An FBI computer technician with top-secret clearance who regularly accessed restricted information has been outed as a Chinese spy. Working in the agency’s large New York City office, Reuters reports, Kun Shan Chun was convicted Monday of acting as an agent of a foreign government and will be sentenced December 2. He had been arrested in March after a sting operation.

Chun, known as “Joey,” came to this country from China with his parents when he was 5. A naturalized citizen of the United States, he began working for the FBI in 1997 but admitted only to passing secrets to the Chinese government from 2011 to 2016, working through a Chinese printer company, for which he worked as a researcher and consultant.

The assistant U.S. attorney said that the information he passed to the Chinese government “included the identity and travel plans of an FBI agent; an internal organizational chart; and photos he took of documents in a restricted area related to surveillance technology,” according to Reuters.

Rising Chinese Espionage

Chun had been charged with four counts, but accepted a plea bargain for the one charge with the agreement he would serve a short sentence. “Since the government’s evidence against Chun looks airtight,” wrote security expert John R. Schindler, “it seems likely that the Feds don’t want a trial which would require the Bureau to explain in detail what their mole gave to Beijing.” Writing in The Observer, a New York City weekly, he argued that

rising Chinese espionage presents a serious problem for the United States because it’s so heavily ethnic in character. Beijing expects its nationals overseas — whom we want to view as patriotic immigrants and naturalized Americans — to serve as their spies abroad, and some of them are quite willing to do so, particularly if China sweetens the pot with financial incentives. This seems to have been the case with Chun.

Schindler warned that such spies are hard to catch, partly because of “political correctness.” No one “wants to be accused of ethnic bias — or worse “racial profiling” — over molehunts. As with counterterrorism in the age of Obama, it’s worse for your counterespionage career to be accused of racism than to miss the mole right in your midst.”

Schindler has, he said, knowledge of “suspected Chinese moles inside our Intelligence Community” who “were allowed to resign, never to face charges of any kind.”

The Daily Caller quoted a report by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara stating that Chun’s is the second Chinese espionage case in the past four months. The other is the case of Amin Yu, “‘who smuggled underwater drone parts from U.S. companies to a state-owned university in China that does military research.'” Yu was a permanent resident who used her own companies to acquire the parts she sent on to China.

The week before Yu was arrested, Newsweek reported, Chinese citizen Fuyi Sun was arrested in another sting operation for buying strictly controlled carbon fiber to send to China. And those arrests followed yet others, including this one described in a New Yorker feature.