Four in US Accused of Spying for Chinese

Four people have been arrested on charges of selling classified and delicate information to the Chinese.

One is a 72-year old man who used to work for Boeing and was said to have sold details regarding the space shuttle; the other three were charged together for passing along US Defense Department (DoD) information the US held on Taiwan. A United States spokesperson deemed the acts serious breaches of national security.

Dongfan Chung of California, originally from China, faces a slew of charges related to spying, including eight counts of espionage, conspiracy, and lying to FBI investigators. The 72-year old engineer worked in the aerospace industry for 30 years. Part of that time, he worked for the space shuttle program. He is said to have received instructions from the Chinese as early as 1979, and to have sent them nearly 25 manuals on programs including the C-17 aircraft, the B-1 bomber, and more. He is also said to have ties to fellow Chinese-born engineer, Chi Mak, who was found guilty of conspiring to export similar information last year.

In an unrelated (and much more spy-riffic) case, two men and a woman are said to have conspired to export highly-classified documents concerning Taiwan to the Chinese government. Gregg Bergersen, a weapons system policy analyst within the Defense Department (DoD/Google), is charged with conspiracy to deliver classified information to people "not entitled to receive it." His co-conspirators, Tai Shen Kuo and Yu Xin Kang, are charged with "conspiracy to disclose national defense information to a foreign government." It is said that Ms. Kang was the liaison between the two men, passing documents from one to the other -- no further details were available at the time of this post.

If found guilty, Chung faces 100 years in prison; Bergersen, 10; and Kang and Kuo face life.

©C Harris Lynn, 2008