US sentenced Singaporean academic to prison for spying for China

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Jun Wei Yeo was sentenced to 14 months in jail after pleading guilty to one count of illegally operating as a foreign agent. For years it transmitted valuable but unclassified military and political information that it had obtained from US authorities to the Chinese government A Singaporean scholar who recruited US officials to provide classified defense and policy information to China was sentenced to 14 months in prison by a US court on Friday.

Jun Wei Yeo, also known as Dickson Yeo, had been working with Chinese intelligence since 2015 and installed a political consultancy in Washington that he used to identify Americans with high-level security clearances who he offered to pay for classified information. The 39-year-old was arrested at an airport in November 2019 and pleaded guilty in July to one count of illegally operating as a foreign agent, which can carry sentences of up to 10 years in jail. But he received a relatively mild sentence and was given the 11 months already spent in prison due to his cooperation with authorities and also because of the risk of contracting Covid-19 in prison , said Washington Federal Judge Tanya Chutkan. The ruling implies that he can be expelled from the United States in January.

A doctoral student at the National University of Singapore, Yeo received orders from Chinese intelligence to open a bogus consulting office in the United States offering jobs, according to court documents. He received more than 400 resumes, 90% of which belonged to military or government employees with security clearances. He used that material and LinkedIn's networking features to track potential targets, targeting people with strong security clearances.

He recruited a few people to work with him, with a focus on those who admitted to having financial difficulties. Among them were a civilian working on the Air Force's F-35B bomber project and a State Department official, who were paid up to $ 2,000 to write reports for Yeo. The reports were relayed to the Chinese government as part of what the Trump administration has alleged is a broader effort by China to steal American secrets, including cutting-edge investigation, for Beijing's economic benefit.

Over the course of several years, according to the Justice Department, Dickson Yeo relayed reports on a military aircraft program, the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and on a cabinet member, who was not identified in the court papers. On Friday, however, prosecutors said none of their recruits ever provided highly classified information, although that was the intention.