Involved in training in China since 2023
FBI: "China is exploiting U.S. military expertise"
A former U.S. Air Force pilot has been arrested by authorities on charges of secretly going to China without authorization from the U.S. government and training Chinese Air Force pilots.
According to AFP on the 25th (local time), the U.S. Department of Justice announced in a press release that it had arrested Gerald Brown in Jeffersonville, Indiana, after he had stayed in China since December 2023 and recently returned to the United States. Brown is accused of conspiring with a foreign national to provide training to Chinese Air Force fighter pilots without authorization from the U.S. Department of State.
Brown served in the U.S. Air Force for 24 years, during which he commanded a unit responsible for nuclear weapons delivery systems and carried out various combat missions. He also served as an instructor pilot and simulator instructor for a variety of fighters and attack aircraft, including F-15 and F-16 fighter jets. After leaving the service in 1996, he worked as a cargo aircraft pilot and later signed contracts with U.S. defense companies to work as a simulator instructor for the A-10 attack aircraft and the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet.
Brown began negotiating the terms of a contract to train Chinese Air Force pilots with an individual named Steve Su Bin in August 2023. U.S. authorities believe that he departed for China in December of the same year, provided information about the U.S. Air Force, and began work training military pilots. Steve Su Bin is a Chinese national who previously served a four-year prison sentence in the United States starting in 2016 in connection with another espionage case.
In the same press release, Roman Rozhavsky, Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, said, "This serves as a warning that the FBI and our partners will hold accountable anyone who cooperates with hostile actors seeking to harm the U.S. military and threaten our national security." He went on to criticize, "The Chinese government is exploiting the expertise of current and former U.S. military personnel to advance the modernization of its own armed forces."
Meanwhile, this is not the first time a former U.S. service member has been arrested for training the Chinese military. In 2022, former U.S. Marine Corps pilot Daniel Edmund Duggan was arrested in Australia on charges of providing Chinese military pilots, without authorization from U.S. authorities, with instruction on techniques, procedures, and tactics related to aircraft carrier takeoffs and landings.
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