US-China 'Spy Swap': A Historic Shift?
Until last month's deal, Beijing has never admitted to having spies abroad.
MATT BRAZIL DEC 10, 2024
THE U.S. SWAP ON NOV. 27 OF THREE CHINESE NATIONALS held here for three Americans imprisoned in China may be a historic first spy trade by Beijing with a foreign country. Or not.
None of the Americans brought home in exchange for a Chinese State Security officer, his sub agent and a former PhD student convicted of possessing child pornography, could be rightly called a “spy,” which is to say, a U.S. intelligence officer tasked with recruiting Chinese to steal their government’s military secrets.
But one of the Americans brought back, John Leung, 78, was an informant for the FBI who was arrested while on a personal trip to China, according to claims by the PRC and reporting by the New York Times.
No evidence whatsoever has surfaced, meanwhile, that either of the other two Americans held by China, Mark Swidan and Kai Li, had any ties to U.S. intelligence.
Indeed, the U.S. State Department had long declared them wrongfully detained on trumped-up charges, but Beijing’s eagerness to get back its real spies, and compel the State Department to ease its travel warning on China, gave the Biden administration an opening to bring home the three Americans plus Ayshem Mahmut, the mother of U.S.-based Uyghur activist Nury Turkel, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In exchange, China got back state security officer Xu Yanjun, his agent Ji Chaoqun, and Jin Shanlin, 26, a former student who was “connected to influential members of the Communist party in China,” according to the FBI., but was convicted only of possessing vast amounts of child pornography.
Xu Yanjun was detained in Belgium in 2018 while attempting to steal jet engine secrets from General Electric.
He was extradited to the U.S. and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
His fate was upheld on appeal in August, which may have incentivized Beijing to make a deal. Ji was convictedin 2022 on charges of signing up with the U.S. Army Reserves in order to steal U.S. military secrets, with plans to later to join the FBI or CIA.
Back in September, the U.S. and China engineered a swap that may or may not have involved one of its agents.
The Biden administration brokered the release that month of David Lin, a U.S. citizen jailed in China for 16 years, by trading him for a Chinese music student, Xiaolei Wu, who had been convicted in Boston of threatening a Chinese activist there, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The State Department described Lin as “a Chinese American pastor who lived in California [who] had been behind bars in China since 2006 serving a life sentence for what it said were bogus charges of contract fraud.”
https://www.spytalk.co/p/us-china-spy-swap-a-historic-shift