A person the feds say is a spy for the Chinese authorities was arrested by the FBI in Boston.
Litang Liang, who was born in 1959 making him 63 or 64, has been federally indicted on conspiracy to behave as an agent of a overseas authorities and performing as an agent of a overseas authorities with out discover to the lawyer basic.
He was arrested Tuesday, the identical day his indictment was unsealed.
Liang made an preliminary look in federal courtroom in Boston the place an interpreter was sworn in and he was knowledgeable of the costs towards him. Aziza Hawthorne of the federal defender’s workplace in Boston was provisionally appointed for Liang’s protection for this listening to solely. Magistrate Judge Jennifer C. Boal scheduled an arraignment and detention listening to for May 11 at 2:30 p.m.
The indictment alleges that Liang labored with a handler and extra People’s Republic of China officers — the variety of individuals listed as “PRC OFFICIAL” within the doc numbers at the least seven — out of the consulate in New York City to spill the tea on a variety of Boston-area individuals the Chinese Communist Party discover problematic.
Among the allegations are that Liang supplied the Chinese authorities — by his New York consulate handler — on varied organizations and folks in Boston, organized a counter-protest towards pro-democracy Chinese dissidents in Boston and despatched off dossiers on potential recruits for the PRC’s Ministry of Public Security. The exercise is alleged to have taken place from the summer time of 2018 by 2022.
Some of his alleged exercise, together with photographing anti-PRC dissidents in entrance of the Boston Public Library in September 2019, put faces and names to U.S.-based activists who he described as a “bunch of clowns trying to cause trouble.”
He communicated each by phone and the cellphone app WeChat, the indictment says. WeChat is described within the doc because the worldwide model of the Chinese app Weixin, a social media software with greater than a billion energetic customers, which shops its knowledge on servers off U.S. shores.
The first alleged interplay between Liang and his PRC handler got here in July 2018, when Liang purportedly let the official know that somebody had destroyed PRC flags in Chinatown and he allegedly named a former “student activist” he believed to be accountable.
The subsequent month, Liang purportedly inquired in regards to the “political standing” of an area lawyer, which exhibits early inroads into native pro-democracy or pro-Taiwan organizations that make up a lot of the allegations towards him. The indictment alleges that he reported again on the membership — together with names — and actions of a number of such native teams.
As his alleged spying exercise broadened, he was put in contact with more and more senior PRC officers, together with an official who directed a subsidiary of the United Front Work Department, a company that the federal U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission says exists to “co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Community Party.”
By January 2019, the feds allege, Liang had co-founded the New England Alliance for the Peaceful Unification of China and started serving as its vp. The group was first organized in Quincy on Jan. 22, 2019, based on state company filings. Liang final appeared on the group’s 2021 annual report filed with the state, however neither his identify nor the place of “Vice President” seems on the 2022 submitting.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”