4. The Duck Analogy

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A quick note, this is the fourth episode of our series. If you missed the first three, we recommend going back and listening in order.

Thanks. Who are we here to talk about Shoe and June?

Jordan and I are in Cincinnati across the table from FBI Special Agent Bradley Hall. You've been hearing Bradley talk about Shoe over the last couple episodes, but now you're going to hear from him in a different way. You're going to hear about his own involvement in this case, which begins when ge engineered David John comes back from his trip to China, the trip where he met Shoe yen June.

When we sat down with Bradley, we already knew how David had gotten on shoes radar LinkedIn, but that didn't explain how David had gotten on the FBI's radar, or, for that matter, how Shoe did, and that was something we really wanted to know. So how does this case begin for you?

So when you guys flew here, I imagine you had digital tickets right right If you buy a ticket last minute, or you buy in cash, or there's a number of different traits. The airlines are required to report that to TSA. And if you ever get a ticket it has four s's on it, it means you've hit two or three of those criteria, which usually means someone's going to give you a secondary search. Well, when the ge engineering returned to the United States from his trip to China, he

At which point they found cash on David Jones, a lot of cash sixteen thousand dollars.

That was not well explained. And that's a starting point for this case.

And so like, did Jang buy his ticket with cash or a last minute or was there something else that led to him being secondary? Is there anything we can say about that?

I actually don't know the answer that question.

Okay, can we talk any more about the secondary It seems like even if you had maybe known something before, is that kind of the first moment we can talk about in his case?

I don't know if I get any more detail than that.

Okay, So he was secondary, he did have his cash, right, it sounds like this was the moment that kind of led to everything else that we then have. Is that roughly correct?

Now?

Let's just leave it at that for now, I think, okay. So Bradley was not going to tell us where this case started, and as much as we tried, we could never get anyone to tell us where this case started. We do know there were a bunch of hacks the FBI trace to the six Bureau years before, which allowed them to see some of Shu's colleagues correspondence with each other.

And when the lead about Shoe and David came in, it landed on Bradley Hall's desk because David John worked at thee Aviation, which was headquartered in Cincinnati, and Bradley was the FBI's only counterintelligence agent there.

We are spy hunters. We spy on the spies, We track the people whose job it is to not be recognized, to not be identified, to blend in. A drug dealer sells drugs, right, that's ipso facto illegal. It's very black and white. Counter Intelligence exists in the gray. These are people who are trained to blend in, who are trained to do things that look normal. So to find that piece of illegality is very, very difficult.

Bradley is an intense guy. I mean we talked to him for almost six hours. We ate lunch, he didn't. We drank coffee, he didn't. We sipped from our bottles of water. He basically didn't.

Let's take some morner, no finder.

He's worked counterintelligence for his entire FBI career, and he chose it because someone told him it was the most challenging thing the Bureau does.

If you have a fifteen a saxa in front of you saying the hardest thing that we do is kindter intelligence. That peaked my interest.

But spy hunting isn't always as badass as it sounds. For instance, the first thing Bradley had to do after getting this lead was go to David Jones' employer and ask for their help.

We went to Ge and said, you know, we have a concern. We by no means have a full picture, but we would like you to work with us.

The bureau came in and said, you guys have a problem.

This is Art Cummings, who at the time was chief security officer for all of GE's businesses.

This is your problem.

But this is the opportunity, the opportunity to work together.

To potentially expose this intelligence officer whose job is to steal IP from American companies. That's just a beautiful operation.

Beautiful for the FBI, but not necessarily for GE.

A lot of companies. I would have said, thank you very much, what's the person's name, fired them, and walked away from it.

Because the proposal raised serious risks. Helping an investigation that might lead to a trial would only draw attention to the fact that GE had had a security breach, which is a bad look when one of the major buyers of your jet engines is the US military.

From like, guyser, are you prepared to expose this to DoD that you have billions of dollars of business with That shows that you were sloppy with their IP or with your IP buddy. That is a bad message all the way across the board.

Plus, GE does a lot of business in China. Working with the FBI on a case that accused China of stealing trade secrets could jeopardize that business, but not working with the FBI with its own risks. The fact that the MSS was targeting David John meant they were after some of GE's most sensitive information.

He was one of about ten to twelve engineers who are specifically on carbon fan blades and carbon fan blaid encasements on the GE engine system series.

That's a very small group of people working on a very important technology.

Yes, G is the only company in the world has ever commercialized this technique. Many have tried and failed, but GE is the only one. They're the crown jewel of jet engines.

I'd say the loss of their most advanced commercial jet engine is a billion dollars.

If they lost it, and.

There's future revenue, and there's just that generation. The next generation jet engine builds on that one, and then the next one on that one, and then the next one on that one. That's real?

Is that GE anymore? We tried repeatedly to talk to the company for the story, but they declined to comment each time.

Ultimately, GE did decide to cooperate with the FBI.

There were enough people, particularly in the C suite, who were who were open to the idea of okay, let's work with the FBI and see what we can do to protect ourselves.

So Ge was in, but Bradley still had to convince one more person to get on board.

David juhn oh I wanted to turn him to use him to operate against the namassas.

Bradley wanted to make David his double.

The double is someone who represents himself for herself as cooperating with the Foreign Intelligence Service, but actually under the control of our service, and it is a very delicate kind of operation because you have to persuade professional counterintelligence people on the other side that this is legitimate.

The double agent David would help the FBI try to learn the details of who this MSS officer actually was and maybe even help catch him, and it was a good moment to try. In twenty seventeen, Donald Trump had just taken office for the first time and his administration was gung ho about going after China, so there was support at the highest levels of government for nabbing an MSS officer, but actually pulling it off would be a real hail Mary because it had literally never happened before.

There was a lot of do you really think this is going to work? And your response was positive, is going to work?

From Bloomberg News and iHeart podcasts, this is the Sixth Bureau.

I'm Jordan Robertson and I'm Drake Bennett.

On November first, twenty seventeen, David John started his day like any other day. Cup He drove to work and then a few hours later he was called into a meeting by GE Corporate Security.

The engineer doesn't know exactly how much hot water he's in.

This is Mike Regal, an agent who has pulled into work with Bradley on the case.

He had like an interaction with you know, GE security people that was more like a general type discussion, kind of an opener.

GE Security asked David about some unusual activity they'd noticed, specifically the five sensitive files he'd transferred onto his personal computer before going to China.

They literally walk out, they say someone else wants to speak to.

You, and then we come in. I'm sure his stress level went one hundredfold because obviously the guy's kind of in shock. It comes for like kind of like a meeting with security guys and two FBI people come walking in.

It was a room meant for sixty seventy people and were sat at one tiny little corner of a table. We indicate that we are there for the same reason the G was there. These files were moved. We've learned from G that they went to China. That's a concern for us. Let's talk about it. And that's how the conversation starts.

You know, you could have somebody that just unburdens himself and says, I know what you guys are here about.

He didn't do that.

No.

They start by asking David about his trip to China, why he went, what he did, who he saw.

You have to kind of eat this steak and small bites.

David gives them a partial story.

He went to a wedding, he went to a class reunion, he visited family back in the provinces, and then he flew home.

He leaves out one thing his talk in Nanjing at the university. So Bradley and Mike remind him.

We started talking about the fact that he had done a presentation without talking to G.

His brain is thinking, let me think of a way to get out of this. Can I think of a way to get out this? Okay, let me give let me give a different version of that. I gave it talk, but it's not on important stuff.

But Bradley and Mike already know exactly what GE files David took with him to China.

Here's the file that you downloaded on March the twenty seventh, and here's the image that has GE proprietary on it that you cropped out when you put in your PowerPoint. Oops.

They know about that. They've got that power point.

There was a lot of I forgot to mentions.

Then they ask him about all the cash he came back with. He lies about the amount and says it was repayment for a loan.

I call it progressive truth telling. I let them tell the lie, and then I go back and I encounter it point by point. I had the bank records that showed where he'd put the sixteen thousand dollars the cash. I'm gonna show you ten ways past Sunday that I know what day you put the money in, which account of went is like, don't, don't, don't play right, just I know.

So he's changing over time to the point where he emotionally just can't do it anymore.

Like you could watch the realization wash over him that oh, this is more than just I downlois some files I shouldn't have. This is now something else.

The questions keep coming and there doesn't seem to be any escape. When David gets hungry, Bradley and Mike eat with him. When he has to go to the bathroom, they go with him. The walls were closing in.

It's a voluntary interview, and he needs to know during a voluntary interview that it's very important that he can leave. It wasn't there, It wasn't his car being towed, and like.

He couldn't drive away.

Well, so there's being free to leave and having some logistical issues are two different things, right.

The logistical issues Mike is referring to look something like this. While the FBI is talking to David, his phone is confiscated, his car sees from the ge parking lot, and his house is searched. Bradley hands him a phone so he can call his wife. They tell him to put her on speaker and to speak in English. David tells her not to go home.

Because the FBI had just kicked in their back door.

It's a short call. He hangs up, and the questioning continues.

So this goes on for a long time, to the point that he he kind of I remember him breaking down.

There's like a slumping of the shoulders. There's you know, an audible exhale where they go from that person who thinks they're walking out of the room that day to somebody realized that their life is fundamentally changed. We go from you know, the proper engineer who sits up with his hands on the table. We start getting to lean back for the lies, and then by the end, you know, he's slumped down in the chair right before he actually you know, starts to starts to tear up, like he started crying.

And finally telling the whole story.

He gives us as much as he could remember.

David acknowledges that he knew something was fishy about the cash he was handed.

After his talk, he eventually called it dark money. That he had known he had received dark money from someone in China, so deep down, maybe not as he was initially given the presentation, but after the fact that realization was there that he knew that it was dark money, he maybe not have known it was the MSS specifically, but at this point you'd be hard pressed to be ignorant to that type of thing happening.

And yet Bradley and Mike couldn't help but empathize a little why being invited to share his expertise at this prestigious university in the country where he grew up was so appealing to David.

He came from a very rural village. He literally was the son of a big farmer, like he grew up on dirt floors. He was the first person not only in his family but from his village to go to college. He was one of about ten to twelve engineers who worked specifically on carbon fan blades and carbon fan blaid encasements. This was a chance for him to brack about it. I know the secret sauce I'm one of very few people can do it. So there was an ego part to.

It, right, and I understand that. I understand that motivation that this guy basically is like, I'm proud of my work. I like what I do, I'm excited about this. The MSS preyed on people that want to talk about what they do because they're proud of it. They're excited about it. They find it interesting. It's like, hey, we really like to hear about this. This sounds like great stuff. Would you like to come give a talk about this? Is that ego? Yes, I guess it kind of is, but it's human. Yeah.

David was suspended without pay and eventually let go, But unemployment wasn't the worst thing he was facing. He could see possible prison time for violating expert control laws and for lying to federal agents. Or he could cooperate.

You say, okay, there is a path forward, and you start to talk very gently about what that path can look like and that, hopefully at the end, will improve their position vice where it is right now, which is pretty bad. We couched it like this. You did wrong. You know you did wrong. You lied to me, you kept lying to me. You finally told me the truth, but you just set off to do this. They came to you, So how about we go get them.

They told them to sleep on it. It had been a long day, a really long day.

I was exhausted, you know. The interview was ours. I can't remember the exact number for some reason. Seven sticks in my brain, but it's hours long.

Seven hours and forty two minutes.

When it was done, Bradley and Mike drove David home because he had no car or phone.

What was that ride like?

Quiet?

You're hearing only from Bradley and Mike here, because, as we said in the last episode, we tried really hard to talk to David John, but he wouldn't talk to us. We didn't get to hear from him directly what that day and night was like for him and how he went about weighing his options.

Agreeing to be a double would be a huge risk for David. He'd be going up against the powerful intelligence apparatus of China, the country where he was born and raised and still had family. He had good reason to say no, but it was that or those potential charges and prison time, so he agreed to cooperate. The next day, he got a lawyer and signed a non prosecution agreement saying that no charges would be brought against him in return for working with the FBI. It was time to

You can't like get on there and say I've got a big laptop and it's ready to go, and guess what I want five million and I want it in an offshore account and here's the number. Right. He's immediately going to say, what the right, This is not for real, this is something, This is one of those FBI doors, right.

Right, So they crafted a different kind of message to the person from NUAA who had first invited David to come give a talk, Chen fun.

Teacher, Chen, I plan to go visit my elderly parents around the New Year after wrapping up a big project, because they aren't in the best health. After all, I likely won't have much time to left with him. I feel like I need to fulfill my familial applications. You'd be great together with old friends by then as well.

Offering to visit the university during Chinese New Year was an empty offer.

Chinese New Year is the single largest mass migration of people in the world. On an annual basis, everyone goes home to their own province or village or farm, et cetera, wherever they came from, which also means I can guarantee no one's going to be there for that period of time that we say that we're going because guess who's not going to be in school for Chinese New Year, Chen Fung or anyone else at any way, and it worked your.

Trip back this time coincides with school holiday, most teachers and the students will pretty much be back to their hometowers.

Bradley was banking on the fact that with the campus empty for vacation, chen Fung would pass off the hosting duties to someone else, someone who didn't actually have a university job, and Bradley was hoping it would be the important seeming official David had met on his trip, the man who had introduced himself as Cheu Huai. Bradley suspected he was actually an MSS officer.

I discussed the list of Section chief Chu will organizer ex change this time wand bingo.

I'll use this analogy. If it quacks and has webbed feet and you think it's a duck. We had feet and quacking at that point.

Even though Bradley suspected Chiu Huey was his guy, he still didn't have his real name and title. But Bradley was right about him being MSS. Because of course, Chu Huai was actually shoe Yen June.

I knew what he was without knowing what he was, if that makes sense.

But he was about to because shoe Yen June had made a key mistake before David came to China. Shue had sent him an email pretending to be Chen Fun and he had sent that email from a Gmail address, which meant the FBI could send search warrants to Google's

I first thought, I wasn't sure what it was cosey as a Mandarin, but I saw a face in a military uniform, which makes it government. So we had a linguist he translated it. He called me back kind of a note of a flutter. Do you know what this is? I said, well, I don't know what it is. I'm going to guess. He says, it's better than what you're

It was an mss cadre form or basically shoe Yen June's resume.

So I started sending communications back dev head Course saying known intelligence officer, and I got a little bit of a snarky call from a fairly high level analytical person at head Course saying, well, why are you calling this individual known into Like that's the highest level we can get.

Let's just take a moment here to reflect on the sloppiness of a Chinese spy relying on American tech companies Apple Google to conduct his top secret work. I mean, it's pretty wild.

We can throw shade at that as well, right, Okay, he was using the most popular cell phone in the world at the time. Shocking. Did he read the forty five thousand pages that you have to sign on we get an alp A product? He didn't because he would have. I mean, if you'd have read, you know, paragraph forty five, subsection four hundred and twenty two, maybe he would have realized that.

Right, and Shoe left all sorts of digital breadcrumbs. When you use your iPhone to take a photo, it captures GPS data, so the FBI was able to determine Shoe's exact location at the moment he snapped the photo of his cadre form that ended up in his iCloud account. He was in Nanjing, in the regional headquarters of the MSS, so not the best tradecraft.

I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question of his life. And that's a unicorn.

The warrant results kept coming back. There were emails and other sensitive documents, and there was the diary that portals to Shoe's life and habits and feelings.

Cards lost the seven hundred and ten to twenty New Peach Shoe twenty second through to Paris. I lost so much in the Stamach John undermind me having a leader like this, what's the point?

And that was something Bradley could use. He began to build a sort of psychological profile of who Shoe was and what he would respond to, and that became a guide for how David communicated with Shoe and how they tried to get him to do what they wanted.

I now knew where all his little buttons were. When you're trying very slowly to craft a message that looks and appears and feels real to them, to know that level of detail about their life and their mindset, it allows you to tweak what you put in the message on a daily basis so that we could keep him talking to our cooperator and keep the case moving forward, so that we could get to the ultimate end goal.

Because Bradley wasn't just trying to talk to Shoe for his plan to work. Bradley needed to convince you to do things things he wouldn't normally do. Like, let David choose where they would meet next, which wasn't going to beat anging.

Obviously, we're not going to allow the engineer to go back to China. Okay, that's you know, non starter, right, and why not because China is territory that we cannot control. Obviously, you know you couldn't go with him, and we're not certainly not going to allow him to go by himself.

So while David and she were messaging back and forth, she was still under the impression that David is coming back to China for Chinese New Year, like he had said. But he's not going to China for all the reasons Mike just said. So they had to break the news that if they were going to meet, it would have to be somewhere else.

But Bradley knew that was potentially a deal breaker. She would be disappointed and might just walk away, so they had to be strategic about it. Because of the diary, Bradley knew all about Shoe's work, resentments and the way he felt about his own superiors.

Munch twenty sevens John rejected, you received today such an ungrateful person, has no shame. I don't will have my advantage so.

They used that Hello Session chief, who unfortunately news to tell you, I can't go by for the new year. The Broughs today requested material for my work trip.

To friends the big bad Boss.

There are lots to be done, and he thinks he's inappropriate for a two weeks location right now. I'm very sorry about this.

I can't go to China now because my boss says I have to go work on this specific.

Project in France. Bradley was hoping that blaming this works trip on the boss was something she would understand and sympathize with, but he knew that wasn't enough on its own. He had taken something away David's trip to China, so now he had to give something in return, something to keep she in the game.

I'm very sorry that I can come back to China for the new year and meet with you guys. I'll email you a directory of documents from a company computer per your previous instruction, please check.

A directory is basically a list of all the files on your computer.

And if you don't know any engineers, you've never worked with an engineer, they name them very specifically, and a lot of details contained within the titles of those files. It's because there's so many files and each is so specific to a piece of technology they're working on, et cetera, that you can glean a lot of information from.

Your point of view. How big of a deal was a directory?

What's huge?

Ge gave Bradley a directory but altered it to remove anything proprietary. David sent it to she and it worked.

I'm sure he has saying his pauses, it's working, it's working. He sent me this file. He created this directory for me. Almost no one ever does that.

Right.

It's good. His gold is gold. We've got to work it hard.

He starts peppering David with questions about his upcoming work trip.

How long were you being as in March? Do you have plans to visit any other countries? I'm planning this year's foreign trouble and will love to see you overseas if it's convenient. The US isn't in my plan, so I like to see you in other countries.

We would love for Ju to basically say I'll come to Cincinnati, Ohio. Sounds like a great town, right. He is not going to do that, So we have to find something that's intermediate, that's risky. But not as big a risk, right.

David and Shoes start discussing European cities in France and elsewhere, But as Shoe gets closer to leaving China for the meeting, he seems to need more reassurance about his source. We chats aren't enough anymore. He wants to hear David's voice. He calls him, but David's not with Bradley and Mike. He's home with his family, so David doesn't answer.

Hello, Session A Chief two.

Sorry I meets your call.

I was trying to put my child to sleep, just got free.

Shoe responds, Do you have.

A minute let's talk on the phone.

How about another day? My family is sleeping.

Shoe presses him, well, how about tomorrow. There's something I like to check in with you about if we meet in friends.

The next morning, David messages Shoe that he can talk at eleven am. He meets up with Bradley and Mike. They decide to do the call from Bradley's car in the FBI parking lot, but David pretends he's in his car in the GE parking lot on his lunch break.

This is Special Agent Regal Special Agent Bradley Hall. The date is February twenty eight.

This call is a tricky thing for the FBI agents to pull off.

About to start consensual telephone call, they.

Need to choreograph it in real time without tipping Shoe off that they're there. So Bradley gives David specific instructions.

So I've just said here, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to give you a pad of paper. I need you to write down as fast as you can what he's saying over here. I'm gonna point to what you say and we're gonna go as quick as we can. If it's something important, you need to give me a signal so that I know, because we need to keep this in natural flow. I said, it needs me natural.

As you listen, you wouldn't know all of this is going on in the background. David sounds so normal. At no point does he let on that he's doing all this writing and signaling and adapting on the fly. It's really impressive.

Oh, I do want to visit Belgium, Netherlands, in Germany. I would like to go check it out.

David suggests a few countries in Europe where he and Sho could meet places he says he's always wanted to visit.

If it works well for you, I can tell my colleage I'm visiting those places for fun, I assume, and they won't come along. I think those places may be more convenient.

So so you're saying it's better to meet in Belgium, Netherlands or Germany, Right right, right, that looks too all right, Let's try our best to meet in Europe.

Good good.

If I need to communicate any details to you, I will send them to you through witchat.

Okay, good night, Okay, goodbye, good night, goodbye, good night. Faction ship too.

Sue has agreed to leave his home turf and meet David in Europe, somewhere in Europe. He believes that David is just a willing source to ge, ready to hand over whatever he needs, and so she is willing to do whatever he needs to to get the goods in this moment. That means he's willing to travel. This is a big win for the FBI.

That's a huge step. That's like, that's definitely kind of like, yeah, this is a this is amazing and.

I could just feel shees excitement.

Here's James Olsen former chief of counterintelligence at the CIA.

This is going to be the recruitment that is going to set him aside from all of his peers.

This is big.

This is a very big thing.

There's this kind of dynamic where the MSS senior management is following us very closely, the FBI senior management is following us very closely. Like when this meeting is taking shape that there would have been an enormous amount of excitement in both places.

Absolutely about the potential.

Absolutely, they both are very close to a major intelligence coup. You're going head to head with the very smart people on both ends, and each side has to be smarter than the other. I could just see the jubilation with the FBI that he's coming our way.

In the next episode.

It's not just like a couple of dudes in suits. I mean, these are some legit looking like Seal Team six looking type dudes.

So I'm bringing into a fatal funnel, into a fatal funnel, into a fatal funnel.

This whole investigation seemed like it was out of a movie. Of course, you know there was going to be an escape plan.

He's serving his country, I serve my country. He's a spy.

I was a spy.

He lived under cover.

I lived under cover.

He's doing what he's.

Believing is right. I did what I believe was right.

How are we any different?