Chinese Spy Caught, Too Late

Washington Post reports: (If this doesn't disturb you, there's a problem.)

Prosecutors called Chi Mak the "perfect sleeper agent," though he hardly looked the part. For two decades, the bespectacled Chinese-born engineer lived quietly with his wife in a Los Angeles suburb, buying a house and holding a steady job with a U.S. defense contractor, which rewarded him with promotions and a security clearance. Colleagues remembered him as a hard worker who often took paperwork home at night.

Eventually, Mak's job gave him access to sensitive plans for Navy ships, submarines and weapons. These he secretly copied and sent via courier to China -- fulfilling a mission that U.S. officials say he had been planning since the 1970s.

And it seems that there have been a whole slew of recent arrests of Chinese agents, posing as students, scientists, and more. Some of them have been here for years, seemingly totally assimilated to American culture.

The president, both the current one and the next, must deal with this situation. There needs to be a lot more caution about Chinese nationals in the United States and a lot more caution regarding classified technological information. Mostly, we need to use, publicly, language of moral reproach toward the People's Republic. Call them by name; tell the world what they are. Perhaps there is also an opportunity here to kill two birds with one stone: for example, cancel $500 million in federal debt to China for every spy that is discovered. We need some concrete way of phasing out economic ties with them, or more moderately to use economic pressure to achieve the goals of releasing political prisoners, ending the persecution of Christians and Falun Gong, backing away from Taiwan, and giving incrementally more autonomy to Tibet.

Now that I think about it a bit more, I think the Beijing Olympics are going to be a good thing. We need to use them to continue to step up reporting on China's crimes against humanity, their imperialism, their aggression. Drew Sharp mentioned that we failed to recognize the British monarchy a hundred years ago in the Olympic Games in London; let's go, show them up, and have our athletic contingent publicly disrespect China's overlords for their heinous crimes.