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This is the fifth episode of this series. If you haven't listened to the previous episodes, we recommend going back and listening in order. Thanks. About five months after GE engineer David Jeun agreed to work with the FBI, he. He was on a plane with agent Mike Riegel heading for Europe. It's stressful. He's like, I'm taking huge risk. I'm away from my family, I'm in a foreign country, I'm doing some weird thing against the Chinese government. And we had to make it clear to him, look, you're never going to meet with him again. This is just to get him in the country. The mission, Arrest Xu Yanjun, a Chinese intelligence officer. This is something we've never, ever done before. Can we actually get this guy out of China so we can get our hands on him? I was skeptical that it would work out like, right, we're gonna get a Chinese intelligence officer and we're gonna bring him back from China and we're gonna try. And we're like, right at this point, I have done some crazy things. I've convinced people way more important to me at the FBI, this is gonna work. It has to work. I mean, there's lots of times we try to do international arrests and they just don't work. Something happens, someone gets tipped off, someone gets cold feet, doesn't show up. I still had that faith, but deep down you're like, man, if this breaks bad on me, I'm never gonna live this down. From Bloomberg News and iHeart podcast, this is the Sixth Bureau. I'm Jordan Robertson. And I'm Drake Bennett. So we were in central Brussels when David and Mike landed. They met up with Bradley. We were based out of my hotel room on the top floor of a 16th century building. Deciding on Brussels as the site of the operation had been a process. Shue had agreed to meet David in Europe before the FBI had even figured out which country would be willing to help them. I literally called and said, all right, here's my 30 second spiel. I have an MSS officer. He's willing to come to Europe. Who's going to say yes to this? Not everyone. The FBI needed to find a country that checked a bunch of boxes. One, would they let the FBI run an operation there? Two, would they help with the arrest? Three, could they move quickly? And four, were they willing to detain and extradite Xu even at the cost of angering China? And we ultimately settled on the Belgians. So up on the top floor of the hotel, in one small room, it's Bradley, Mike, David, an FBI translator and their Belgian chaperone. We had the most junior counterterrorism officer from the Belgian federal police assigned us. And by assigned us, I mean she just sort of sat there and went, what am I doing here? You could tell she was bemused, but she was along for the ride. Things got claustrophobic. The ceiling was low, it was hot, and sometimes it didn't smell great. You know, it's fragrant. Five of us are crammed into this room, spending most of our day on the phone with Shue, trying to affect the next pivot in the operation. You're there, but there's still one more pivot. Correct, because Shue thinks David's in Paris for a work trip and that he'll meet him in Amsterdam. Hsu had even suggested a specific spot, oddly, a laser tag venue called laser gaming. But that wasn't going to happen, since Belgium is the country that said yes to this operation. So on March 29, 2018, two days before Xi was supposed to leave China, David sends him a message. The trip to France is going pretty smoothly. However, my work schedule has been changed. My boss made me travel to the sub branch of Safran in Belgium because we need to give him some technical help with the joint project. That said, I would not be able to make it to Amsterdam this Saturday. The pivot. But I can meet you at a hotel in Brussels this Sunday afternoon. If I was on that other end, I would be thinking, you don't tell me what to do. I tell you what to do. I'm the handler, you're the informant. He pushed back hard. He yelled at us. I, I have permission from the Chinese government to travel to France. I have permission from the Chinese government to travel to the Netherlands. I don't have permission to go to Blankety Blank, Belgium. And of course, David had to respond in real time. As the conversations or the texts are happening, our linguist is translating as quickly as possible again so that Mike or I can point. Say that, say that. Don't say that, say that. It was a sensitive moment. Hsu was still pushing for the meeting to happen in the Netherlands that Sunday. You can definitely make it in one day. Why don't you book your train and we can meet somewhere near the train station? But the Netherlands wasn't going to work for the FBI, so David needed a new excuse for why he couldn't even take a day trip, why he had to stay in Brussels, we spent hours talking about what we could say to make it as believable as possible. We filled a quarter of one of these notebooks with the different. Well, if we said this, would that work? And someone would say, I don't think it's gonna work because of this. And we'd rip it out and we'd start again. In the end, they went with their go to excuse. We played on things that we knew had worked before. The big bad boss. Sunday is Easter. My boss takes it very seriously. Well, the boss feels so guilty about making us travel on the holiday weekend that he's going to take us out for an Easter brunch. He's reserved an Easter lunch for the traveling team and asks us to please attend. And if I don't show up, that's going to look really bad. And I can't disappoint my boss. So I can't leave Brussels. This is why I'll have time to meet you here on Sunday afternoon. But I don't have time to travel to other cities. You know, we're so sorry. We can't help it. This is just a situation. I'll be back in six months or a year or whenever. The next time I might be back here. Maybe we can do it then. Well, that was unacceptable. It had to happen now. So Shue finally concedes. He agrees to a meeting in Brussels. He's gonna physically come. Why do you think he ultimately agrees to come to Belgium? There was so much back and forth, but eventually he agrees. I think the prize was too much. I mean, the prize was something he couldn't pass up. Right. He's looking at large amounts of GE research that helps Chinese commercial aviation cut time off, saves them money, gives them a jump. So if you're Zhu and you bring in this kind of stuff, you're basically saying I'm the guy that did it. The day before his trip, Xu messages his wife. I put a USB drive in the eyeglass box in the middle of the bookcase. It contains some encrypted documents. If something happens, someone will come to you and tell you the password. I mean, I've deployed more than 40 times. Often I don't tell anyone where I'm going. I can't tell anyone where I'm going. But to add the comment on if something goes wrong, I've never done that. And the reaction that his wife had was what you would expect. Oh, my God, don't scare me like this. It seems like he had some doubts at that point. He did. But when you talk about the risk, reward, what we were offering, what we were claiming that we were going to provide was clearly worth the risk. I will never know if he was ordered or chose to go, given that set of circumstances, but it happened. On March 31, Shu arrives in Amsterdam en route to Belgium. Photos pulled from airport security cameras show him coming through customs. He's wearing a backpack, has a giant suitcase and is dressed in all black. And he's not alone, he's with a colleague. In the photos, you can see Shu talking on his phone. He's on the phone with us. Shu's talking to David about where to meet in Brussels. So I grabbed Ruth, our Belgian colleague, who was with us, who very begrudgingly, I think she slept on the floor that night in my room, like in a sleeping bag or something. And I grabbed her and I said, okay, we need to find a meeting location. We've gotten too far. I can't let Shu tell me where we're going to meet. And we just started walking around like tourists. And as I'm walking around central Brussels, I come across Les Pain de Cotillain, this coffee shop, the chain Le Panne Cotidienne in le Gala du St. Hubert. This particular location was in a 19th century shopping center with a high arched glass ceiling lined with elegant shops. It's completely encased. It's the most beautiful architecture you can imagine. And I haven't slept in a couple of days. I'm tired and I see this coffee shop and I say, this is just like that coffee shop in the opening scene of Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy, the quintessential John le Carre spy story. I like watching spy movies. Not that my life resembles a spy movie in any way, shape or form. But I went, this works. This is the spot. So that's the fun reason I picked it. The operational reason was that I was bringing him into a funnel. One way in, one way out. You can't go through the back of these stores. I asked the front desk and they recommended a coffee shop nearby. I walk around and found a coffee shop which is very close to my hotel. So basically I am walking my guy into a pedestrian only space. He can't drive up, he can't surveil unless he's on foot. One way in, one way out. They have quiet seating on the second floor. Then we said we were going to be on the second floor of the coffee shop. That means he had to go into the coffee shop. Fatal funnel number two. Then he had to go upstairs. Fatal funnel three. To put him in such a tight locale, there's no way that we could miss him. So I'm bringing him into a fatal funnel. Into a fatal funnel. Into a fatal funnel. Send me the name of the coffee shop. Coffee shop is inside of Galeries Royal Saint Roubaix. I took a picture for reference. Okay, I'll let you know when I'm about to be there. I'll be checking WeChat at all times tomorrow. Okay, keep in touch. So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now a Global workforce of 300,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94% of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter Business IBM Find Home Wherever you roam at Sinesta Es and Simply Suites. Stretch out and enjoy home like amenities for however long you need. And when you're a Sonesta TravelPass member, staying at Sonesta Es and Simply Suites means earning points toward free nights, upgrades and more. Go to sonesta.com to book your stay and unlock their best rates with Sonesta Travel Pass Here today, Rome tomorrow. Join now@sonesta.com terms and conditions apply. This podcast is brought to you by Wise the smarter way to manage your money Internationally if you're getting a headache from juggling different currencies and different bank accounts in different countries, there's a better way to receive money in the currency you need without the slow transfer times or hidden fees. Meet Wise the savvy way to handle your money internationally. Hold balances in up to 40 currencies with the mid market exchange rate on every conversion. Whether you're receiving payments from tenants abroad, earning as a digital nomad, or converting dividends from your international investments, the Wise Multi Currency account is for you. Be Smart, Get Wise, Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com Terms and Conditions apply. Easter Sunday Dawns David John and Mike Riegel go to a lavish Easter brunch. A fake one staged by the FBI. They made a reservation at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels. They had a very fine five course brunch. We basically took every FBI resources in Brussels and we had them become the GE Aviation Team. Remember this Easter brunch was the reason David told Shue he couldn't leave Brussels and it was entirely made up, but they had to have one anyway in case the MSS was watching. We had a guy sort of walk around like he was the boss, right? Because if they were watching, we needed to have the big bad boss have a face. Right. I didn't know what the MSS was going to do in this situation. Meanwhile, across the city, dozens of police officers are out looking for Shue. We had surveillance out everywhere trying to make sure these guys were going to show up. They go to the train stations, assuming he's taken a train in from Amsterdam. But Xu is in a car, a dark colored Jaguar. He's being chauffeured to Brussels by the personal driver of the Chinese ambassador to the Netherlands. They were delivered for a clandestine meeting in the ambassador's car. Just let that wash over you for a second. That's how confident the MSS were in their ability to operate within the eu. I've never been picked up by anybody at any foreign airport ever for the FBI, let alone get to ride around in the Ambassador's Jaguar. Bradley is at the Belgian Federal Police headquarters in their command center. I remember fairly early in the morning, say maybe 8:30 or 9, the head Belgian prosecutor comes into this base and very professionally, but in a flurry like, is this real? Is this actually happening? And they said, we actually think it is. We think this is going to go down. And she's the one who sat down and said, okay, let's do this. And that's how the mourning started. Bradley had spent months running this operation, but now it was Belgian police and Belgian prosecutors who were calling the shots. And Bradley was relegated to the sideline. We don't get to participate in the arrests. We're not law enforcement officers in those countries. This is a Belgian operation. And that was made abundantly clear. So when they would talk to me, they would speak in English. But then when they were speaking to each other, they were speaking in French. And I speak enough French to be dangerous. And they kept saying, the FBI needs the meeting to happen before we can effect the arrest. I said, no, just be Desiree. Non, non, c'. Est. C' est pas de vrai. And I said, no, if you see him, please, for the love of God, arrest him. So they were under the impression that the target had to meet with the engineer. Correct. In order to, like, we needed that to happen for the arrest to be valid. And I said, no, no. And they all stop and they turn and they tilt their heads at me, realizing I've been listening to their conversations all morning. And immediately Switch into Flemish, and I have no idea what is happening. For the rest of the day, they kept talking amongst themselves until a squawk on the radio. And the Belgian surveillance commander, she said to me, we think we see him. It's 11 o' clock in the morning, 11:30 in the morning. After all the negotiations and all the pivots, Hsu was there in Brussels, and he was early. The meeting wasn't until that afternoon at 3. Shue and his colleague Xu Hang were there to case the meeting spot. And Bradley was done being patient. Please just arrest him. I couldn't imagine sitting in this space for four more hours like this, because I control none of this. Like, I'm. I'm an observer at best. Just please, please, please arrest him. And then she comes back. Oh, we lost him. I'm thinking, oh, no. Did they tell you they lost him? Mm. What goes through your mind at that point? I just wanted to get it over with. It just needed to end. Then two hours later, Shu was back. He texted david, we're here. Let me know when you're done eating. I'll meet you in front of the shop. Standing in front of the cafe, Chu raised his phone to snap a picture of it. Bradley has that photo. He shows it to us. And you'll notice this gentleman here, the reason he's a little blurry is what happens in about the next second is four very large, very muscular Belgian slot operators walk up, plain clothes. They pick up Zhu Yanjun and Zhu Heng by their elbows and start walking away with them through the crowd. Really. So this is literally his last second of freedom. There's a bunch of squawking on the radio from the surveillance commander. SWAT commander's radio starts squawking. And I said, what just happened? And she starts closing up her logbooks and stuff and says, it's over. We just arrested him. And in my head, I think, this is the pinnacle of my career. I'm never going to do anything more significant that I will ever be able to talk about than this. And what a way for it to end. It's over. We arrested him. One of the Belgian police inspectors who was kind of a. Is a more senior guy, and he's, you know, kind of a big dude with a white beard. I just gave him a huge hug. It was like a big bear hug. And I think he was like, you know, Americans did this kind of stuff because it was like the stress was over. Foreign. The FBI has David send a couple more messages to Shue. They also have him call Shue's phone. They want it to look like David's got nothing to do with Shu's arrest and that he's just there waiting for him at the coffee shop. I'm here now. Are you here? You know, just in case anyone else from the MSS is paying attention. I've been waiting for almost an hour and still haven't seen you. You wouldn't even pick up the phone. Sorry, I have to head back to prepare for tomorrow's meeting. With that final message, the relationship between Shu Yanjun and David Zhan came to an end. A relationship built on lies and manipulation. It's safe to say they both regretted it. I remember getting a phone call on Easter Sunday morning early, and running up to my third floor to take the phone call away from my kids. This is Emily Gladfelter, a federal prosecutor on the case. And they were like, they've got him. It took me a few minutes to process. I was like, what? With, wait, he's arrested? I was like, wow, surreal. I just cannot believe. Here we are. When they got him to the station, talked to him, he refused to talk. Tim Mangan, another federal prosecutor on the case, he pretty clearly said, I want a Chinese attorney. I'm not going to speak with you. There was an arrest warrant there or some other documentation they asked him to sign. He refused to sign it. The two MSS officers were now in the custody of the Belgian police. On Shu Heng, the police found two phones and envelopes of cash, $7,000 and nearly €8,000. On one of the phones, they found a bunch of pictures of David Jun and of the GE engineer's family. These were sort of social media pictures, but he had a large collection of them. If I came to talk to one of you guys, let's say we had just met once, and I said, I'd like you to provide me X, Y, and Z. And I basically have on my phone pictures of your whole family. Right. It would freak you out. It's unnerving. I mean, this was like many, many, many photos of this guy and his family. Yes. You can sort of use it as leverage to keep them working with the intelligence officer. And we thought he was sort of in preparation for going from the carrot to the stick. Shu Heng wasn't part of the arrest warrant, so he was released after a couple hours. When authorities went to access the contents of his second phone, there was nothing there. It had been remotely wiped. Xu Yanjun was also carrying two phones. One was a Huawei phone with a password of I kid you not Shu Yanjun, 1980. The second was the iPhone, which he had used to so diligently document his life. For years he was jailed in Brussels while the Chinese government hired a law firm to fight the extradition. But Xu pursued other avenues. There was a bizarre escape attempt, a jailbreak. Xu had tried to reach out to another inmate and offered money if the person could help him escape. €50,000. But it was foiled. I mean, this whole investigation case seemed like it was out of a movie at times. And that was just like another chapter that of course, you know, there was going to be an escape plan. Six months after his arrest, Shue's extradition was approved by a Belgian court. That meant it was time for Bradley and Mike to fly back to get him and bring him to the US for trial. You know, we basically flew on the director's plane over there, the FBI director's personal jet. This is kind of a once in a career type thing, right? I'm a lowly young guy from southern Ohio and this is, I mean, for some executives, this would be like, oh, what's the big deal? To me it's kind of like, wow, there's a couch. What's this? I mean, to me it's neat, you know. To me it's neat. I'm used to commercial, just I'm a guy that's back in coach, you know, I'm going through Atlanta and, you know, walking eight miles through Atlanta Airport, it's kind of like, wow, you kind of get on the plane and you're in Belgium. It was a beautiful day. It was October, so it wasn't hot. It was just a beautiful day. Blue skies, puffy clouds. We are at a private terminal on the grounds of the Brussels International Airport where our plane has been parked. A motorcade arrives and drives onto the tarmac, right up to the plane. They get out, their long rifles are out. It's not just like a couple of dudes in suits. I mean, these are some legit looking like SEAL Team six looking type dudes. They open the door to the Volvo station wagon and out he pops. He's just a medium build Chinese gentleman. He doesn't stand out in any crazy way. He's handcuffed. In the European system, at least in the Belgian system, they don't wear prison garb, they wear civilian clothes. So he had sneakers on, a pair of jeans, a button down and a sweater. But not for long. As part of the transfer, Bradley makes Shue change into a striped jail uniform he's brought from Ohio. I let him know that we're going to shackle him at the feet and at the waist and at his wrists and he's going to fly back to the United States that way. And Ju, when we get him on the plane, is not combative but also not cooperative. A decision was made to basically just, you know, ask him the booking questions. Name, date of birth, address, telephone number, this kind of stuff. I think Alias was one. One of the standard booking questions is aliases. But yeah, he did not like the questions. He declined to answer some of them or he refused to answer some of them. Hsu was charged with conspiring and attempting to commit economic espionage and steal trade secrets. He arrived in Ohio and was sent to a federal detention center to await his trial. It was a very long wait, three years. For much of that time, Hsu was confined to a 70 square foot jail cell alone for for 23 hours a day. He communicated with his wife and family through letters, which were often held up for months by translation protocols. Then in October 2021, Hsu found himself as a defendant in an American courtroom, a scenario he probably never imagined. Support for the show comes from Public Lately it feels like there are two types of investing platforms. Some are traditional brokerages that haven't changed much in decades, and others feel less like investing and more like a game. Public is positioned differently. It's an investing platform for people who are serious about building their wealth on public. You can build a portfolio of stocks, options, bonds, crypto without all the bugs or the confetti. Retirement accounts? Yep. High Yield Cash? Yes again. They even have direct indexing. 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IBM When Xu's trial finally got underway, the pandemic was still raging. I mean, the jury box was covered in plexiglass. The witness stand had plexiglass. The judge's bench had plexiglass. We all wore masks. This is Paula Christian, a local TV investigative reporter who covered the trial. As someone who regularly covers the courts, she knows all the lawyers and took note of shoes. He had a whole squad from Taft, an elite Cincinnati firm. As a reporter, one of the first things you look at when you have a defendant is who their lawyer is. And if they have a firm like Taft, somebody's paying for it because it's too expensive for an average person to pay for this. I mean, Ralph Conan probably bills at six to seven hundred dollars an hour. And they had six, seven people on their legal team in the courtroom. I mean, that's thousands of dollars an hour. HSU's lawyers declined repeated requests to speak to us, and the trial wasn't recorded, but we do have the transcripts. The defense didn't dispute that Xu worked for the mss. He's a recruiter nobody's ever hidden from, that he's affiliated and works for the mss, or that Xu was trying to cultivate aviation experts working outside China. Sure, he was trying to get them to share their expertise. Sure, he paid them and wined them and dined them. And what does that prove? Exactly. But they argued that the information Xu was trying so hard to get wasn't technically trade secrets. Believe what you will about the government's evidence in this case, ladies and gentlemen, but there's no way that you can conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that our client has intended to steal trade secret information. This case is about a man who was caught up in a controversy between the US And China over China's advancing competency and abilities technologically. The US Was overreaching. The US Just didn't want China to have any technology. So they're just being spiteful. That was their main argument. But they were up against a lot because how can you argue with what you said on a recorded line or what you wrote in a text message on your phone or the photos you took? It's tough. The trial stretched over two and a half weeks. David Jund testified. So did the Honeywell engineer, Arthur Gow, so did folks from GE and a chief inspector from the Belgian Federal Police. Bradley was on the stand for three days. The last witness was James Olson. He was the prosecution's expert on espionage. I've never seen a jury and a judge lean in the way they did with Jim Olson. I mean, it was surreal. The defense, in cross examining James Olsen, tried to use his own spy career against him. There was a moment in his cross examination where they accused him of lying. So, you know, you've been undercover and you've not been honest with your family or your friends and whatnot. And he said something like, and I would do it again for this country. And it felt like a moment where it was like, the flag should be behind him and you should be hearing the national anthem. And it was like you could hear a pin drop. It was amazing. And then on redirect, I went up and asked, if you'd been caught, what would have happened? And he kind of looks at me and then he looks over at you and he goes, I'd be right there and points right at you. Shu was shooting daggers at me in his eyes. When I looked at him, I could not help but having a feeling of, he's really not much different from me. He's serving his country, I serve my country. He's a spy. I was a spy. He lived undercover. I lived under cover. He's doing what he's believing is right. I did what I believed was right. How are we any different? And so I had kind of a momentary pang that we could easily be trading places. I could be sitting in a trial, being convicted of espionage if I'd been caught. And the only real difference between Shu and me was is that he got caught and I did. I was not totally unaware of the human dimension of what we were doing, potentially of sending this man away. From his family and from his country for many, many years. But I was there to convict him. This was the only time in our history that we had an MSS staff officer in a courtroom facing conviction in prison in the United States. And this was a message that I wanted to send to China. The deliberation process, if I recall, took more than a day. That was a really stressful time. I remember wandering around downtown a couple days waiting for this verdict and just thinking, what do we do if this doesn't come out our way? Tim and I felt a tremendous amount of weight on our shoulders. We were concerned that, you know, if we fell short in our duty, that we would cause some sort of international incident. The verdict comes back and the entire courtroom is silent. You just sit and wait for these words. There's so much anticipation. And he was found guilty of everything. We reached out to China's Ministry of Foreign affairs about the case back in 2022 after the verdict came out. And they said, quote, the accusations by the US are completely fabricated. We demand the US handle the case in a fair manner and ensure the legitimate rights of Chinese citizens. When we reached out to them again this year, they referred us to previous statements. A year after the trial, Xu's sentence came down. He was given 20 years. I thought the Xu sentence was pretty strong. This is Alan Koehler, former head of counterintelligence at the FBI. To get someone 20 years like that, that's a huge hit for anybody who commits economic espionage. You know, 20 months is more likely the type of sentence that we get. But I think there were some pretty serious aggravating factors. The type of information he stole, the breadth of the effort that he was being charged with, and sort of the co conspirators that were wrapped up in it. All of that, plus him being a Chinese intelligence officer, I think that just worked against him in this matter. Xu didn't speak at all during his trial, but at the sentencing hearing he did. He spoke through a translator. Here's some of what he said that day. All of this took place within the grand context of the trade war between the US and China. All the US government has done is to use the legal system as a weapon in the war it wages to further its political agenda. That has nothing to do with respect and justice. Your Honor, I'm just an ordinary Chinese citizen who knows nothing about politics, nor do I know anything about secrets. Why on earth did I get caught into this incredible legal battle? Thus, this whole case is merely a political farce directed and acted out by the US government for self aggrandizement. It is like the thief who demands that the thief be caught regardless what the sentence may be. I will appeal this case because I stand by my innocence. Thank you. Shu did appeal, but he lost. In August 2024, a federal appeals court upheld his conviction and sentence. But Xu's saga didn't end with that prison sentence. In two weeks, we'll have the final episode of our series where Xu gets an unlikely lifeline. I don't think China really had a playbook for how to handle this. She just told me about how he was quote unquote rescued. I'll never forget the sight nor the sound of the FBI agents who banged on the door and said FBI opened the door and barged straight in. That's coming up on March 20th. Don't miss it. If you follow markets, you know the value of long term thinking. You plan, you diversify, you prepare for volatility. But in life, even the best strategies can't prevent every bad day a fire, a loss, a disruption that demands immediate attention. When that happens, what matters isn't just what you planned, it's who shows up. That's where Cincinnati Insurance comes in. 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