Chinese spy buy caught on surveillance video

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By Bill Gertz

FBI surveillance video made public Sunday reveals details of a Chinese espionage operation to obtain secrets from the Pentagon through a group of Americans who spied for China.

The rare video footage was the high point of a multiyear investigation into Chinese espionage carried out by a ring of military intelligence agents operating from Guangzhou, China.

The tape, made public by CBS' "60 Minutes," was recorded in 2007 with two cameras hidden in a rental car during the investigation of Pentagon analyst Gregg W. Bergersen. The video reveals Bergersen pocketing a wad of about $2,000 in cash from Kuo Tai-shen, a Taiwanese-born spy for the People's Republic of China.

"I'm very, very, very, very reticent to let you have it because it's all classified," Bergersen says to Kuo about classified reports he had in his possession. "But I will let you see it."

Bergersen, who is serving a five-year prison term, then said, "You can take all the notes you want … but if it ever fell into the wrong hands, and I know it's not going to, but if it ever … then I would be fired for sure. I'd go to jail, because I violated all the rules."

Commenting on the video, former FBI agent John Slattery, who oversaw the Bergersen case, told CBS that "information has been passed prior and this is reward for that, or there is expectation that passage of information is forthcoming so that's what's happening here."

According to court papers in the case, Kuo, a businessman who was based in Louisiana, took the information from Bergersen and provided it to another Chinese agent, Kang Yuxin, with details of Taiwan's Po Sheng communications and defense system. Additionally, Bergersen provided Kuo with classified lists of planned U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan over the a five-year period.

Bergersen thought he was providing the classified information to Taiwan, through Kuo, when in fact the information went to China's military intelligence service, known as the Second Department of the People's Liberation Army, or 2PLA, according to court papers.

Bergersen was sentenced to five years in prison in July 2008. Kuo received a 15-year term in May 2008.

The Bergersen case grew out of an earlier spy case involving U.S. defense contractor Chi Mak, who was arrested in 2005 and later convicted of passing embargoed technology to China illegally and for failing to register as a foreign agent. He is serving a 24-year prison term. His brother, Tai Mak, is serving a 10-year prison sentence for his role as a courier, and three other Mak family members also were convicted in the case.