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Dickson Yeo / Facebook
Jun Wei Yeo, an ambitious and newly enrolled Singaporean PhD student, was certainly delighted when he was invited to give a presentation to Chinese academics in Beijing in 2015.
His PhD research was on Chinese foreign policy and he was about to discover first hand how the growing superpower seeks to gain influence.
After his presentation, Jun Wei, also known as Dickson, was approached, according to US court documents, by several people who said they worked for Chinese think tanks. They said they wanted to pay him to provide “reports and political information.” Later they would specify exactly what they wanted: “scuttlebutt” – rumors and insight.
He soon realized they were Chinese intelligence officers, but remained in contact with them, according to an affidavit. He was first asked to focus on Southeast Asian countries, but later his interest turned to the US government.
That’s how Dickson Yeo set out on the path to becoming a Chinese agent, one who would end up using the professional networking website LinkedIn, a bogus consulting company, and who would become a curious scholar to lure American targets.
Five years later, on Friday, amid deep tensions between the United States and China and a determined crackdown by Washington against Beijing spies, Yeo pleaded guilty in a US court to being an “illegal agent of a foreign power.” The 39-year-old man faces up to 10 years in prison.
Students at Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP), which trains some of Asia’s top public officials and government officials, were surprised by the news that their former partner had confessed to being a Chinese agent.
“He was a very active student in class. I always saw him as a very smart person,” said a former graduate student who did not want to be named.
She said she often talked about social inequality, and that her family had financial problems when she was a child. She said it was difficult for her to reconcile the person she knew with her guilty plea.
A former staff member of the institution painted a different image, saying that Yeo seemed to have “an inflated sense of his own importance.”
Yeo’s doctoral supervisor had been Huang Jing, a high-profile Chinese-American professor who was expelled from Singapore in 2017 for being an “unidentified agent of influence from a foreign country”.
Huang Jing always denied those allegations. After leaving Singapore, she worked first in Washington DC and now in Beijing.
According to court documents released with Yeo’s guilty plea, the student met with his Chinese handlers dozens of times in different parts of China.
During a meeting, he was asked to obtain specific information about the US Department of Commerce, Artificial Intelligence and the Sino-US trade war.
Bilahari Kausikan, a former permanent secretary of the Singapore Foreign Ministry, said “he had no doubt that Dickson knew he was working for the Chinese intelligence services.”
He was not, he said, “an unintended useful fool.”
Yeo made his crucial contacts using LinkedIn, the professional networking and job site used by more than 700 million people. The platform was described only as a “professional networking website” in court documents, but its use was confirmed to the Washington Post.
Former government and military employees and contractors have no qualms about publicly posting details of their detailed work histories on the website for lucrative jobs in the private sector.
A screenshot of the now deleted LinkedIn profile of Dickson Yeo
This presents a potential gold mine for foreign intelligence agencies. In 2018, the head of counterintelligence in the United States, William Evanina, warned of Beijing’s “super aggressive” action on the platform owned by Microsoft, which is one of the few Western social networking sites that is not blocked in China.
Kevin Mallory, a former CIA officer jailed for 20 years last May for revealing military secrets to a Chinese agent, was first attacked on LinkedIn.
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In 2017, Germany’s intelligence agency said Chinese agents had used LinkedIn to attack at least 10,000 Germans. LinkedIn has not responded to a request for comment for this story, but previously said it takes a number of steps to stop the nefarious activity.
Some of the targets Yeo found by tracking via LinkedIn were commissioned to write reports for his “consultancy,” which had the same name as an already prominent company. These were sent to his Chinese contacts.
One of the people he contacted worked on the US Air Force F-35 fighter jet program and admitted he was having money problems. Another was a U.S. Army officer assigned to the Pentagon, who was paid at least $ 2,000 (£ 1,500) to write a report on how the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan would affect China.
Finding such contacts, Yeo, who lived in Washington DC for part of 2019, was assisted by an invisible ally: the LinkedIn algorithm. Every time Yeo looked at someone’s profile, he suggested a new list of contacts with similar experience that he might be interested in. Yeo described it as “unforgiving”.
According to court documents, his handlers advised him to ask the targets if they were “not satisfied with the job” or “had financial problems.”
William Nguyen, a former American student at the Lee Kuan Yew school who was arrested at a protest in Vietnam in 2018 and later deported, said in a Facebook post on Saturday that Yeo had attempted to contact him “multiple times” after being released from the Prison and his case made headlines around the world.
In 2018, Yeo also posted bogus online job ads for his consulting firm. He said he received more than 400 CVs, of which 90% come from “US military and government personnel with security clearance.” Some were passed on to their Chinese handlers.
Using LinkedIn is blatant, but not surprising, said Matthew Brazil, co-author of Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Manual.
“I think many intelligence agencies around the world probably use it to search for sources of information,” he said. “Because it’s in the interest of everyone on LinkedIn to put their entire careers there for everyone to see, it’s an unusually valuable tool in that regard.”
He said that launching consultant reports is a way for agents to “snag” to a potentially valuable source that could then be persuaded to provide classified information.
“It is a modern version of classic commerce, really.”
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US Deputy Attorney General for Homeland Security John Demers said the case was an example of how China exploits “the openness of American society” and uses “non-Chinese citizens to attack Americans who never leave states. United”.
Singapore, a multicultural society of 5.8 million people where ethnic Chinese make up the majority of the population, has long enjoyed close ties to the United States, which uses its air and naval bases. But it has also sought and maintained positive relations with China.
Kausikan said he did not believe that the espionage case, the first known to involve a Singaporean, would harm the country’s reputation with the US government, but feared that Singaporeans might face greater suspicions in American society.
On Sunday, the Singapore Interior Ministry said investigations had not revealed any direct threat to the country’s security stemming from the case.
LKYSPP Dean Danny Quah wrote in an email to the faculty and students, quoted by the Straits Times, that “no faculty or other students at our school are known to be involved” in the Yeo case.
A school spokesperson told the BBC that Yeo had been granted a PhD absence permit in 2019 and that his application had now been canceled.
Dickson Yeo doesn’t seem to have gotten as far with his contacts as his managers would have liked. But in November 2019, he traveled to the US with instructions to make the army officer a “permanent conduit for information,” according to his signed statement.
He was arrested before I could ask.
