Remember
Greg Chung , the Chinese spy who had infiltrated NASA and was pocketing technology for his nation of birth? It started long before that. Rewind to 2004, when the FBI, reeling from its failure to make a conviction in a previous case, was trailing Chi Mak,
a Chinese national now sporting an American passport who was working for Power Paragon, a US Navy defense contractor in California. The agents assembled the contents of the bag like a jigsaw puzzle. Patched together, the pieces constituted two documents, one handwritten and the other machine-printed. Gunnar Newquist, an investigator assigned to the case by the N.C.I.S., spotted an English phrase at the bottom of the handwritten sheet. "DDX," he said, reading it aloud. "That's a Navy destroyer." The handwritten text turned out to be a list of naval technologies and programs: submarine propulsion networks; systems for defending against nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks; and others. On the printed sheet were instructions about going to conferences to collect information. Gaylord was certain that the two documents were tasking lists from Chinese intelligence.
A great read over at the New Yorker, and a reminder that sometimes a bit of paranoia is a good thing: you may be right.