Former Boeing executive of Chinese origin convicted for espionage
17 Jul 2009
Close on the heels of China arresting four Anglo Australian miner Rio Tinto's executives for spying and stealing state secrets early this month, (See: China arrests four Rio Tinto employees) a former Boeing engineer and Chinese-born naturalised US citizen, Dongfan "Greg" Chung was convicted yesterday by a US court on espionage charges for stealing secrets related to B-1 bombers, Delta IV rockets and F-15 fighters.
US Federal agents told a court in Santa Ana, California that Chung, who was arrested in September 2006, was working as a spy for China and the People's Liberation Army for 30 years.
His arrest came after federal agents raided his house and found to their astonishment a mountain of more than 300,000 pages of sensitive documents relating to the space shuttle, F-15 fighter, B-52 bomber, CH-46/47 Chinook helicopter, fuelling system of a Delta 4 rocket, an antenna system for the space shuttle and other aerospace and military technologies.
They also found letters, lists and journals detailing his communications with top officials in China.
Chung, who had security clearance when he worked on the Space Shuttle Program, had stashed away documents included design drawings and diagrams, structural and material specifications, project management data, and engineering reports related to military aircrafts.
Prosecutors, who had charged the former Boeing employee under the Economic Espionage Act, said that Chung, who had come to the US in the early1960s, worked at Boeing's Rockwell International Corp's space division as a stress analyst on the forward fuselage section of the space shuttle until Boeing laid him off in 2002.