At a virtual event hosted by another think tank in July, Wray said that the FBI opens a new counterintelligence investigation involving China every 10 hours. Even the pandemic has not slowed the effort. “We’re talking about everything from Fortune 100 companies to Silicon Valley startups, from government and academia to high tech and even agriculture,” FBI director Christopher Wray said at a conference at a Washington, DC, think tank in February. The FBI now has over 2,000 active investigations involving China, spanning all 56 field offices. And although it is partly the creation of Trump administration hawks, the groundwork was laid years ago, under the Obama-era Justice Department. Though ostensibly about upholding the law, the China Initiative has also become one of the US’s principal tools in its brewing technological standoff with China. Overseen by FBI and DOJ officials, as well as a group of federal prosecutors, it takes a “whole of government” approach that involves coordinating ideas across multiple agencies. In 2018, the department launched the China Initiative, an effort to crack down on intellectual-property theft and other crimes. The Justice Department is waging war on Chinese industrial espionage. The difference was that the target was a Chinese-born scientist with two PhDs-a new sort of criminal, and one that the US would increasingly take aim at over the years to come. To catch Mo stealing the trade secrets of the two agricultural giants, the FBI pulled out the tools that might be used against drug cartels or organized crime: car chases, airport busts, and aerial surveillance. Betten came to oversee a vast dragnet involving dozens of agents across the United States. They posed as farmers, shipped boxes of seed using FedEx, and even attempted to smuggle the seed back to China in Orville Redenbacher microwave popcorn bags.īut the FBI’s reaction was equally outsized. Over the coming years, Betten followed closely as Mo and his colleagues at DBN executed an elaborate, if occasionally comical, plot to steal seeds from Monsanto and Pioneer. The Chinese government didn’t yet allow companies to sell genetically modified corn of the sort that had been growing in the Iowa field, but most experts expected the policy to change, and DBN, it seemed, was trying to prepare. DBN competed with Pioneer and Monsanto in the Chinese market. It turned out that Mo, who also goes by the first name Robert, worked for DBN, an agricultural company based in Beijing. Agricultural technology is among the sectors designated for strategic development in China, and the US Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, which advises the president on intelligence matters related to national security, had identified it as a frequent target of industrial spies. His name was Hailong Mo.īack at the FBI field office, Betten soon learned of two other suspicious incidents involving Hailong Mo and other seed companies operating in Iowa-including Monsanto, another agricultural giant, which would earn over $2 billion in profits that year. Pioneer security later used the license plate to trace the rental car to a man with a Florida driver’s license. When the farmer asked what they were doing, the kneeling man stammered out an excuse then he bolted for the car and jumped in the passenger seat as the car sped away. Another man waited nearby in a parked car. A Pioneer security officer mentioned that a few months earlier, a contract farmer in a remote part of Iowa had found a Chinese national crouched on his knees in a field where the company grew genetically modified inbred seed. To catch Mo stealing agricultural trade secrets, the FBI pulled out tools it might use against drug cartels.Īt the meeting, Betten explained the bureau’s efforts to combat economic espionage and tackle cybersecurity threats. In the years that followed, that focus would only intensify. By then, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) had already brought at least four federal trade cases on behalf of DuPont subsidiaries and affiliates on trade-secret theft. DuPont was already a giant corporation: it would make a profit of over $4 billion in 2011, on revenue of nearly 10 times as much. The bureau worked closely with companies to identify the secrets targeted by Chinese competitors, and the relationship with DuPont, Pioneer’s parent company, was particularly cozy. A dizzying array of technologies were now portrayed as critical to national security: wind turbines, paint whiteners, corn seed.
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