Operation Fox Hunt: How China Exports Repression Using a Network of Spies Hidden in Plain Sight.

[Матушкин Андрей Николаевич]

Hu told Chinese newspapers that he learned she was in the United States, requested an Interpol red notice in 2013, and “started to track her” — activity that was illegal if done on U.S. soil.

“Fugitives who fled to the United States are the most difficult to catch, and it is even more difficult to catch fugitives who hold a U.S. green card,” an article in the Chutian Metropolis Daily said.

Chinese accounts claim Hu “miraculously” got a break in September 2015 when he found out the woman had flown to Cancun and Mexican authorities detained her. She requested that Mexican officials deport her to the United States, so Hu and Chinese embassy officials in Mexico “raced against time,” fearing U.S. diplomats could intervene, the accounts say. Hu organized a ruse with Mexican officers: They tricked the prisoner onto a plane to Shanghai by telling her it was bound for Houston, the articles say. A published photo shows Hu at an airport with two Mexican immigration officers who transported the prisoner.

Mexico kept the affair unusually quiet. There was no Mexican press coverage, no standard announcement about international cooperation in action.

Asked about the matter, FBI officials said they had not identified the woman and were investigating. But ProPublica has identified her based on information from knowledgeable officials, detailed summaries of Chinese court documents, and other sources.

She is 50-year-old Suying Wang. In 2012, she came to the United States, where she married a U.S. citizen. Records show he is the president of a small business in Houston that has an affiliate in Mexico City. They lived in a condominium complex in Houston. Her former husband, who has since divorced her, declined to comment when reached by telephone.

As for Wang’s arrest in 2015, ProPublica confirmed elements of the Chinese accounts, but discovered other details that change the story. In reality, Chinese operatives did surveillance of three fugitives in Merida, Mexico, a city about 190 miles from Cancun on the Yucatan peninsula, according to U.S. and Mexican officials. At the Chinese embassy’s request, Mexican immigration officers then arrested Wang and two others wanted for unrelated economic crimes, the officials said. Because Mexico does not have the death penalty, Chinese diplomats signed a pledge stating that Wang did not face execution in China, according to the officials, who requested anonymity.

Mexico deported Wang on Sept. 23, 2015. Photos obtained by ProPublica confirm Hu’s involvement. They show the prisoner in transit in the custody of Chinese officers. Those officers also appear in a published photo of Hu and Mexican officers at an airport, and in another in which Wang’s face is obscured.

Credit:Source: People’s Public Security News
Despite the Interpol notice and her Chinese citizenship, the deportation — and the reported deception used to get her on the plane — raise questions. International refugee law bars governments from returning foreigners to countries where they face a well-founded fear of persecution. China is a notorious violator of human rights. And Mexican authorities had a clear alternative: They could have sent the U.S. resident to the United States, a close ally.

The other two targets were also sent back to China, but it is unclear if they were U.S. residents as well. The episode reflects China’s growing clout south of the border. One of Hu’s superiors, a Wuhan deputy police chief named Xia Jianzhong, later visited Mexico to thank immigration chiefs for their help.

A spokesperson at the Mexican embassy in Washington declined to comment on the case.

In Wuhan, a court sentenced Wang to five years in prison, a sentence reduced to three years on appeal. The rather light punishment, combined with the scope and expense of the operation, underscores that one of the main goals of Operation Fox Hunt is instilling fear in the diaspora.

Hunters from Wuhan have worked other cases in Houston. While pursuing one man between 2016 and 2018, they caused his brother-in-law in Wuhan to lose his job and forced him to visit a prosecutor’s office for months; they made his business partner’s wife go to the United States and hire private detectives to investigate him; they tortured and jailed his brother and harassed their elderly mother, according to the wanted man’s lawyer, Gao Guang Jun. Parts of the ordeal were also documented in the report by Human Rights Watch in 2017.

“It was a huge attack on the family,” Gao said. “The whole family is broken.”

 

[Матушкин Андрей Николаевич]

Hu’s name did not surface in that case, though his team may have been involved. But starting in 2015, he led the attack on the family of the former accountant in Houston. ProPublica has identified him as Zhu Haiping — the uncle and brother, respectively, of Johnny and Jason Zhu in New York.

Zhu Haiping, now 58, spent 18 years on the run, accused of stealing almost $2 million while he was deputy finance director of an aviation agency in Wuhan. Hu’s task force located him in Houston, where he was a legal resident, and hounded him. Urged by his family to surrender, he “said he would return many times, but he never finalized a date,” according to an article in the magazine of the Communist Party’s anti-corruption unit.

Finally, Hu’s team unleashed an “emotional bomb,” the article says. They sent the wanted man a video of his friends, his former home and Wuhan delicacies set to music.

“He started to tear up, and the mere remaining suspicion at the bottom of his heart had gone,” the article says.

In July 2016, Zhu “was returned” to China, according to U.S. court papers. The details of the repatriation are unknown, but it is hard to believe he surrendered because of an appeal to sentiment.

Hu’s ability to cross U.S. borders repeatedly during his hunts is startling. Although he kept his mission secret, he identified himself as a police officer for the Wuhan Public Security Bureau on his application for a U.S. tourist visa in the New Jersey case. In March 2016, a Chinese newspaper article even mentioned his investigation of the former Wuhan development official in New Jersey, calling the wanted man one of Fox Hunt’s top targets. But Hu had no known problems at U.S. airports when he traveled back and forth.

Asked if that was a breakdown in border security, federal officials said visa screening consists mainly of checking U.S. databases, which in this case apparently did not include information from the Chinese press. The chances of detection were low because of the large number of visa applicants reviewed by U.S. consulates in China, they said, and consular officials and border officers were not as aware of Fox Hunt then as they are today.

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Hu’s point man in California was Rong Jing.

Rong, a married businessman, lived in Rancho Cucamonga, an arid city south of the San Gabriel Mountains and about 35 miles east of Los Angeles. Like the operatives in New York, he was an immigrant with permanent resident status. But Rong, now 39, described himself as a bounty hunter for the Chinese government, court documents said. He apparently liked the work and liked to talk about it. His bragging would give investigators a primer on the reach and relentlessness of Fox Hunt networks.

Just weeks after aborting the scheme involving the father in New Jersey, Hu turned up the heat on the wanted couple. He zeroed in on their daughter in northern California. She had arrived in the United States as a child, studying at a private boarding school years before her parents fled China. She had earned an advanced degree at Stanford, gotten married and made a life for herself far from her parents and their problems with the Chinese courts.

None of that mattered to the hunters from Wuhan. The daughter became their new weapon.

In May 2017, Rong hired a private investigator to stalk her. Unfortunately for him, the investigator was a confidential informant for the FBI. U.S. officials did not disclose if or how they maneuvered the informant into place. Since starting the investigation in New Jersey in early April, agents had been mapping the travel and contacts of the Fox Hunt team, and Hu had spent time in California, according to interviews and court records.

More generally, the FBI had been watching private investigators — especially in areas with large Asian communities — because of the role they had increasingly played in Fox Hunt. Rong does not speak English, so it is likely that the investigator he hired speaks Mandarin.

The bottom line: The FBI now had a man inside Hu’s operation.

On May 22, Rong met for four hours with the investigator-informant at a restaurant in Los Angeles. In a recorded conversation, Rong offered the detective $4,000 to investigate and videotape the daughter. If the team succeeded with the repatriation, he and the detective could split any reward money, Rong said.

Rong said the bosses in Wuhan hadn’t told him “what to do with” the daughter. It was possible they could ask him “to catch” her, he said. Rong and the detective might have to act as proxies for Chinese officers who “wouldn’t feel comfortable to arrest her” in the United States, he said.

If there are “things they wouldn’t feel comfortable to do,” Rong said, “we need to be there on their behalf.”

 

[Матушкин Андрей Николаевич]

Rong asked whether the detective had a problem with removing someone from the country. “Say, if he wants us to bring him/her over, can you bring him/her over? Would this bring about any legal issues?”

Once the detective had shot video of the daughter, his next job would be to contact her parents and persuade them to return to China, Rong said. For the next few weeks, the private investigator went through the motions of shadowing the daughter, supervised by the FBI.

Reporting to Rong on July 14, the detective discussed photos he had provided of the daughter and her home. Then he asked: “You don’t think they’ll do any harm to her, do you?”

Rong’s reply wasn’t entirely reassuring. If the detective got in trouble, they would both be in trouble, he said.

“If there was an accident,” he said, “in truth you [could claim that you] were just … investigating her.”

At other moments, Rong sounded less menacing. She was “simply a daughter,” he said, emphasizing that the parents were the main targets.

Credit:For ProPublica
Unlike the New York operatives, Rong wasn’t wary of the detective. His recorded conversations painted an inside picture of Operation Fox Hunt.

The Communist Party footed the bill. Rong did freelance missions exclusively for Wuhan, receiving a fee for each repatriation. He talked about teams of visiting “lobbyists.” They were salaried “civil servants” of the Chinese government who traveled on work visas under multiple identities. Their job was “persuading people” to return to China, he said.

The account fits with information uncovered in other cases. The clandestine hunts follow a pattern: Investigators like Hu create networks and swoop into the country at key moments, insulated by layers of forced recruits, hired civilians, private detectives, even street criminals. The pursuits last for years, sometimes even after U.S. law enforcement intervenes.

Rong and the private detective met again, but the project in California fizzled out. The case went quiet until November, when the FBI had another breakthrough.

Although Hu had warned Johnny to stay in China after he flew back with the elderly father, the young man returned to the United States on Nov. 9. FBI agents interviewed Johnny and he confessed, giving up details of the operation during two interviews, court papers say. The agents let him go and he returned to China the next year. FBI officials did not explain their decision, but agents often delay arrests while they build cases.

The pressure on the family in New Jersey continued. In April 2018, Xinba Construction Group, a company based in Wuhan, sued the couple in New Jersey state court. The lawsuit accused the former official of extorting bribes while in powerful posts in Wuhan, delaying projects and causing the company to lose $10 million. In a countersuit denying the allegations, the defendants alleged that the company had teamed up with Chinese authorities to retaliate for the former official’s opposition to a contentious toll-collection contract.

Chinese companies and security forces often coordinate criminal and civil actions against Fox Hunt targets, experts said. The Wall Street Journal wrote about the practice, including the Xinba lawsuit against the couple, last year.

Lawyers for both sides did not respond to requests for comment. The lawsuit is still in the discovery phase. In February, federal prosecutors involved in the Fox Hunt criminal case in New York filed a motion to intervene and request a stay in the Xinba suit.

The next salvo from Hu’s team was more primitive. Between April and July of 2018, an unknown conspirator harassed the daughter in California, sending derogatory messages about her family to her Facebook friends.

In New Jersey that September, two young men showed up at the wanted couple’s house. The intruders banged on one door, tried to open another, peered through windows, and left threatening notes.

“If you are willing to go back to the mainland and spend 10 years in prison, your wife and children will be all right,” one note said. “That’s the end of this matter!”

Surveillance video and fingerprints led investigators to Zheng Congying, now 25, of Brooklyn. Investigators believe he was hired muscle. He has pleaded not guilty. His attorney declined to comment.

Seven months after the threats, someone sent the wanted couple a package containing a compact disc. It recalled Hu’s “emotional bomb” in Houston. Over a song in Mandarin, a video showed images of their relatives in China, including the elderly father whom Hu’s team had brought to New Jersey. The father sat next to a desk where a book by President Xi, “The Governance of China,” was prominently displayed.

 

[Матушкин Андрей Николаевич]

“I believe that this shot was deliberately staged to make [the son] aware that the PRC government played a role in taking this picture and creating this video,” an FBI agent wrote in the complaint. He described the photo as a form of implicit coercion demonstrating “the government’s control over [the son’s] aged parents.”

In the video, the wanted man’s sister implored him to come back. She said their parents were sick, isolated and distraught.

“When parents are alive, you can still call someplace a home,” she said in the video. “When parents are gone, you can only prepare for your own tomb.”

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The lengthy investigation gave insight into a secret world at a crucial time.

“The timing of the investigation ties nicely with our understanding of when Fox Hunt came to be more broadly understood outside of China,” said Benavides, the chief of the FBI’s China counterintelligence branch. “This investigation absolutely helped the FBI understand how Fox Hunt operatives work, what the plans and intentions are and how aggressive they would be in this arena.”

That aggressiveness has only escalated worldwide. In 2017, an abduction squad descended on a Chinese Canadian billionaire in Hong Kong’s Four Seasons Hotel. They allegedly drugged him, rolled him out in a wheelchair, and spirited him to the mainland. When another billionaire living in New York, Guo Wengui, made allegations of high-level corruption, Chinese security chiefs traveled to confront him at his penthouse overlooking Central Park. FBI agents ordered them to back off, saying they had violated the terms of their visas.

And Beijing crossed another line in France. After “two years of unremitting efforts,” Chinese authorities announced in March 2017, investigators from the Ningxia region and embassy personnel in Paris had “successfully persuaded” a fugitive to come home. Zheng Ning, a cashmere industry executive, had lived in France for three years before his mysterious disappearance.

Unlike the United States, France has an extradition treaty with China. Yet French officials say they knew nothing about the repatriation. French intelligence chiefs complained to their Chinese counterparts afterward.

“It’s shocking,” said Paul Charon, a China expert at the French defense ministry’s Institute for Strategic Research. “It also shows a bigger phenomenon: the hardening stance of the regime in Beijing, which dares to carry out these operations overseas and mock the sovereignty of other countries.”

U.S. officials acknowledge that the government was slow to respond to the threat.

“It did take us a while to catch up and realize what was happening,” said Demers, who returned to the Justice Department from private practice in 2018 and was chosen to lead the new China Initiative. “With things like Fox Hunt, we realized it was not going to be enough to change behavior simply through having meetings with the Chinese. We were going to have to be more aggressive.”

The FBI has tried to break through a wall of silence in immigrant communities to reach potential and known targets.

Qiu Gengmin, 59, is one of the latter. His name appeared on the Fox Hunt list six years ago as the result of an ill-fated shipbuilding deal and, he says, a vendetta by a security chief in Zhejiang province. Dogged Chinese agents have spied on him even at a Buddhist temple in Queens, he said. He has lost his money, home and wife. Authorities have harassed and jailed his relatives and friends in China.

“As long as I don’t go back, they do not have personal freedom,” Qiu said, hunched over a table in his lawyer’s office. “They will continue to surveil them and there will be no so-called freedom. They are not allowed to take the train, they are not allowed to fly, they are not allowed to go out. They are afraid.”

His story has ambiguities, however. U.S. prosecutors felt the evidence was strong enough to charge him with money laundering and conspiracy to transfer stolen property. He spent more than 20 months behind bars, pleading guilty to a federal charge of contempt. He has applied for political asylum.

About a year ago, three FBI agents interviewed Qiu as a victim, not a suspect.

“They say we need to follow up with your safety concerns,” he said. “We want to protect you. … They said if there’s anything, I should call them.”

And last October, federal prosecutors charged eight people, including Hu, in the first U.S. case targeting Fox Hunt.

Rong Jing, the California freelancer, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an illegal foreign agent and to conduct interstate stalking. His lawyer says he went down a hazardous path of agreeing to increasingly ominous requests from the Chinese government.

 

[Матушкин Андрей Николаевич]

“You have a number of individuals who have made a new life in America but wind up in this type of situation by doing a benign favor for an old friend from the old country,” said the lawyer, Todd Spodek. “Yet over time their participation in the unlawful repatriation effort increases. As it increases, it crosses the line into criminal acts, which was not their original intention.”

Another defendant pleaded guilty to the foreign agent and stalking charges. McMahon, Jason Zhu and Zheng await trial on both charges.

Six FBI agents and two police officers arrested McMahon at his home in northern New Jersey at 6 a.m. on Oct. 28. His lawyer said that the Fox Hunt team duped the detective and that there is no evidence he knew he was working for the Chinese government. His total profit for a case that has destroyed him was $5,017.98, the lawyer said.

“He never spoke to someone whom he understood, whom he knew, to be a Chinese official,” Lustberg said. “Mike McMahon is a victim in this case.”

Johnny Zhu, Dr. Li Minjun and Tu Lan, the prosecutor charged with leading the repatriation team, are thought to be in China. So are PRC Official-1 and another implicated official. Prosecutors did not charge or identify them, as often happens in counterintelligence cases for strategic and diplomatic reasons.

As for Hu, the fugitive hunter has become a fugitive. At last word, though, he was still a star. In 2018, his name appeared on the website of the Communist Party’s anti-corruption agency. Because of his long experience on the front lines, the organizers of a national training conference had invited him to Beijing as an instructor.

The cop from Wuhan taught a session about international law enforcement cooperation.

Update, July 22, 2021: Based on information in a superseding federal indictment that was unsealed on July 22, we have updated this story to include the name and title of an individual previously identified only as PRC Official-2 and the title of an official identified as PRC Official-1. PRC Official-2 is Tu Lan, 50, a prosecutor for the Hanyang District of Wuhan. PRC Official-1 is the director of the Wuhan prosecution office’s anti-corruption bureau.
The July 22 indictment charged two additional defendants with acting and conspiring to act in the United States as illegal agents of the People’s Republic of China and with engaging and conspiring to engage in interstate and international stalking. It also charged two of the nine defendants in the case with obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Operation Fox Hunt: How China Exports Repression Using a Network of Spies Hidden in Plain Sight

China sends covert teams abroad to bring back people accused — justifiably or not — of financial crimes. One New Jersey family was stalked as part of a global campaign that takes families hostage and pressures immigrants to serve as spies.

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