The Justice Department announced charges on Tuesday against two Chinese citizens accused of trying to gather military information and help recruit sources from within the U.S. Navy.
Yuance Chen, 38, of Oregon, and Liren Lai, 39, a Chinese citizen in the United States on a tourist visa, were charged with working for years to help the Chinese foreign intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security.
The two men were arrested on Friday as part of a sprawling counterintelligence investigation by the F.B.I. They face charges of acting as undeclared agents of the Chinese government.
The episode comes as the Trump administration tries to more aggressively confront China on a host of issues, including national security, trade and immigration.
In a statement, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Justice Department would “not stand by while hostile nations embed spies in our country.”
According to the criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department, Mr. Lai recruited Mr. Chen about four years ago to work on behalf of the Ministry of State Security. An F.B.I. affidavit said that those efforts included arranging a “dead drop” of $10,000 from Guangzhou, China, for another Chinese intelligence asset in Livermore, Calif., by leaving a backpack stuffed with cash at a locker in a recreational complex.
That money, according to the F.B.I., was payment for information related to U.S. national security.
The pair also worked to gather information about people serving in the U.S. Navy, and to help Chinese intelligence efforts to recruit intelligence assets in the American military, the complaint added.
In one instance, Mr. Chen stopped by a recruitment center in San Gabriel, Calif., where he gathered identifying information for potential recruits that he then shared with an intelligence officer in China. In another instance, according to the complaint, Mr. Chen reached out to a Navy service member over social media, and supplied information about that person to the Ministry of State Security.
The charging documents also asserted that a broader network of people in the United States working at the behest of Chinese intelligence officers aided the pair’s efforts. One of those people, who is not named in court papers, had been working since as early as 2015 to carry out “various clandestine operations in the United States,” according to the F.B.I. affidavit in the case.
The scheme also involved covert communication tools provided by the Ministry of State Security that enabled the Chinese spy agency to communicate with assets in the United States.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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