A Chinese spy named Yanjun Xu was convicted last Friday of trying to steal trade secrets from General Electric Aviation. Fox News reports his extradition to the US and trial are a first:

Yanjun Xu, a 41-year-old Chinese national, was the first Chinese intelligence officer ever to be extradited to the United States to stand trial, according to federal officials. A federal grand jury found him guilty on all counts, including conspiring and attempting to commit economic espionage and attempting to steal trade secrets.

“This was state-sponsored economic espionage by the PRC designed to steal American technology and put Americans out of work,” said Alan E. Kohler Jr., assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. “For those who doubt the real goals of the PRC, this should be a wakeup call; they are stealing American technology to benefit their economy and military.”

Xu was trying to steal information on GE’s composite engine fan. The DOJ press release reveals that since at least 2013 Xu would lure workers at various US aerospace companies to China on the premise that they were giving a lecture to a university. Then he would try to get proprietary information out of the workers. This particular attempt started in 2017. What Xu didn’t know is that he was really dealing with the FBI:

In March 2017, a GE Aviation employee in Cincinnati, Ohio, was solicited to give a report at a university in China. The employee traveled to China two months later to present at the university and was introduced to Xu. Xu and others paid the employee’s travel expenses and a stipend.

In January 2018, Xu requested “system specification, design process” information from the employee and – with the cooperation of the company, who was working with the FBI – the employee emailed a two-page document from the company that included a label that warned about the disclosure of proprietary information.

In February 2018, Xu began discussing with the employee the possibility of meeting in Europe during one of the employee’s business trips and asked the employee to send a copy of the file directory for his company-issued computer.

Xu traveled to Belgium on April 1, 2018, to meet with the employee and was arrested at that time.

The South China Morning Post reports that China has described Xu’s arrest as the US “making something out of thin air.”

Xu’s trial in Cincinnati was closed to cameras but there was some local reporting on it. This report notes that when Xu was arrested he had $7,000 in US bills and another €7,000 euros in brown envelopes. He also had several large storage drives on him and multiple cell phones. In short, he was caught red-handed. With his conviction on two counts of economic espionage he now faces a maximum of 15 years in prison.