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?

Shuyen Jun 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 engineer David John comes back from his trip to China.

The trip where he met Shuyen Jun.

When we sat down with Bradley, we already knew how David had gotten on shoes radar linked in, but that didn't explain how David had gotten on the FBI's radar or for that matter how she 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?

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 and 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 engineer returned to the United States from his trip to China, he had these codes on his ticket. He was offered a secondary inspection.

At which point they found cash on David John, a lot of cash, $16,000.

That was not well explained.

And that's a starting point for this case.

And so like, did Zhang buy his ticket with cash for the last minute, or was there something else to let him be in secondary?

Is there anything we can say about that?

I actually don't know the answer to that question.

Okay.

Can we talk anymore 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 can 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?

No, 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 traced to the six bureau years before, which allowed them to see some of Xu's colleagues' correspondence with each other.

We also know that cases like this one can start with the NSA flagging some email address, or text, or geotag, or really any sort of digital footprint we're leaving behind all the time.

And so we think it's likely that at least one of Xu's email addresses was flagged before he started talking with David Jun.

So when he did, the FBI noticed, got David's secondary to the airport, and found the cash.

And when the lead about Xu and David came in, it landed on Bradley Hall's desk.

Because David Jun worked at GE 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.

The drug dealer sells drugs, right? That's Ipsophacto illegal.

It's very black and white.

Counterintelligence 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 sit for our bottles of water, he basically didn't.

You want to take some water?

No, I'm fine.

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 G.S. 15 A.S. accident in front of you saying the hardest thing that we do is counterintelligence, that peaked my interest.

But spy hunting isn't always as bad-ass as it sounds.

For instance, the first thing Bradley had to do after getting this lead was go to David Jun's 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 commings.

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?

Fire 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 a security breach.

Which is a bad look when one of the major buyers of your jet engines is the U.S. military.

Normally, guys, 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?

But 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 came 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 10 to 12 engineers who were specifically on carbon fan blades and carbon fan blade encasements on the GE engine system series.

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

Yes, GE is the only company in the world that has ever commercialized this technique many have tried and failed.

But GE is the only one.

They are 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.

Art isn't at 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 sea 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, John.

Oh, I wanted to turn him to use him to operate against the MSS.

Bradley wanted to make David his double.

A double is someone who represents himself or 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.

As a 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 2017, 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 NABigan 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, I'm positive it's going to work.

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

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November 1, 2017. David John started his day like any other day. He woke up. 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 was 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, having an opener.

GE Security asked David about some unusual activity they'd noticed.

Specifically, the five sensitive files he 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 up 100 fold because obviously the guy is 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 60, 70 people and we're sat at one tiny little corner of a table.

We indicate that we are there for the same reason the GE was there.

These files were moved. We've learned from GE that they went to China. That's the concern for us.

Let's talk about it. And that's how the conversation starts.

You know, you could have somebody that just unburdened 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 GE.

His brain is thinking, let me think of a way to get out of this. Can I think of a way to get out of this?

Okay, let me give, let me give a different version of that. I gave a 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 download on March the 27th. 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 PowerPoint. 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 counter it point by point.

I had the bank records that showed where he put the $16,000 in the cash. I'm going to show you 10 ways past Sunday that I know what day you put the money in, what you counter went to.

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 downloaded 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.

He couldn't drive away. Well, so there's I mean, being free to leave and having some logistical issues are two different things.

The logistical issues Mike is referring to look something like this. While the FBI is talking to David, his phone is confiscated.

His car is seized 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 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 kind of I remember breaking now.

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 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 the 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's, 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 may be 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 pig farmer. Like he grew up on dirt floors. He was the first person not only his family, but from his village to go to college.

He was one of about 10 to 12 engineers who work specifically on carbon fan blades and carbon fan blade encasements.

And frankly, this was a chance for him to brag 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 prayed 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 export 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 word 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 didn't set off to do this. They came to you. So how about we go get them?

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

I was exhausted. You know, the interview was hours. I can't remember the exact number I for some reason seven sticks my brain, but it's hours long.

Seven hours and 42 minutes.

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

What was that ride like? Quite.

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 go spy hunting.

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With David on board, the FBI made their first move under Bradley's direction.

David got back in touch with his contacts in Nanjing, but he couldn't come on too strong.

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.

He's immediately going to say, what?

This is not for real. 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 Feng.

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 left with them.

I feel like I need to fulfill my familial applications.

You'll 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, etc.

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 Feng or anyone else at NUAA?

And it worked.

Your trip back to this time, coincides with school holiday.

Most teachers and students will pretty much be back to their hometowns.

Bradley was banking on the fact that with the campus empty for vacation, Chen Feng 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 Chu Huai.

Bradley suspected he was actually an MSS officer.

I discussed with the Section Chief Chu where organizers changed this timeline.

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 Chu Huai 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 Xu Yan Jun.

I knew what he was without knowing what he was. That makes sense.

But he was about to. Because Xu Yan Jun had made a key mistake.

Before David came to China, Xu had sent him an email pretending to be Chen Feng.

And he had sent that email from a Gmail address.

Which meant the FBI could send search warrants to Google's parent company, Alphabet.

Those warrant results revealed that the Gmail address was linked to an Apple iCloud account.

So the FBI sent warrants to Apple too.

And with those results, Bradley came into some feathers in a bill.

In the form of one boring looking government document.

When I first saw it, I wasn't sure what it was because it was a Mandarin.

But I saw a face in a military uniform, which makes it government.

So we had a linguist he translated.

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 said, it's better than what you're going to guess.

It's the MSS officer's life.

From when he started college, to when he joined the Communist Party,

to when he joined the Ministry of State Security,

and then every major progression in his career after that fact.

It was an MSS cadre form.

Or basically, Xu Yanjun's resume.

So I started sending communications back to FBI Headquarters saying known intelligence officer.

And I got a little bit of a snarky call from a fairly high level,

analytical person at Headquarters saying, well, why are you calling this individual known intelligence officer?

That's the highest level we can get.

We are positive.

This person's intelligence officer.

Because I had his spy CV in front of me.

And when I said that to them, there was like a pause on the call.

And then you have what?

And it's not that it was confusion.

We know these things must exist, right?

Which is the first time we'd ever seen it.

That was the thing that took a case that was going fast and made it go light speed.

And why?

I feel to prove he's an intelligence officer.

This was definitive proof.

Again, apologies for the duck reference.

We know it's a duck.

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 45,000 pages that you have to sign on when you can help a product?

He didn't, because he would have, I mean, if he'd have read, you know, paragraph 45 subsection 422,

maybe he would have realized that, right?

The 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 shoes 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 trade craft.

I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question of his life.

And that's the unicorn.

The warrant results kept coming back.

There were emails and other sensitive documents.

And there was the diary that portals to choose life and habits and feelings.

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 to very suddenly 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 shoe to do things.

Things he wouldn't normally do.

Like let David choose where they would meet next, which wasn't going to be an engine.

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 shoe 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.

Shoe 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 resettments, and the way he felt about his own superiors.

So they used that.

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

Bradley was hoping that blaming this workshop on the boss was something Shoe 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 Shoe in the game.

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, etc.

That you can clean a lot of information.

From your point of view, how big of a deal was a directory?

It's huge.

GE gave Bradley a directory, but altered it to remove anything proprietary.

David sent it to Shoe, and it worked.

I'm sure he has sent his bosses. 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. It's gold. It's gold. We've got to work at hard.

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

How long will you be in France in March?

Do you have plans to visit any other countries?

I'm planning this year's foreign travel, and we'll love to see you overseas if it's convenient.

The US isn't in my plan.

So I like to see you're in other countries.

We would love for Shoe to basically say,

I'll come to Cincinnati, Ohio.

Sounds like a great town, right? He's 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 Shoe 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, Station Chief Chu. Sorry I missed 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 sleepy.

Shoe presses him.

Or how about tomorrow?

There's something I like to check in with you about if we meet in France.

The next morning, David messages Shoe that he can talk at 11 a.m.

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 28th.

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

About to start a 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 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.

Wait.

Over here, I'm going to point to what you say.

Hey.

And we're going to 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 a natural flow.

I said, it needs to be 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.

I do want to visit Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany.

I would like to go check it out.

David suggests a few countries in Europe where he and Shoe could meet.

Places he says he's always wanted to visit.

If it works well for you, I can tell my colleagues I'm visiting those places for fun.

I assume they won't come along.

I think those places may be more convenient.

So you're saying it's better to meet in Belgium, Netherlands, or Germany, right?

Right, right.

That works 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 WeChat.

Okay, good night.

Okay, goodbye.

Good night.

Goodbye.

Good night, Sergeant Chief Chu.

Shoe has agreed to leave his home turf and meet David in Europe.

Somewhere in Europe.

He believes that David is just a willing source of GE ready to hand over whatever he needs.

And so Shoe 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 definitely kind of like, yeah, this is amazing.

And I could just feel she was 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 this very closely.

The FBI senior management is following this very closely.

Like, when this meeting is taking shape, there would have been an enormous amount of excitement in both places.

Absolutely.

About the potential of this.

Absolutely.

They both are very close to a major intelligence coup.

You're going head to head with some 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.

On the next episode.

It's not just like a couple of dudes in suits.

And these are some legit luck and like seal team six luck and type dudes.

So I'm bringing him 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 is 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 undercover.

I lived undercover.

He's doing what he's believing is right.

I did what I believe was right.

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