wired.com
Robert Beckhusen
It began as a conspiracy by two international drug traffickers to smuggle meth into New Jersey, but ended as a plot to steal U.S. military drone technology on behalf of the Chinese. At least, that’s the rather fantastic claim made by the Justice Department in an oddball caper that seems to borrow equally from Burn After Reading and Breaking Bad.
According to an amended criminal complaint filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey, the two smugglers, 45-year-old Hui Sheng Shen (or “Charlie”) and 41-year-old Huan Ling Cheng (or “Alice”) provided a list of sensitive military items to undercover agents: missile engines and technical manuals; “stealth technology,” control panels and radar reflectors for the F-22 Raptor; an early warning E-2 Hawkeye plane and a list of drone tech, including control panels for the hunter-killer MQ-9 Reaper; and “inferrate [infrared] mounting system technology” for the high-flying Global Hawk spy drone.
The federal court complaint details the surreal conversations.
“I got a message for you: A guy want[s] to buy a plane,” Shen allegedly told an agent in a conversation last September. “It’s a, uh, early warning aircraft,” he added.
Shen and Cheng dubbed the Hawkeye plane the “big toy,” and they claimed that the buyer was a “secret assistant” to an unnamed senior Chinese official serious about paying for the plane. Later, the smugglers would state the buyers were people “who come from Beijing,” working for “some kind of intelligence company for the Chinese government — like CIA.”
Discussion
No comments yet.