During my time at this job I was interviewed and briefed by the FBI several times on the dangers of potential foreign influence, since as a person with a clearance we could potentially be targets for foreign intelligence services attempting to gain access to the materials we worked with.
There were several people in my division who never did gain a full clearance and had to be limited to working entirely with unclassified systems. One of those persons didn't receive a full clearance not due to any fault of their own, but simply because both of their parents still lived in mainland China. The ability of a foreign nation to apply pressure, potentially threatening their parents, was apparently too great a risk in the estimation of the FBI for them to approve a clearance.
Those concerns were not unfounded because America has been spied on by China, as documented by The New Yorker.
"In the magazine earlier this month, I wrote about Greg Chung, a Chinese-American engineer at Boeing who worked on nasa's space-shuttle program. In 2009, Chung became the first American to be convicted in a jury trial on charges of economic espionage, for passing unclassified technical documents to China.
"While reporting the story, I learned a great deal about an earlier investigation involving another Chinese-American engineer, named Chi Mak, who led F.B.I. agents to Greg Chung. The Mak case, which began in 2004, was among the F.B.I.'s biggest counterintelligence investigations, involving intense surveillance that went on for more than a year.
"While Chung volunteered his services to China out of what seemed to be love for his motherland, the F.B.I. believed that Mak was a trained operative who had been planted in the U.S. by Chinese intelligence. Beginning in 1988, Mak had worked at Power Paragon, a defense company in Anaheim, California, that developed power systems for the U.S. Navy. The F.B.I. suspected that Mak, who immigrated to the U.S. from Hong Kong in the late nineteen-seventies, had been passing sensitive military technology to China for years."
In the current context, this type of influence by China seems to have set its sights on Jared Kushner.
"In March, 2017, Bill Priestap, the F.B.I.'s chief of counterintelligence, visited the White House and briefed Kushner about the danger of foreign-influence operations, according to three officials familiar with the meeting. Priestap told Kushner that he was among the top intelligence targets worldwide, and was being targeted not only by China but by every other major intelligence service as well, including those of the Russians and the Israelis. Priestap said that foreign spy agencies could use diplomats and spies masquerading as students and journalists to collect information about him. (An F.B.I. spokesperson declined to comment.)
"Priestap and Kushner discussed some of Kushner's contacts, including Wendi Deng Murdoch, the ex-wife of Rupert Murdoch. Kushner and Ivanka Trump had known her for about a decade, and she was a regular guest at their Washington home. U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials have long speculated about Wendi Murdoch's ties to the Chinese government. Internally, some Chinese officials spoke about her in ways that suggested they had influence over her, the former senior official, who was briefed on the intelligence, said. Other officials said that the intelligence was inconclusive."
On top of these, Kushner has an outstanding $1.2 billion loan on his property at 666 Park Avenue which presents a significant security risk, and just before the election borrowed $285 million from Deutsche Bank (who were fined $630 million for $10 billion in Russian money-laundering last year), and yet even they have referred some of Kushner's transactions they deemed "suspicious" to Germany's Federal Financial Advisory Authority as well as the Mueller investigation. With only an interim security clearance, Kushner gets to read the President's Daily Security Brief, even though Trump doesn't read it himself. Jared and Ivanka both have secret private email accounts on Trump company servers. (And people didn't trust Clinton -- who did have a valid permanent clearance but didn't have access to the PDB -- because she did what with her emails again and her husband Bill took a measly $500,000 from where?)
So there's all that.
At Northrop we also had an employee who had managed to run up quite a debt from multiple visits to the Caribbean. This person eventually decided that he was going to solve his debt problem by smuggling classified documents out of our facility and sell them to Russia. He phoned the Russian embassy in San Francisco and offered up the documents, only to have the Russians hang up on him. They knew quite well that the FBI was likely listening in, and they were (just as they were listening to Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn talking to Ambassador Kislyak). Soon afterward the FBI called him back pretending to be the Russians, and arranged a meeting. When this person appeared at the meeting with the two documents he'd smuggled out of our classified facility, he was arrested on the spot and is still serving two life sentences for this action.
"A former Northrop Corp. aerospace engineer who tried to sell secret defense plans to two undercover FBI agents posing as Soviet spies pleaded guilty to espionage charges Thursday in Los Angeles federal court.
"Thomas Patrick Cavanagh, speaking so softly that he had to be told to repeat his comments, admitted that he believed he was selling classified documents about the U.S. 'stealth' bomber program to agents of the Soviet Union.
"Questioned in detail by U.S. District Judge Matthew Byrne Jr. before his guilty plea was accepted, Cavanagh said he knew the information he tried to sell would be helpful to the Soviet Union.
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