Yanjun Xu’s fate is now in the hands of a jury from Southwest Ohio, who must decide whether he is a career spymaster for the Chinese intelligence service or the innocent pawn in a global trade war.
Prosecutors rested their case against an accused Chinese spymaster late Friday, with their last witness, a former CIA chief of counterintelligence, urging the jury to convict, “I know spying when I see it, and this is spying.”
Prosecutors began tying accused Chinese spymaster Yanjun Xu to other espionage cases on Tuesday, trying to persuade a jury that he was part of a wide-reaching conspiracy to attack aviation companies worldwide and steal trade secrets to build better aircraft.
The words could have come from a spy novel or a James Bond movie script. Instead, they came from one of four cell phones Belgian police confiscated when they arrested accused Chinese spymaster Yanjun Xu and his colleague, Heng Xu, at a Brussels mall on April 1, 2018.
The nation, and the world, may be watching what happens inside a federal courtroom in Cincinnati as the first Chinese intelligence agent ever extradited to the United States stands trial for espionage on Monday.