Chenguang Gong, a 59-year-old resident of San Jose, pled guilty on Monday to stealing missile-tracking technology from a research and development firm in the Los Angeles area.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) described Gong as a dual citizen of the United States and China. He came to the United States around 1993 and became a U.S. citizen in 2011. He earned a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from Clemson and has done Ph.D. work at Stanford.
He was hired by the unnamed research and development firm in January 2023 as an “application-specific integrated circuit design manager responsible for the design, development and verification of its infrared sensors.”
Three months after he was hired, Gong allegedly began downloading thousands of files from his work computer to “personal storage devices.” Many of those files contained proprietary data and trade secrets, including details of a space-based system for detecting missile launches and tracking hypersonic weapons.
The company Gong took the files from was also involved with designing sensors that allow American military aircraft to detect and defeat heat-seeking missiles.
Gong was terminated by the “victim company” in April 2023. By that time, he had evidently accepted a job at a competing company, but he was still downloading sensitive files to his personal storage devices. DOJ said the data he downloaded was “worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Investigators digging into Gong’s background discovered he applied to Communist China’s “Talent Programs” on numerous occasions between 2014 and 2022, during which time he worked for “several major technology companies in the United States.”
China has several initiatives for aggressively recruiting foreign technology experts, the most infamous being the Thousand Talents Program (TTP). U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies say the talent programs have often been used to recruit espionage agents and steal valuable intellectual property for China.
“Gong travelled to China several times to seek Talent Program funding in order to develop sophisticated analog-to-digital converters. In his Talent Program applications, Gong underscored that the high-performance analog-to-digital converters he proposed to develop in China had military applications,” DOJ noted.
Gong allegedly wrote emails that indicated his desire to help China advance the military capabilities of its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and he was clearly aware he could get in deep trouble for transferring sensitive technology from his employers to the PLA.
The Justice Department’s announcement of Gong’s guilty plea did not indicate if he was suspected of transferring military technology to China from the L.A.-area company that employed him from January to April 2023.
The FBI recovered several of Gong’s data storage devices when it searched his residence in May 2023, but at least two of his hard drives were missing, and their whereabouts remain unknown.
Gong’s sentencing hearing will be held in September. He is currently free on $1.75 million bond, but could face up to ten years in federal prison.
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