The audacious ruse that exposed China's campaign to steal American secrets

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In March 2017, an engineer at G.E. Aviation in Cincinnati, whom I will refer to using part of his Chinese first name, received a request on LinkedIn. Hua is in his forties, tall and athletic, with a boyish face that makes him look ten years younger. He left China for the United States in 2003 for graduate studies in structural engineering. After earning his Ph.D. in 2007, he went to work for G.E., first at the company's research center in Niskayuna, N.Y., for a few years, then at G.E. Aviation.

The LinkedIn request came from Chen Feng, a school official at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (N.U.A.A.), in eastern China. Like most people who use LinkedIn, Hua was used to connecting with professionals on the site he didn't know personally, so the request didn't strike him as unusual. "I didn't even give it much thought before agreeing," Hua told me. A few days later, Chen sent him an email inviting him to N.U.A.A. to make a research presentation.

Hua has always wanted academic recognition. "When I did my doctorate, I first wanted to be a professor in China or the United States," he says. But since his studies focused more on practical applications than on pure research, a career in industry made more sense than an academic career. At G.E. Aviation, he was part of a group that designed containment cases for the rotating fan blades of jet engines. The use of carbon-based composites in fan blades and their casings, instead of metal, means lighter motors and a commercial advantage.

"I felt honored to be invited to give a talk," says Hua. Being recognized at home was especially gratifying for Hua, who grew up poor in a small village and was the only child of his generation to go to college. Beyond the prestige, the invitation also included a free trip to China to see friends and family. Hua arranged to arrive in May, so he could attend a nephew's wedding and reunion. academic at the Harbin Institute of Technology. There was a problem, however: Hua knew that G.E. would refuse permission to give the speech if he asked, which he was supposed to do. "Since G.E. is a high technology, it is difficult to get approval even for present r at conferences in the United States,” he says. The company was concerned about disclosing proprietary information.

Hua made it clear to Chen that he could only discuss composite materials research in general, without entering in the details of what he did at G.E. Aviation. To prepare, Hua told me, he went back to the work he had done for his doctorate and gathered additional information from scientific papers. He also downloaded some G.E. training files to his laptop. These contained instructions from G.E. experts on the use of composites; Hua thought they would help him save time preparing for his presentation, which he planned to do during his flight.

After landing in China, Hua took a high-speed train flight from Beijing to Nanjing, where Chen drove him to a hotel on the campus of Nanjing University. The next morning, Chen and Hua went to a meeting with a man introduced as Qu Hui, deputy director of the Jiangsu Provincial Association for International Science and Technology Development. Qu gave Hua a welcome gift: loose Chinese tea nicely wrapped in a gift box. "I accepted it as an honor," Hua said. "I like to drink tea since I was a child."

A few dozen students and faculty members attended Hua's lecture. They asked several questions that Hua was happy to answer. “I remember a student asking me a specific question about the architecture of the material I was talking about in my presentation,” he says. “I said, this is G.E. proprietary information. I'm just using this image as an example, but I can't share details of what we design or use. »

After the presentation, Chen gave Hua an envelope filled with $3,500 in US dollars...