How Boeing engineer spied for Chinese for 30 years… and stole secret space shuttle designs
By Mail Foreign Service
Undercover: Dongfan ‘Greg’ Chung spent 30 years supplying information to the ChineseAn American engineer was convicted of waging a 30-year campaign of industrial espionage after police found 300,000 pages of sensitive material at his home.
Chinese-born Dongfan ‘Greg’ Chung, 73, stole the documents while working for Boeing and Rockwell International as a stress analyst.
Investigators believe at least some of the material, which included information about the US space shuttle and a booster rocket, was handed on to China.
Chung was convicted of six counts of economic espionage, one count of acting as a foreign agent, one count of conspiracy and one count of lying to federal agents.
He could face up to 90 years in prison when he is sentenced in November.
In a 31-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney said: ‘The trust Boeing placed in Mr. Chung to safeguard its proprietary and trade secret information obviously meant very little to Mr. Chung,
‘He cast it aside to serve the PRC (People’s Republic of China), which he proudly proclaimed as his “motherland.”‘
Prosecutors only discovered Chung’s activities while investigating another suspected Chinese spy in 2006.
The trail led them to his house, where they discovered a huge cache of sensitive documents.
These included information about a fueling system for a booster rocket and on the space shuttle – documents that employees were ordered to lock away at the end of each day.
Boeing invested $50 million in the technology over a five-year period.
Chung, investigators now believe, began spying for the Chinese in the late 1970s, a few years after he became a naturalised US citizen and was hired by Rockwell International.
He worked for Rockwell until it was bought by Boeing in 1996 and was finally laid off in 2002.
A year later, the company rehired him as a consultant. He was fired after the FBI launched its investigation into his activities.
Chung opted for a non-kury trial that ended on June 24.
During 10 days of proceedings, defense attorneys said Chung was a ‘pack rat’ who hoarded documents at his house, but they insisted he was not a spy.
They also claimed he had violated Boeing policy by bringing the papers home but had not broken any laws – and that the US government could not prove he has passed secret information to China.
Judge Carney, however, dismissed the suggestion that Chung was a pack rat as ‘ludicrous.’
He ordered the defendant, who had been free on $250,00 bail, to be kept in custody until he was sentenced, adding a man facing such a long sentence with close ties to China could easily flee.
Space shuttle Endeavour lifts off earlier this week: Chung was accused of taking designs related to earlier modelsSpeaking after the verdict, Ivy Wang, prosecuting, said: ‘I hope that one of the messages that goes out is if someone is going to steal proprietary information and steal that information for the benefit of another country, they are going to be charged in this country and face very serious punishment for doing so.’
Thomas Bienert, defending, said he planned to appeal.
‘A big feature (of this case) is not about what China wanted Mr Chung to do, but about what Mr Chung was willing to do,’ Bienert said outside the courtroom.
‘There is no evidence that China used or benefited from anything in this case.’
Chung’s trial is America’s first under the Economic Espionage Act.
The legislation was passed in 1996 to help the government crack down on the theft of information from private companies that contract with the government to develop US space and military technologies.
It became a priority in the mid-1990s when the US realised China and other countries were targeting private businesses as part of their spy strategy.
Since then, six economic espionage cases have settled before trial. In some of the cases, defendants were sentenced to just a year or two in prison. Another is set for trial in US District Court in San Jose this year.
Steven Fink, president of Lexicon Communications Corp., a corporate crisis management firm, said prosecutors previously have tried cases under a different part of the 1996 act involving theft of trade secrets.
He questioned why it took so long for the government to try someone on the economic espionage charges levied in the Chung case, saying he believes officials were too worried about ruffling diplomatic feathers.
‘In the past there had been times when diplomacy has trumped national security,’ he said.
‘This (verdict) is a spit in the ocean unless it is a sign that the government is going to get aggressive in prosecuting these cases, because there are a lot of them out there.’
The Chinese government has made no comment on the case.
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How Boeing engineer spied for Chinese for 30 years… and stole secret space shuttle designs…
An American engineer was convicted of waging a 30-year campaign of industrial espionage after police found 300,000 pages of sensitive material at his home.
Chinese-born Dongfan ‘Greg’ Chung, 73, stole the documents while working for Boeing and Rockwell…
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