Amidst all the chatter about mysterious drones on the eastern seaboard, and talk of foreign nationals coming to this country to attend college or gain employment under special status, how has this story from a few months ago not received more widespread attention?
A Chinese national named Fengyun Shi, who came to the United States to attend college in Minnesota, was arrested and convicted of spying on operations at the Newport News naval Shipyard via drone. He also flew his drone over the BAE shipyard in nearby Norfolk. BAE is a defense contractor that provides “...some of the world's most advanced, technology-led defence, aerospace and security solutions…we develop, engineer, manufacture, and support products and systems to deliver military capability, protect national security and people, and keep critical information and infrastructure secure.” These military shipyards are in Virginia, not Minnesota, where Mr. Shi was supposed to be attending college.
This story had completely escaped my notice until I came across this tweet from The Virginian Pilot newspaper a few days ago.
While the national news clearly ignored this story as nothing more than a local crime story, it did get a little bit of local press in Minnesota and Virginia. The story is partly comical, as this Chinese spy got caught when his drone got stuck in a tree, but it is deeply disturbing too.
As reported in Wired magazine last May, despite being in this country to attend graduate school, Fengyun Shi was taking a break from his studies at the University of Minnesota, at which time he traveled to Virginia. While flying a drone in inclement weather (e.g. when there was cloud cover that prevented Chinese satellites from being able to spy) Mr. Shi accidentally got a drone stuck in a tree in a residence just outside the Newport News naval yard. This shipyard produces the United States’ nuclear submarines, among other warships.
When Mr. Shi approached the house to try to get his drone out of the tree, the property’s occupant asked for Mr. Shi’s ID. The occupant then took pictures of Mr. Shi’s ID, along with the license plate of Shi’s rental car, and then called the police. The police advised Mr. Shi to remain there while they called the fire department to get the drone out of the tree, but instead, Mr. Shi fled. Federal officials recovered the drone and found forbidden photographs in a memory card that was on the drone.
When the FBI seized the drone and pulled the photos off its memory card, they discovered images that special agent Shalowitz said she recognized as being taken at Newport News Shipyard and BAE Systems, which is a 45-minute drive away. The affidavit states that on the day Shi took the photos, the Newport News Shipyard was “actively manufacturing” aircraft carriers and Virginia class nuclear submarines.
“Naval aircraft carriers have classified and sensitive systems throughout the carriers,” the affidavit states. “The nuclear submarines present on that date also have highly classified and sensitive Navy Nuclear Propulsion Information (‘NNPI’
and those submarines even in the design and construction phase are sensitive and classified.”
Mr. Shi was charged with multiple criminal misdemeanors in violation of the Espionage Act, including the prohibited filming of a military installation, as well as the prohibited use of aircraft to criminally spy on U.S. military facilities. He subsequently pled guilty to several espionage charges. There’s much more that I am getting to, but how is espionage by a foreign national on U.S. soil only a misdemeanor?
In October of this year, Fengyun Shi was sentenced to six months in prison. This October article from the Minneapolis Star Tribune reveals some more information about Mr. Shi that is very troubling….
Mr. Shi bought the drone on January 3, then flew from San Francisco to Norfolk the next day. On January 5 he flew the drone over the BAE shipyard, before heading down to Newport News on January 6, the day his drone got stuck in a tree while photographing the naval shipyard. After he fled from the scene of his snagged drone, he returned to the Bay area in California, where he was arrested on January 18 ”…before he could board a one-way flight to China.”
If all this isn’t crazy enough, at his sentencing in October in U.S. District Court, Fengyun Shi “was also ordered to be on court supervision for one year after his release as part of his sentence under a World War II-era statute that is part of the Espionage Act.”
Why is this convicted spy, who is a Chinese citizen, going to be released into the United States “on court supervision” after his release from federal prison for spying on the Unites States of America?! In what inverted world is this happening?
Coincidentally, the Wall Street Journal reported this story about drones swarming around Virginia military facilities in October of 2024:
The drones headed south, across Chesapeake Bay, toward Norfolk, Va., and over an area that includes the home base for the Navy’s SEAL Team Six and Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval port.
If we don’t want Chinese spies doing surveillance work around U.S. military installations, a blindingly obvious way to stop it is to not allow Chinese spies into our country under cover of student visas or work visas.
Daniel Horowitz noted in a series of tweets that over the past two decades the number of foreign students in America has nearly tripled, to 1.5 million, of which over 330,000 are from China. He added, “The notion that we'd have hundreds of thousands of foreign students from a country we are essentially at war with is insane, especially after espionage and trade theft run rampant.”
It's even more insane that we are letting these foreign “students” who are not even enrolled in college stay in the country so they can spy on our military facilities, and even after they’re convicted and sentenced, they’ll be turned loose in the U.S. to continue spying rather than being deported as hostile foreign agents.
The only explanation for importing foreigners who seek to harm our country is to understand that the people allowing this to happen also seek to weaken and harm the United States.
[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]