LOS ANGELES — The case of a lifetime started with a putrid smell and a green garden hose sticking out of the side of a supposedly vacant warehouse in California farm country.
Inside the sprawling building on I Street in Reedley, code enforcement officer Jesalyn Harper found vials filled with liquid — some marked in English or Mandarin, others with just a code — that bore frightening labels such as “Malaria,” “COVID-19” and “HIV.” Refrigerators, lined up in columns along a wall, had labels that read “blood” and “Ebola.”
As she walked deeper into the warehouse, passing lab workers filling pregnancy test kits, she located the source of the smell that had brought her there — droppings from 1,000 lab-tested mice, she told The Times during a recent interview. The workers were nice enough, she said, but when she started asking questions she could feel the mood change.
“I realized I’m in trouble, and I need to get out of this building without tipping them off that I’m scared,” Harper said.
Her discovery blew open an elaborate criminal case with ties to California, Las Vegas and China. The investigation in Reedley found that the lab was part of an elaborate scheme to import COVID tests from China and pass them off as American made.
But there are some who fear the operation was much more complex than that. A congressional committee uncovered payments topping $1 million made to the operator of the Reedley business from banks in the People’s Republic of China.
But this 8/21/25 BBC News article make you go hmmm:
A US Navy sailor in California has been convicted of espionage for selling secrets to a Chinese agent who recruited him through social media.
Jinchao Wei, 25, was convicted of six charges, including espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage and unlawful export of classified data about US Navy ships.
He was paid more than $12,000 (£8,920) over an 18-month period by a Chinese intelligence officer who approached him in February 2022 for information about the USS Essex, which he served on, as well as other naval vessels.
Wei, also known as Patrick Wei, was arrested in August 2023 on espionage charges as he arrived for work on the amphibious assault ship.
"The defendant's actions represent an egregious betrayal of the trust placed in him as a member of the US military," US Attorney Adam Gordon said in a statement after the verdict was read.
"By trading military secrets to the People's Republic of China for cash, he jeopardised not only the lives of his fellow sailors but also the security of the entire nation and our allies."...
A text exchange between Wei and his mother was presented to show that he understood he was committing espionage.
"Other Chinese serving in the US Navy are still trying to figure out how to make extra money, and driving cabs. Whereas I am just leaking secrets," Wei texted his mother.
She responded: "Good job!"...
Wei was arrested alongside Petty Officer Wenheng Zhao, who was arrested on charges of accepting more than $14,800 for sending sensitive photos and videos to a Chinese intelligence officer.
Prosecutors said Zhao transmitted "plans for a large-scale maritime training exercise in the Pacific theatre, operational orders and electrical diagrams and blueprints for a Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar system located in Okinawa, Japan".
Zhao was found guilty last year and sentenced to 27 months in prison.
The woman — identified only as Kay — has been receiving the parcels for over a year now, and they’ve been arriving at such frequency, she’s had no choice but to stack them up in her driveway to maintain some semblance of order....
"The culprit is a China-based Amazon seller called Liusandedian, which peddles faux leather car seat covers that apparently fit few of the models they’re designed for — so customers by the hundreds have been sending the junk products back."
Sellers must supply either a return shipment coupon or a U.S. return address. It appears that they decided it was cheaper to use Kay's address.
For some time, we have been seeing behavior that makes absolutely no sense in a free market: shipping products that you cannot sell and you do not even attempt to get back for resale to someone for whom the product mightcwork; the Atacama Desert dumping of new Chinese-made clothes; the dumping of brand new cars on hillsides in China when an attempt to set up a cheap vehicle sharing scheme failed.
In each case, substantial capital has been invested in making and shipping stuff that makes no profit. This reeks of a command and control economy with no feedback system. China is destroying itself with actions like this that no free market system would tolerate.
If these were items that had some salvage value, she could perhaps benefit from it. But short of making faux animals, I see none. I wonder if some enterprising American could figure out how to transform them into something useful
But national security decisions do not happen in a vacuum. Obama wanted to make a political show by being the man who got Bin Laden. With the advent of a close 2012 re-election campaign approaching, Obama wanted to open that race by ensuring everyone knew it was his decision that led to the end of America’s greatest enemy. Having a raucous Navy SEAL raid, while riskier, was preferable from a political standpoint than simply dropping some bombs on the compound from a drone.
In January 1988, one of Taiwan’s most senior nuclear engineers defected to the United States after passing crucial intelligence on a top-secret program that would alter the course of Taiwan’s history.
"Colonel Chang Hsien-yi was a leading figure in Taiwan’s nuclear weapons project, a closely guarded secret between the 1960s and ‘80s, as Taipei raced to develop its first nuclear bomb to keep pace with China.
"He was also a CIA informant.
"Chang exposed Taiwan’s secret nuclear program to the United States, its closest ally, passing intelligence that ultimately led the US to pressure Taiwan into shutting down the program – which proliferation experts say was near completion."
Our government's desire to stop the spread of nuclear weapons made perfect sense, especially because Taiwan was still far from a functioning democracy at the time. Unlike Chang, I think a nuclear armed Taiwan would be a deterrent to PRC invasion. The possibility of invasion leading to even a small nuclear weapon on Three Gorges dam would be a powerful deterrent. It would be suicidal for Taiwsn to do that, buy this is in the nature of MAD: neither side wants to do something that might provoke such an action.
I suspect that whatever our suppression of their effort caused, they have probably returned to where they were. As someone I know described Japan's nuclear weapons capability relative to the same problem: a screwdrivers's turn away.
