The first Chinese intelligence officer ever to be extradited to the United States has been sentenced to 20 years in jail. Xu Yanjun, 42, was found guilty earlier this month of leading a ring of Chinese agents that targeted U.S. aviation companies, recruiting their employees to travel to China and soliciting their proprietary information on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). “As proven at trial, the defendant, a Chinese government intelligence officer, used a range of techniques to attempt to steal technology and proprietary information from companies based in both the U.S. and abroad,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in the statement. Xu was transferred from Belgium in 2018 after an engineer he targeted for recruitment cooperated with the FBI to lure him to the European country. He has been a state agent since 2003, and prosecutors at the trial displayed an image of Xu’s CCP membership card taken from his phone after his arrest. He steadily rose to the rank of deputy division director at the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), the intelligence and security agency for China, reports The Epoch Times.
