ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The young man stood before the judge, his usually neatly trimmed hair now long enough to brush the collar of his prison jumpsuit. Glenn Duffie Shriver had confessed his transgressions and was here, in a federal courtroom with his mother watching, to receive his sentence and to try, somehow, to explain it all.
When the time came for him to address the court, he spoke of the many dreams he’d had to work on behalf of his country.
“Mine was to be a life of service,” he said. “I could have been very valuable. That was originally my plan.”
He had been a seemingly all-American, clean-cut guy: No criminal record. Engaged to be married. A job teaching English overseas. In letters to the judge, loved ones described the 29-year-old Midwesterner as honest and caring — a good citizen. His fiancee called him “Mr. Patriot.”
Such descriptions make the one that culminated in the courtroom all the more baffling: Glenn Shriver was also a spy recruit for China. He took $70,000 from individuals he knew to be Chinese intelligence officers to try to land a job with a US government agency — first the State Department and later the CIA.
And Shriver is just one of at least 57 defendants in federal prosecutions since 2008 charging espionage conspiracies with China or efforts to pass classified information, sensitive technology or trade secrets to intelligence operatives, state-sponsored entities, private individuals or businesses in China, according to an Associated Press review of US Justice Department cases.
Of those, nine are awaiting trial, and two are considered fugitives. The other defendants have been convicted, though some are yet to be sentenced.
Most of these prosecutions have received little public attention — especially compared with the headline splash that followed last summer’s arrest of 10 Russian “sleeper agents” who’d been living in suburban America for more than a decade but, according to Attorney General Eric Holder, passed no secrets.
Contrast that with this snapshot:
n In Honolulu, a former B-2 bomber engineer and one-time professor at Purdue gets 32 years in prison for working with the Chinese to develop a vital part for a cruise missile in a case that a high-ranking Justice Department official said resulted in the leak of “some of our country’s most sensitive weapons-related designs.”
n In Boston, a Harvard-educated businessman is sent to prison, along with his ex-wife, for conspiring for a decade to illegally export parts used in military radar and electronic warfare systems to research institutes that manufacture items for the Chinese military. The Department of Defense concluded the illegal exports “represented a serious threat to U.S. national and regional defense security interests.”
n In Los Angeles, a man goes to jail for selling Raytheon-manufactured thermal imaging cameras to a buyer in Shanghai whose company develops infrared technology. The cameras are supposed to be restricted for export to China because of “their potential use in a wide variety of military and civilian applications,” according to court documents.
n And in Alexandra, Va., there is Shriver, who told the judge quite simply: “Somewhere along the way, I climbed into bed with the wrong people.”
All five of these defendants were sentenced over just an 11-day span earlier this year.
In Shriver’s case, when once he asked his Chinese handlers — “What, exactly, do you guys want?” — the response, as detailed in court documents, was straightforward.
“If it’s possible,” they told him, “we want you to get us some secrets or classified information.”
Despite denials from Beijing, counterintelligence experts say the cases reveal the Chinese as among the most active espionage offenders in America today, paying more money and going to greater lengths to glean whatever information they can from the United States.
Earlier this year, retired FBI agent I.C. Smith gave a speech called “China’s Mole” at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. It was about a man who landed a job with the Central Intelligence Agency and later turned out to be a spy for China. As Smith told a rapt audience: “The intelligence community had been penetrated.”
He was referring to one of the most damaging Chinese espionage cases of all time: the infiltration of Larry Chin, a naturalized US citizen who in 1986 admitted to spying for China during his almost three decades with the CIA. As a former Chinese counterintelligence supervisor, Smith helped investigate Chin, who later committed suicide.
Smith was stunned to learn of the 5 1/2-year recruitment of Glenn Shriver and China’s “run at the front door” of America’s pre-eminent intelligence agency. “The Chinese,” Smith said, “still have the capacity to surprise.”
How did they do it in Shriver’s case? Standing before a federal judge on a blustery day in January, Shriver tried to explain how he went down the path to betrayal.
“It started out fairly innocuous,” he recalled. During a college study-abroad program in Shanghai, he was taken with Chinese culture and became proficient in Mandarin. After graduating from Grand Valley State University in Michigan in 2004, he returned to China to look for work.
Shriver was just 22 years old when, in October 2004, he first met a woman in Shanghai who would introduce him to the Chinese intelligence officers who persuaded him to consider turning against his own country. According to court documents, he’d responded to an English-language ad looking for scholars of East Asian studies to write political papers.
He met several times with a woman called “Amanda,” delivered to her a paper about US-China relations regarding North Korea and Taiwan, and was paid $120.
She later asked Shriver if he’d be interested in meeting some other people — two men he came to know as “Mr. Wu” and “Mr. Tang.” Over the next several years, they would meet at least 20 times.
Six months after first meeting “Amanda,” Shriver applied for a job as a foreign service officer with the US State Department. Though he failed the foreign service exam, the intelligence officers paid him $10,000. A year later, in April 2006, he took the exam a second time but again failed. He was nevertheless paid $20,000. Then, in June 2007, Shriver applied for a position in the clandestine branch of the CIA. A few months later, he asked the Chinese intelligence officers for $40,000 for his efforts.
In June 2010, Shriver underwent a series of final security screening interviews at the CIA in Virginia, during which he lied in response to questions about any previous affiliation with foreign intelligence officers. A week later, he was arrested — US officials wouldn’t disclose what led them to him — and his clandestine life unraveled.
“Nobody knew. Nobody,” said his mother, Karen Chavez. “He was a good kid. Worked, earned money, was respectful. … I don’t know what he was thinking.”
The closest her son came to an explanation was when he told the sentencing judge: “I think I was motivated by greed.”
From The Associated Press.