The Department of State building. Jun Wei “Dickson” Yeo said he recruited an employee to write a report on a then-serving member of the Cabinet.
Photo: daniel slim/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesA political-risk consultant funded by China pleaded guilty Friday in federal court in Washington to tapping U.S. government employees for sensitive information, the latest in a flurry of criminal cases accusing Chinese authorities of directing illegal activities in the U.S.
Jun Wei “Dickson” Yeo, a Singaporean national, admitted to working with Chinese intelligence operatives since 2015 to recruit U.S. military and government employees to write reports for him that he said were intended for clients in Asia, without revealing to those employees that he was sending the information to the Chinese government.
Those recruited included a civilian working with the U.S. Air Force on the F-35B military aircraft program and a U.S. State Department employee he paid to write a report on an unidentified then-serving member of the U.S. cabinet that advises the president, a court filing said.
Mr. Yeo targeted the employee between 2018 and 2019 on a professional networking site. He paid the man, who claimed financial hardship, $1,000 to $2,000 to write a report on the cabinet member, the filing said.
The Trump administration has ramped up efforts to root out Chinese spies, researchers and others engaged in what the administration says is a full-scale effort to steal intellectual property and other secrets. Such espionage was cited as a reason for closing the Chinese consulate in Houston. In retaliation, Beijing on Friday ordered the closure of the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, a city in southwestern China.
Mr. Yeo’s case is unrelated to the Houston consulate, according to a person familiar with the matter.
It offers a “peek into the playbook” of Chinese intelligence, the acting U.S. Attorney in Washington, Michael Sherwin, whose office brought the case, said. “It shows how they operate in our backyard…and use networking to target soft targets,” Mr. Sherwin said.
Mr. Yeo is scheduled to be sentenced in October, and faces up to 10 years in prison. The Chinese embassy didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In November, Mr. Yeo was returning to the U.S. when he was stopped by law enforcement at an airport, questioned, and eventually arrested, the statement of his offense said. The judge overseeing Mr. Yeo’s case acknowledged in court that Mr. Yeo is likely to be deported from the U.S. after serving his sentence.
At an hour-long court hearing, Mr. Yeo pleaded guilty to acting as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. attorney general’s office, and acknowledged that he had worked to get nonpublic information from senior U.S. officials at the direction of Chinese intelligence. “I am pleading guilty because I am guilty,” Mr. Yeo said.
Mr. Yeo said that Chinese operatives instructed him to create a fake consulting company to attract potential recruits, and home in on targets who had access to sensitive U.S. information, were experiencing financial difficulties or were unhappy at work. Mr. Yeo, 39 years old, acknowledged the events in his plea agreement, which he repeated in court.
Mr. Yeo’s activities dated back to 2015, when he was a graduate student in Singapore and traveled to Beijing to give a presentation on the political situation in Southeast Asia, the plea documents said. Unidentified individuals claiming to be from China-based think tanks offered him money in exchange for political reports and information, and later instructed him to specifically target nonpublic information and “scuttlebutt,” the document said.
Mr. Yeo met with the Chinese operatives dozens of times in China, and came to understand that “at least four” of them were intelligence operatives for the government.
“On more than one occasion, Yeo received the exact same tasking from all of his [intelligence] contacts, leading Yeo to surmise that there is one central authority in Beijing that disseminates research questions to various components,” the court document said.
Mr. Yeo used a January 2019 to July 2019 stint in the Washington, D.C. area to generate contacts, it said. According to his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Yeo said he was a doctoral fellow at George Washington University during that time “working on the foreign policy of smaller strategic states in light of US-China competition.”
A spokeswoman for GW said that Mr. Yeo was a visiting scholar at the university for six months in 2019, adding that he had no employment or student relationship with the university and didn’t receive any funding from GW.
Mr. Yeo also claims on LinkedIn to have held overlapping academic and consulting roles in Singapore, Beijing, and the U.S.
When traveling to China, he was regularly taken out of the customs line and brought to a separate office to gain admission to the country, a step his contacts said was taken to conceal his identity, the court filing said. At a hotel room meeting during one of Mr. Yeo’s visits, a Chinese intelligence operative told him to get nonpublic information about the U.S. Department of Commerce, artificial intelligence and the U.S.-China “trade war,” the filing said.
Mr. Yeo expanded his activities in 2018, when an unidentified handler told him to create a fake consulting company and advertise job opportunities for it online, according to the filing.
Mr. Yeo did so, using the same name as a prominent U.S. firm that does public and government relations work, it said. Mr. Yeo’s LinkedIn profile said he worked at Resolute Consulting and KWR International Inc. in 2018 and 2019.
A spokesman for Resolute Consulting said Mr. Yeo never worked for the firm. A representative for KWR couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. Mr. Yeo told U.S. law enforcement that he had received over 400 resumes in response to his postings and that 90% of them were from U.S. military and government employees with security clearances, the filing said.
One of those resumes came from an officer in the U.S. Army who was assigned to the Pentagon at the time. The person told him, Mr. Yeo said, that he was traumatized by his military tours in Afghanistan. Mr. Yeo paid him $2,000 or more through fund transfers to his wife’s bank account for a report on how the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan would affect China, the filing said.
In another instance around 2015, Mr. Yeo contacted a civilian with a high-level security clearance working with the U.S. Air Force on the F-35B military aircraft program, the filing said. Mr. Yeo got the man, who said he was having financial problems, to provide him with information about the geopolitical implications of the Japanese purchasing the F-35 from the U.S.
Mr. Yeo’s Chinese intelligence contacts gave him a bank card to pay his American contacts and told him not to communicate with Chinese handlers when he traveled to the U.S. due to concerns the U.S. government would intercept their communications. They also told him to use multiple phones and to change his account on the Chinese messaging platform WeChat every time he contacted them, the court filing said.
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