And, no surprise, it involved a Chinese naturalized citizen, who committed treason and espionage.
WASHINGTON — The Navy is weighing charges of espionage against an officer who is a naturalized American citizen and has been under investigation since last year on suspicion of providing secret information to China and Taiwan, United States officials said.
The allegations against the officer, Lt. Cmdr. Edward C. Lin, 39, who was born in Taiwan, are part of a secretive espionage case in which Commander Lin is also accused of visiting a prostitute. United States officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly because the investigation into the officer is continuing, said Navy investigators believed that Commander Lin provided secret information to a Chinese girlfriend.
[Navy May Charge Officer With Giving China and Taiwan Secrets, by Matthew Rosenberg and Helene Cooper, NYT, April 11, 2016]
For Commander Lin, who moved to the United States as a teenager, the allegations represent a huge reversal. The Navy had held him up as an example of what immigrants can achieve in the United States and in the military.
The Navy featured his personal story in December 2008 in a public affairs report on his naturalization ceremony, which took place in the United States District Court in Honolulu.
Just how broken that system actually is has been revealed by several cases since then. Last fall, Mostafa Ahmed Awwad, a navy civilian engineer, was convicted of passing secret information about the navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, to an Egyptian intelligence officer. Rather, to someone Mr. Awwad thought was an Egyptian spy. In reality, it was an FBI agent working undercover: the traitor was stopped before he could actually betray secrets. Left unasked in all this was how Mr. Awwad, a native of Saudi Arabia, got work as a navy engineer with security clearances when his loyalty was clearly not to the United States.
It happened again this February when another navy civilian engineer, James Robert Baker, was charged with repeatedly lying to his employer on his security clearance paperwork. Mr. Baker, who worked for the navy for three decades, was born Majid Karimi in Iran. Over thirty years, Mr. Baker lied flagrantly about his true biography and life events, including the fact that he still possessed an Iranian passport that he traveled on long after taking a job with the navy, a clear violation of security rules.
[Amid Shocking Chinese Spy Case, Our Navy Can No Longer Be Trusted, by John Schindler, The Observer, April 11, 2016]
