the search of the house confirmed he s stealing information, but we didn t have the proof that he was committing espionage. and that would include giving it to a foreign government. we can prove he stole it. we can prove that he traveled, but we couldn t prove that he traveled with the classified documents. that was the next step. that was the smoking gun we needed to go to the next level. after the covert entry, the next big break happened. when we recovered something from the trash. we were looking through chi mak s trash for almost a year before we found any real high value evidence. amongst the trash, we re found a lot of tiny little papers with chinese characters on them. on that given day, special agent jesse murray from the fbi had, in the office, laid out a bunch of pieces of paper. she was putting them together like a puzzle. and she called me over. she said, gunnar, can you help me with this?
when i interviewed chi mak for the second time, with omar lopez, another ncis agent, i ll never forget walking into the very unusual no see waving. that he would never want to talk to me again. but that day, he waved and he wanted to talk. so he brought him in and he didn t really have a great plan for how we wanted to talk to chi. we wanted to talk about the technology. and we built rapport. chi mak wanted to be the smartest man in the room. it was realized that chi mak wanted to be the professor. and so we, therefore, had to put ourselves into a position of being the student in order to get chi mak to open up. ego was the key to opening him up. when we confronted him about the work he did, he wanted to talk more about it. when he talked, we talked about
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.
a quiet electric drive would have given the chinese a fingerprint for that sub s movement throughout the ocean. that allowed them to track it and eventually destroy it. if a foreign power knows the acoustic signature of a submarine, then they can kill that submarine. quiet electric drive was at risk. that may have already gone to china or may soon go to china. so that s why there s a much greater fear in failing to catch chi mak. in 2004, the chinese didn t have a strong navy capability. they were really a brown water navy. a navy stable to operate in shallow water. chi mak chose the chinese efforts to be able to expand their capabilities into blue water.
in order to do that, we need to make sure we fit into the natural patterns of that neighborhood. the fbi went so far as to obtain a van that looked just like chi mak s van that we used to approach the home. if a neighbor were looking out, they d assume chi mak was coming home and they d go back to sleep. you need a huge number of people watching the neighborhood making sure nobody walks up on you. you need to watch out for dogs and teenagers, as strange as it is. teenagers can come and go at any time of the night and dogs can be barking. neighbors get up to smoke on their porch or use the bathroom. it s a complicated ballet of controlling when you go in and when you leave. you can t just come and go. i remember standing in the command post and taking stock of everything going on around me and then realizing just how complex this operation really was. all of the moving parts. any one of those things fail, and you re done. when you go inside the house, you can t leave a trace that yo