and most of the time she did too.

Spies or people and people are lazy.

It's absolutely a truth throughout all Espnach cases. And I've got this little thing that I keep on me.

At this point and I interview with Alan, he pulls out a piece of paper.

I don't know if you're a George Smiley fan.

It's a quote from Smiley's People, a John Lecarrey novel that's part of the same trilogy as Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy. Alan keeps this quote with him, the way someone else might keep a scrap of scripture or a pocket constitution.

For the longest time.

I would have a copy of the book which is behind me on my shelf, dog eared. And I was just in a Marriott at one point, and I took a piece of Marriott stationary and I wrote this quote down. This is the kind of a kind of intelligence geek that I am.

He keeps it close as a kind of reminder, a warning.

So this is a quote from Smiley's people.

It's referring about a truth throughout all sponache cases.

Is it okay if I just share this part with you? Yeah? Absolutely.

He knew that sometimes old spies, even the best of them, were little like old lovers.

So the time twenty new peach as.

Age crypt up on them, they began to cheat out of fear that their power were deserting them.

Tech goal, maybe you can't head back first, Thank you so much.

They pretended they had it all in the memory, but in secret they were hanging on to their virility. In secret they wrote it down, often in some homemade code, which, if they had only known it, could be unbuttoned in hours or minutes by anyone who knew the game.

June twenty second through to Paris.

Names and addresses of contacts subagents.

June eleventh, met g Chiltring.

Nothing was holy. Routines, times and places of meetings.

Let's try our best to meeting in Europe.

Work names, phone numbers.

John rejected meal receipt. Today, I will have my revenge.

Even safe combinations written out as social security numbers and birthdays.

Send me the name of the coffee shop we're here.

In his time, Smiley had seen entire networks put at risk that way because one agent no longer dared to trust his head.

And put a USB drive in the eye glass box in the middle of the bookcase.

Happens, someone will come to you and tell you the password.

And to me, that is exactly what espionage is. If people execute flawless tradecraft, they will never be caught, but because they're people, they will always be caught.

Your honor, I'm just an ordinary Chinese citizen who knows nothing about politics, nor do I know anything about secrets. I stand by my innocence. Thank you.

China is still behind the US when it comes to aviation technology. Ge'z jet engine is still the most advanced out there. China's engines are five or ten or fifteen years behind, but they're probably not going to stay there. I mean there used to be similar gaps in other sectors, like electric vehicles, but not anymore.

Yeah, so twenty years ago things were very different for China.

This is Juliana Lu, a global business column for Bloomberg Opinion. She's been covering China for over two decades.

Twenty years ago, nobody expected Chinese evs to be the world beatles that they are today. I think it was even that long ago when Elon Musk was laughing and.

As you're familiar with BYD the ramping up production of their electric vehicles.

Warren Buffet owned ten percent stake in that.

Why do you laugh.

Trying to compete?

Why do you last?

Have you seen their car?

I have been like literally laughing at BYD during a Bloomberg TV interview.

Tell me why you're laughing.

You don't see them at all as a competitives.

Why is that?

I mean they offer a lower price point. I don't think they have a great product.

Elon Musk may have considered the Chinese electric car maker BYD something to laugh about. Back in twenty eleven when he gave that interview. But BYD is now one of the fastest growing car companies in history and ranks among the biggest automakers in the world. They're not a joke. They're a threat, which is why the US government has made it basically impossible to sell them in the US.

Yeah, I mean I haven't, and I have.

But that's because I live in London, where there are plenty of byds driving around. China is getting so good at so many things quickly, evs, AI drones that they're starting to have their own fears that their tech will get poached.

In the case of BYD, it had kind of long expressed a desire to open up a factory in Mexico, and about a year ago the reports that that permission was being delayed by the Chinese side because Beijing was concerned that this technology would be kind of diffused out of Mexico and into the US into the so called wrong hands.

Recently, the Chinese government has started taking steps to guard intellectual property in other realms like AI The government now discourages top Chinese AI researchers from traveling abroad, warning that they might potentially be targeted in some way. It's also recently launched an investigation into a deal between Meta and the Chinese founded AI firm Mannas for potentially putting Chinese tech secrets at risk, maybe for.

The first time in kind of modern history. The shoes on the other foot, it's not a very comfortable position to be in, but at least US officials are being pretty honest with you about how they see the current situation.

Good morning Today, the Select Committee on China meets to examine the rise of China's auto industry and what it means for America's economy and national security.

The release of Deepseek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake up call for our industries that we need to be laser focused on competing.

In just five years, China has gone from a minor exporter to the world's largest auto exporter at below market prices that US and allied automakers cannot match.

They've already exceeded our military capabilities. They have more planes, more ships, more summaries, more bistles, more bombs, more soldiers.

They have the ability to build.

Ships two hundred and thirty times faster than we do. They have an air force that out numbers ores. Previously was a technological gap that we're able to depend on. That technology gap has evaporated, and.

I would imagine the rationale is not that different from the Chinese side, right, the rationale that kind of supported the kinds of acts that you're reporting about. It's a mirror, right, places a mirror to what China has allegedly been doing and what the West may be willing to do.

But what is the West willing to do? Everyone we interviewed for this series has insisted over and over again that we don't do what China does. The US government does not steal trade secrets. Companies might spy on other companies, but our intelligence services do not spy on foreign firms to steal their tech.

Governments spy on other governments. Our governments should not be stealing using the state apparatus to steal trade secrets for commercial purposes. And it's just it's outside the boundaries. Can I just ask why? It's kind of like Omar in the wire, you know, you got to have a code.

Or trifling basically kill it every day working man and all I mean, don't get a twisted.

I do some dirt too, but I ain't never put on nobody who wasn't in the game.

A man must have a code, no no.

Doubt, and the code is we don't steal trade secrets for commercial purposes. We're here to spy on each other for the needs of our state. Everyone has our state purposes that we're going to be conducting espionage. But there are certain lines we don't cross them. You don't see the NSA out there stealing secrets to help coke or PEPSI. It's just not how we do things. And the Chinese just blur all those lines.

We need to see. I do not do industrial espionage. We do not steal foreign technologies. That's not our job. We don't do that. So that is a major distinction. In fact, many, many foreign intelligence services trend in full alike, do have that responsibility of acquiring technology that they cannot get in any other way. But no, we don't do.

That, at least not since we became the world's dominant superpower. But if that changed, would we what lines would we blur? Well, we're already blurring plenty of them. The government is taking ownership stakes in different companies, inserting itself into the private sector in ways it hasn't before.

The leader of.

Venezuela was taken from his capital city and is not sitting in a Brooklyn prison. FBI and DOJ are being used to investigate the president's perceived political enemies. So, honestly, what's so precious about trade secrets? Why wouldn't the US start sending out spies to try to steal them, especially if it had a new motive to catch up.

And let's not forget the US has done it before. Earlier in the series, we mentioned how the United States, back when it was a very young nation, paid people to smuggle loom designs out of Great Britain, the global industrial power of that age. The question is would we do something like that again today? We wanted to ask our espionage expert, James Olsen, who spent three decades in the CIA, the one who took the stand against you, who was crushed by the news of the swap, who you just heard say.

Weed, CI do not do industrial espionage.

We wanted to know what James thought about this, about whether the US is official approach it's code if you will could change. The last thing I want asking is just whether this insistence on our spying being sort of defensive rather than offensive is a luxury of the fact that we're the sort of preeminence of a power in

I think conceivable that if the United States lost its premi andive position in the world, that we would be more offensive in our intelligence efforts to strengthen ourselves at the expense of our adversaries, rather than the primarily defensive mode that I think we're in now. That's conceivable to me. I hope that day never comes.

A huge thanks to everyone who made this possible, our production team, editors, engineers, composers, translators, voice actors, voice coaches, fact checkers, the many people we interviewed on and off the record, and everyone at Bloomberg and beyond who contributed to and supported this project with their advice, suggestions, and time and again.

Please share rate, and review our show if you liked it. If you're still listening, then you should also check out our homepage, where we have two print pieces and a video documentary that we made about the boy spy gchat Chune that's at Bloomberg dot com Forward Slash the sixth Bureau.

Thanks so much for listening, Bye

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