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.”
During a phone conversation in November, an agent asked: “I’m assuming that these guys are pretty high level people, am I right?” The agent wondered why, since the project was so large, the clients could not meet with him directly in either the United States or the United Kingdom. “They are spies,” Shen replied. “They, they, they are very hard to get a visa. They cannot go to U.S. or UK”
What’s also curious is how the smugglers planned to get the technology out of the United States — provided the smugglers could even get access to the material in the first place. In December, the agents told the smugglers they could supply them with a Raven RQ-11B, a small drone which can fit inside a backpack.
However, there’s one small problem: You can’t exactly a board a commercial flight with a military drone in your carry-on luggage. Shen, a veteran drug trafficker (or so he claimed), planned to apply some of the same rules, “such as using scuba divers to swim out to a ship docked offshore,” the complaint states. Or even using narco-style semi-submersible submarines to link up with a larger ship offshore.
To hide their activities, the smugglers would avoid sending e-mail. Instead, they’d share an e-mail account with the undercover agents and communicate through writing and saving the e-mails in draft form. The smugglers also provided a code book to agents. And the smugglers told agents they bought cameras to take pictures of sensitive military technology, but planned to delete the photos before leaving for China — where their clients would be able to retrieve the deleted data.
But technical know-how aside, the recordings make them seem more like they were in over their heads. And while smugglers are smugglers — often agnostic to the material they’re carting — it seems unlikely that the Chinese government saw fit to recruit drug traffickers for sophisticated intelligence operations. And stealing a U.S. military surveillance plane before flying it back to China? Good luck with that. It stretches imagination that China’s spooks would be crazy enough to do it.
But in terms of drug trafficking, Shen and Cheng delivered. Early meetings with agents resulted in the successful shipment to New Jersey of a (later seized) kilogram of meth hidden in Chinese tea bags. Further conversations would have Shen and Cheng discuss smuggling meth to Japan disguised as tsunami relief, or routing Mexican meth to Japan in tequila bottles. The least what can be said is that they had potential.
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