Some of them have set up high-rolling lives overseas with lush mansions and millions in offshore accounts. The targets are not murderers or drug lords, but Chinese public officials and businesspeople accused - justifiably and not - of financial crimes. Launched in 2014, Operation Fox Hunt and a program called Operation Sky Net claim to have caught more than 8,000 international fugitives. soil amid growing tensions between the two countries. And it illuminated a little-known cloak-and-dagger battle between Chinese operatives and American agents on U.S. The three-year investigation revealed for the first time the inner workings of Operation Fox Hunt, a shadowy fugitive-apprehension program that is a pillar of President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign.īut it underscored something more troubling: the extent to which China is brazenly persecuting Chinese people around the world, defying other nations’ laws and borders with impunity. Six of them, including the former NYPD detective, were also charged with conspiracy to engage in interstate stalking. Last October, Hu hit the headlines again, this time in the United States, when federal prosecutors in New York charged him and seven others with conspiracy to act as illegal agents for China. When the stage was set, they brought their target’s frail and elderly father from China to New Jersey as human bait - a high-stakes gambit known as an “emotional bomb.” They employed aliases and cover stories to relay money, intelligence and threats. The team did stakeouts while the unsuspecting neighborhood slept. It grew to at least 19 American and Chinese operatives: hired muscle, private detectives (including a former New York Police Department sergeant), and undercover repatriation specialists who slipped in and out of U.S. Locked onto his new target, Hu mobilized his team.
Hu Ji in front of Interpol headquarters Credit: The cop surveyed the large lawn, the trees flanking a brick path, the two-story house behind bushes.ĭon’t tell anyone you brought me here, he said. Stopping the car, Johnny pointed out the location.
He’d already done surveillance to prepare for this visit. So in September 2016, Johnny became an indentured spy. Hu had essentially offered a brutal deal to Johnny and his relatives: If you want to help your family, help us destroy someone else’s.
#Running a spy network trial#
Two months earlier, they had “persuaded” the uncle, a former chief accountant for a provincial aviation agency, to return to China to stand trial for alleged crimes. Johnny’s uncle in Houston had been a target of Hu’s covert team.
#Running a spy network driver#
The driver was a new recruit, a boyish-looking Chinese immigrant in his late 20s who lived in Queens and called himself Johnny. Hu’s driver took an exit into a wooded subdivision, cruising by big homes set back from the two-lane road that wound through one of the country’s wealthiest enclaves. Sometimes, it was best to hide in plain sight. He’d identified himself as a Chinese police officer on his tourist visa, and the Americans hadn’t given him any trouble. The work was riskier here in fact, it was illegal. His cases had led from Fiji to France to Mexico, making headlines back home. He was in his early 40s, about 6-foot-1, smooth and confident-looking.
Hu Ji watched the suburban landscape glide past the highway. Fact-based, independent journalism is needed now more than ever.
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