Free Republic

The last defendant in an extended family charged with conspiring to export U.S. defense technology to China reached a plea deal that brought the case to an abrupt end, authorities said Wednesday. Rebecca Laiwah Chiu, 63, reached the deal with federal prosecutors late Tuesday on the eve of her trial on charges of conspiracy to export defense articles, failure to register as a foreign agent and making false statements to the FBI. Chiu instead pleaded guilty to one count of acting as a foreign agent without registering with the U.S. government and will serve three years in prison, said her...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The case against three alleged Chinese agents is set to return to court Monday with testimony from an FBI official that could help explain why the government has filed only one criminal charge despite making sweeping claims of conspiracy and theft. Chinese-American engineer Chi Mak, his wife, Rebecca Laiwah Chiu, and brother Tai Wang Mak pleaded not guilty Nov. 22 to charges that they were unregistered agents for China. Each was indicted on a single count even though an affidavit submitted last month by FBI Special Agent James Gaylord alleged they had committed crimes ranging from...

LOS ANGELES – The FBI knew about Chi Mak's retirement plans, what his dining room looked like and what he allegedly took home from work. The 66-year-old engineer for a Southern California defense contractor and his 57-year-old brother, Tai Mak, were under surveillance for months. Agents tapped the Maks' phones, planted listening devices in their cars, sifted through their trash and installed a closed-circuit camera above Chi Mak's dining-room table. Investigators suspected Chi Mak was taking restricted documents about naval technology from his job at Anaheim-based defense contractor Power Paragon and passing them to his brother, who was going to...

LOS ANGELES Two family members were charged Wednesday in the federal case against a Chinese-American engineer accused of trying to send sensitive information about Navy warships to China. An indictment returned by a grand jury in Santa Ana charged Billy Mak, 26, and his mother, Fuk Heung Li, 48, with making false statements and acting as agents of a foreign government, namely China, without prior notification to the U.S. attorney general, said FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller. Billy Mak is the nephew of Chi Mak, who allegedly took computer disks from an Anaheim defense contractor where he was lead engineer on...

SANTA ANA, Calif. - A federal judge on Monday denied bail for two Chinese nationals accused of conspiring to steal sensitive documents on U.S. Navy warship technology and smuggle them to China. Tai Wang Mak, a broadcast and engineering director for the Phoenix North American Chinese Channel, and his wife, Fuk Heung Li, were arrested Oct. 28 in Los Angeles as they prepared to board a flight to China. In Li's luggage, authorities found a disk that contained information on U.S. technology designed to suppress the noise of submarine propulsion systems, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Deirdre Eliot. The disk had...

"... the next-generation destroyer, DD(X), with its two fully automated 155mm guns capable of firing 10 Global Positioning System-guided rounds per minute up to 83 nautical miles from an expandable 920-round magazine..." Passionate advocates of returning our Nation's two battleships to service maintain that these two ships could be brought back into service quickly, safely and economically to meet Marine Corps requirements for long-range, precise firepower ashore...we should not confuse our fondness for those ships with an assumption of their appropriateness for the task at hand. ...If reactivated, the battleships would not be able to fire munitions "as far as...

The Navy's new destroyer, the DD(X), is becoming so expensive that it may end up destroying itself. The Navy once wanted 24 of them. Now it thinks it can afford 5 - if that. A rendering of a DD(X) destroyer. The price of the Navy's new ships, driven upward by old-school politics and the rusty machinery of American shipbuilding, may scuttle the Pentagon's plans for a 21st-century armada of high-technology aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines. Shipbuilding costs "have spiraled out of control," the Navy's top admiral, Vern Clark, told Congress last week, rising so high that "we can't build the...