At least 154 Chinese scientists who have spent the past two decades working on government-sponsored research at the US’s main national security laboratory have been recruited to do scientific work in China – some of which have contributed to the advancement of military technology that the US national security threat — according to a new private intelligence report obtained by NBC News.
The Strider Technologies report details what it calls a systemic effort by the Chinese government to place Chinese scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons were first developed.
Many of the scientists were later lured back to China to advance in technologies such as deep-earth-penetrating warheads, hypersonic missiles, silent submarines and drones, the report said.
Scientists were paid as much as $1 million for participating in the Chinese government’s “talent programs” designed to recruit Chinese scientists to return to China. Such talent programs have long been a concern, but US officials said they hadn’t seen an unclassified report before that described the phenomenon in such detail, naming specific scientists and the projects they worked on.
The talent transfer “poses a direct threat to US national security,” said Greg Levesque, co-founder of Strider and lead author of the report. “China is playing a game that we are not prepared for, and we really need to mobilize.”
Although a former Los Alamos scientist pleaded guilty in 2020 to lying about his involvement in a recruitment program in China, most of the behavior described in the report appears to have been legal. In addition, US officials and experts say that most Chinese scientists who immigrate to the US stay here – and many have made significant contributions to US defense technology.
But current and former US intelligence officials said the Strider report shows how the Chinese government has used talent recruitment programs to gain insight into US technology to build an army that poses a significant threat to US national security. The officials added that China’s hard turn under President Xi Jinping is sparking a re-evaluation of the long history of scientific exchange between the two countries.
“We have benefited immensely from the influx of Chinese talent,” said Robert Daly, a China expert at the Wilson Center, a congressional-chartered impartial research institute. “And I hope we can continue to do that – it’s essential for the United States. But China is now developing weapons systems, capabilities, doctrines and, frankly, attitudes to its own power, which means we’re in some of these areas. have to go back to the drawing board.”
In 2019, a bipartisan Senate report said China’s Thousand Talents program and similar arrangements were a vector for China to exploit US research.
“Through talent recruitment programs like the Thousand Talents, China pays scientists from American universities to secretly bring our knowledge and innovation back to China — including valuable, federally funded research,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a 2020 speech. that American taxpayers are actually footing the bill for China’s own technological development.”
Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was developed during World War II, is devoted to science and engineering in support of US national security. But much of the research there is unclassified and many foreign scientists work in the lab.
Los Alamos officials referred questions to the Energy Department, which declined to comment on the report’s specific findings.
The Department of Energy said in a statement to NBC News that America’s “national security and defense demands fierce protection of critical technological development, even as we safeguard the open science research that endorses the United States’ technology leadership.
“In response to increasing threats to research security, the Department of Energy has taken significant steps in recent years, including the adoption of rigorous vetting, counterintelligence assessments and restrictions on participation in foreign talent programs,” the agency added. “The Department of Energy is also implementing procedures to ensure compliance with U.S. export licensing requirements, including those for the release of controlled technology to foreign nationals in the United States.”
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
The Strider report says that in 2019 the Energy Department passed a rule banning employees and contractors from participating in talent programs related to China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. The rule appears to have reduced brain drain, the report said.
The Justice Department launched what it called the China Initiative in 2018, an effort to thwart China from stealing groundbreaking research. A series of cases exploded amid allegations of racial profiling, and the Justice Department abandoned the initiative last year. National security officials say, however, the threat of Chinese espionage – and China’s legal acquisition of US intellectual property – continues.
Bill Evanina, who served as the top counterintelligence officer in the US government from 2014 to 2021, said he has seen many classified reports over the years documenting the problem of technology transfer through poaching.
However, he said, “This is the first time we have a comprehensive, open-source reporting identifying the people, places, services and organizations in China that are taking advantage of that talent that once worked here in national labs.”
Evanina and other officials said Los Alamos is by no means an outlier – China is recruiting scientists at other national labs and major research centers in the US
Citing publicly available information on websites in the US and China, the report contains specific information about a number of scientists.
For example, according to the report, Zhao Yusheng received nearly $20 million in grants from US taxpayers during an 18-year career in Los Alamos, where he had top-secret Q clearance and led a defense project that developed bombs that could penetrate deep underground. .
Then, in 2016, Zhao joined a talent program, Strider discovered, and left the US for a job at a research center in China. The report states that before that, while he was in Los Alamos, he hired another Chinese scientist to work with him on the bomb investigation. That scientist filed a patent in China in 2007 for an “ultra-radiative penetrating warhead,” the report said.
Zhao is now a vice president of the Southern University of Science and Technology in China, known as SUStech, which conducts defense research. He did not respond to requests for comment.
The Strider report found that 15 Los Alamos veterans work at SUStech, including its president, Chen Shiyi, who has been a major contributor to China’s hypersonic missile program. Chen did not respond to emails.
“Nobody can say this isn’t a matter of national security,” Evanina said. “Because, from hypersonics to acoustic capabilities and warheads, we are committing the ability of adversaries to use weapons against us. And that is hard for any American to swallow.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
