on the back, hug, kiss. none of that. that kind of relationship kind of made us wonder, is this actually a marriage in the ordinary sense or more of a contract? more of a partnership or more of something the chinese government had put together to serve its own purpose. in our investigation, we also started following his brother tai mak and his sister fuk li and his son billy mak. it gave us information about who tai mak was and what his role was. we we believe that tai mak was sent to the united states in 2001. tai mak s job was to be the currier of information that chi mak stole. tai mak was an integral part of this operation.
china about his progress. this was frosting on the cake for us. we didn t realize they would have surveillance personnel watching their own people for signs of compromise. and it also confirmed the importance of this delivery to china that they d have somebody watching it. at the airport, we searched the bag of tai and fuk li, his wife. in the piece of luggage, they had a small book titled how to speak american english. in it they had two out of three cds. and they are the type of discs, you d learn to speak english. put it in your computer, spit out words, talk back to it. instead of having the third disc, they had the disc they copied and encrypted. pretty ingenious. any inspector would open the book up, look at it quickly, see the two discs and move ahead. when tai mak and fuk li entered through security at the
discovered that, in fact, they were discussing copying discs and giving them to his brother, how they were going to take these discs back to china. based on information we had, we believe the quiet electric drive, the very sensitive navy submarine data is on that disc. tai mak then took that disc home and gave it to billy, his son, who was in charge of the ibm thinkpad laptop which had the encryption program on it. tai mak wasn t so good at doing the encryption on his own. we don t believe billy was originally part of the plan but tai mak asked his son to help encrypt the information his uncle chi mak had given him. we found out fuk li made some calls and then called her husband and said we re going to china. the very next day, tai mak called the handler pupei leung in china.
complete cycle, that you ve stolen it and transferred it to a foreign power. by watching tai take the information and go through security, we re able to complete that charge that he s now committing espionage because he s flying through china in order to give it away. the operation to arrest tai mak and his wife at los angeles international airport was extremely complicated. it s not just taking down one person in one place. we had to do multiple arrests simultaneously. we have to make sure we knew where chi and rebecca were. phao, billy, tai and fuk all at the same time. prior to the arrest at the airport, we were doing heavy surveillance of them as they approached the airport. billy drove them, dropped them off and left. as they were at the airline counter, we had an outer ring of surveillance personnel who noticed an asian male standing on the sidewalk at l.a.x., outside, filming them through the window. he s at an airport and videotaping people in line in
on the squad is he wasn t above doing the trash either. he volunteered to help. my kids would ask, how is your day? i d tell them i ve been dumpster diving all day. didn t sound like a real respectable position, but that s what we do. we realized we needed 24/7 surveillance coverage of chi mak and his wife. we needed to understand where chi mak was, who his associates were, how he got from one place to another, where he went and what he did when he went to those locations. in order to do that, you have to rely on just good old-fashioned physical surveillance. chi mak s life revolved around his work. he didn t have a social life, that we could see. he didn t even keep in much contact with his brother tai mak who also lived in los angeles close to chi mak. he and his wife would spend long hours in there. rebecca wouldn t leave the house without him. rebecca would look out her