Over the weekend a sensational spy saga appeared in the media, one that the U.S. Navy managed to keep out of the headlines for the last eight months. The Department of the Navy revealed that a career officer has been sitting in a brig in Norfolk, Virginia for months, suspected of espionage on behalf of a foreign power. Although the indictment was heavily redacted, it was obvious that the accused has done serious damage to our national security, not least because the charges—including communicating secret information “relating to the national defense to representatives of a foreign government”—could carry the death penalty.
It did not take long for reporters to uncover that the country the suspect stands accused of spying for is China, and the officer in custody is himself of Chinese origin. Neither of these facts can be considered shocking by those familiar with counterintelligence. Beijing spies aggressively on the United States, especially our navy, which is the major obstacle to China achieving its strategic goals in East Asia, while they mainly stick to their ethnic milieu in espionage. Indeed, Chinese intelligence operations against America that do not involve persons of Chinese origin or extraction are very much the exception.
The accused is Edward Lin, a career Navy officer, a lieutenant commander (equivalent to a major in our other armed services) and a naval flight officer. A graduate of the Naval War College who served as a navy liaison to Congress, his career was clearly going places. Particularly troubling is the fact that Mr. Lin spent much of that career assigned to maritime reconnaissance units, in other words squadrons that fly spy planes. He was assigned to very secret special units that collect signals intelligence from modified P-3 Orion patrol aircraft. In other words, Mr. Lin had to be a goldmine for Beijing, since he could reveal highly classified information regarding what the navy and American intelligence know about China. . . .
We know nothing yet about what Mr. Lin told Beijing, but the unusual degree of secrecy surrounding this case, with the lieutenant commander stashed in the brig for months without press notification, indicates that the navy thinks the damage must be severe indeed. Worse, it is impossible to write the Lin debacle off as some sort of ugly aberration, as navy leadership will want to do. In truth, it’s been evident for several years that the U.S. Navy has lost control of its own security, a development with worrisome ramifications far beyond our navy.
Ominous warning signs have appeared throughout the Obama presidency. When the Washington, DC Navy Yard fell prey to a spree killer in September 2013, leaving a dozen dead plus the shooter, the killer was a navy civilian employee with a history of mental illness including police involvement, and also a secret-level security clearance. Although police reported these incidents, navy security took no action, and the shooter remained able to work and enjoy access to military bases—with fatal consequences. It was evident something was seriously amiss with the navy’s security clearance process.
Just how broken that system actually is has been revealed by several cases since then. Last fall, Mostafa Ahmed Awwad, a navy civilian engineer, was convicted of passing secret information about the navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, to an Egyptian intelligence officer. Rather, to someone Mr. Awwad thought was an Egyptian spy. In reality, it was an FBI agent working undercover: the traitor was stopped before he could actually betray secrets. Left unasked in all this was how Mr. Awwad, a native of Saudi Arabia, got work as a navy engineer with security clearances when his loyalty was clearly not to the United States.
It happened again this February when another navy civilian engineer, James Robert Baker, was charged with repeatedly lying to his employer on his security clearance paperwork. Mr. Baker, who worked for the navy for three decades, was born Majid Karimi in Iran. Over thirty years, Mr. Baker lied flagrantly about his true biography and life events, including the fact that he still possessed an Iranian passport that he traveled on long after taking a job with the navy, a clear violation of security rules.
Worse, Mr. Baker had multiple identities plus significant unexplained affluence—in one case, the shifted around more than $130,000 illicitly. To anyone versed in counterintelligence, it all reeks of foreign intelligence operations. Left unasked here is how an immigrant from Iran, a country that represents one of the biggest threats to the United States—not to mention a top espionage risk—managed to get navy employment and security clearances in the first place, then broke numerous basic security regulations for three whole decades without getting caught.
