Tag: espionage

Accused CCP Spy’s Circle Linked to Sinaloa Cartel Stash House and Cambodian Scam Empire

A California real estate agent accused of spying for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is tied through her romantic partner to a house the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) identified as a stash house for a Sinaloa Cartel money-laundering network. Her partner’s business connections also lead to the alleged enforcer of a Cambodian scam empire.

FBI agents arrested Wanying “Heather” Zhang, 34, of Irvine, at Los Angeles International Airport on October 4, 2026, as she prepared to board a flight to Shanghai. A federal grand jury indicted her on October 9 on charges of conspiracy and acting as an unregistered agent of the People’s Republic of China. Her trial is scheduled for November 30 in federal court in Santa Ana.

Investigators believe Zhang received the surveillance assignment during a June 2025 meeting with a Chinese government contact in Changsha, China. On September 1, 2025, she and a companion identified in the complaint as “Individual 1” flew from Las Vegas to Seattle, rented a car, and drove to the home of Ting-Yu Lai, the son of Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te.

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Was Jeffrey Epstein a Spy?

Was Jeffrey Epstein a spy? The Epstein-is-a-spy parlor game has been going on for years. There are plenty of reasons to believe that he could have been an intelligence asset, but the House Oversight Committee report reaches no such conclusions.

There are legitimate questions about how this guy could move through the world with such impunity without government cover. The Committee plumbed ideas about how Epstein got acceptance and cover from legitimate business and elite society big shots, and did, in fact, ask if his advantages came from intelligence ties.

The Oversight Committee, looking into the government’s treatment of the pervert’s activities, found suspicious, though inconclusive, insights into this question. Spoiler alert: The Oversight Committee Report found massive problems with the government investigations into Epstein, as I reported in Epstein Report: Victim NDAs Blocked Justice, While Dems Just Wanted to Get Trump.

But what of the espionage ties?

Who else could possess passports with aliases for different countries — including Saudi Arabia — in his possession? That sounds like spycraft, doesn’t it?

Who has a girlfriend/accomplice whose dad was a suspected Mossad agent? Was Ghislaine Maxwell an intelligence asset?

Who was besties with the former head of Israeli intelligence and former Israeli PM Ehud Barak? Epstein.

Some of the suspicions about Epstein’s ties to intelligence came directly from reporting about Alexander Acosta, the former head of the Department of Justice’s South Florida U.S. Attorneys’ Office. Acosta allegedly said that Epstein “’belonged to intelligence’ — though Acosta denied ever making this statement during his transcribed interview with the Committee.”

These are tantalizing issues which are not conclusively answered in the House Oversight Committee majority report (there’s no minority report yet) about the government’s handling of the Epstein case. But they do offer some details from recycled media reports found in the footnotes.

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US Army Soldier Arrested In England Over Russian Spying – And Where He Worked Is The Alarming Part

A 41-year-old US Army soldier was arrested near Gloucester, England, on Tuesday on suspicion of spying for Russia while assigned to NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, the alliance’s British-led rapid-deployment headquarters.

London’s Metropolitan Police said the arrest was made as part of a Counter Terrorism Policing investigation, on suspicion of offenses under sections 1 and 3 of the National Security Act 2023: obtaining, copying, retaining or disclosing “protected information,” and assisting a foreign intelligence service. “The country to which the allegations relate is Russia,” the force said. The soldier, who has not been named, is in custody at a London police station, and officers are searching two addresses in Gloucestershire.

A senior NATO military official confirmed to NBC News that the American service member “was assigned to NATO’s” ARRC, whose headquarters sits at Imjin Barracks on the outskirts of Gloucester. Three people familiar with the matter told the network the same.

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China dismisses as a smear campaign claims of a spy plot involving Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

China denied on Monday it engaged in an attempt to ensnare Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, saying the spying allegations were unsubstantiated and a smear campaign against Beijing.

Huang has acknowledged he had been intimate with a business executive, issuing an apology to his wife and to the company in an open letter posted on Nvidia’s website. He did not name the woman.

Nvidia announced Sunday it was conducting an independent investigation into reports that Huang was the “target of a foreign intelligence effort.”

The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence determined that the woman was gathering information for Beijing.

“I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security,” Huang said in his letter.

In a routine news briefing Monday, a Chinese spokesperson rejected claims it used the woman as a spy.

“The so-called Chinese spy allegation is unsubstantiated. It is nothing but smears against China,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Guo Jiakun said on Monday.

Beijing earlier had dismissed The New York Times report saying Huang had developed a close relationship with a Chinese citizen named Alice Huang, who ran a company that last year faced claims it was illicitly shipping advanced Nvidia computer chips into China.

Nvidia shares dropped roughly 5% in pre-market trading early Monday.

The New York Times said Alice Huang was a former executive of a Singapore-based data center company called Megaspeed International, whose website prominently touts its partnership with Nvidia.

Many offices in Singapore were closed on Monday for a holiday. Megaspeed and the Singapore Ministry of Home Affairs did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

Nvidia is one of the world’s most valuable publicly traded companies, alongside Apple and Microsoft. Its sales of computer chips to China have at times been targeted by U.S. regulators seeking to limit Beijing’s access to such technology.

“The key questions are whether he was aware of any espionage activities and whether any confidential or strategically sensitive information was compromised,” said George Chen, a partner and chair of digital practice at The Asia Group, a Washington-based consultancy.

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Nvidia Boss Jensen Huang Admits Affair with Suspected Chinese Spy, Board Launches Investigation

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted in a message to company employees that he had an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence believes is a Chinese spy, prompting the company’s board to open an independent investigation on Sunday.

Axios reports that Huang’s admission came in a draft email to Nvidia staff obtained by the outlet. “I owe my family and all of you an apology,” he wrote. “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did.”

The woman has been identified as Alice Huang a tech executive turned alleged Chinese spy who was recruited to gather information from Jensen Huang and potentially press him to support making Nvidia’s advanced chips available in China, despite existing export restrictions.

Breitbart News previously reported that Nvidia denied an improper relationship between its CEO and the Chinese woman:

Authorities were already investigating whether Alice Huang was helping China obtain restricted advanced Nvidia AI chips before surveillance revealed she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, according to a report by the New York Times. The discovery raised alarms due to Huang’s central role in the global AI race as the CEO of Nvidia, which produces the most powerful AI chips in the world.

Nvidia, meanwhile, said Megaspeed is an ordinary regional customer and that Jensen Huang’s meetings with Alice Huang are routine CEO interactions with customers.

“Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a C.E.O.’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year,” Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo told the Times.

Rizzo added that Nvidia is “confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know,” and that customers like Megaspeed “receive ordinary business information — not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets — and zero information relevant to national security.”

The timing is awkward: Huang has been a vocal advocate for loosening restrictions on selling advanced AI chips to China, a position he held even as the relationship was unfolding.

Nvidia’s board announced Sunday that an independent committee, assisted by outside counsel, would investigate the matter. The board said it has no reason to believe that national security or company secrets were compromised, and it backed Huang to keep running the company.

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Ukraine Field Report: Russian Ballistic Missiles Hit Kyiv as Germany Arrests Suspected Russian Spy

Russian forces struck Kyiv with three waves of ballistic missiles overnight into October 22, killing one person and injuring 24, including four children, according to city authorities.

The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia launched Iskander-M, S-400, Zircon, and Onyx missiles, along with 210 drones, 110 of them jet-powered. Air defenses shot down 181 drones. Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia fired 21 missiles at the capital and struck targets across 12 regions.

The State Emergency Service reported damage in six Kyiv districts. In Dniprovskyi, one person was killed and six were injured, including a child, as fires engulfed homes and cars. In Pechersk, strikes damaged buildings, ambulances, and a monastery, injuring eight people, including three children.

A missile hit a non-residential building in Holosiivskyi, injuring six people, while two others were injured in Obolonskyi. A restaurant complex burned in Sviatoshynskyi, and transport infrastructure was damaged in Darnytskyi.

In the Bucha district, a drone struck near a store, damaging homes as well as cars on the highway and wounding a 59-year-old. Kyiv was also hit last month.

In the north, Russia struck an enterprise in Chernihiv twice with Banderol munitions, killing a 61-year-old man and injuring a 54-year-old man, regional head Viacheslav Chaus said. A Shahed-type drone also set fire to a warehouse at an agricultural enterprise in Semenivka.

In Sumy Oblast, nearly 60 Russian attacks hit 26 settlements across 14 communities, killing a 74-year-old man and injuring five people.

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How a Citizen Bought a Kidnapping From Israel’s Spy-for-Hire

On New Year’s Eve in 2023, on the Danish side of the border with Germany, two children stood near their father’s house watching fireworks. The boy was ten, his sister thirteen. A team of masked men in black stormed the house, beat the father to the ground, and took the two children. One of them pressed a distress button that summoned Danish police, who tracked the group as it moved on foot toward the border. When the children cried out, their captors taped their mouths. After thirty-five minutes they crossed into Germany and drove eight hundred kilometers south, and two days later the mother collected them at her home in Hamburg. The men who did this were not relatives and not street criminals. They were hired professionals, and somewhere there was a price.

The capabilities used that night, the watching, the fabrication of evidence, the seizure of a person and their removal across a frontier, once belonged to states alone. They have moved into private companies that sell them to private buyers, and the firms at the center of this case are Israeli, staffed by veterans of the country’s intelligence services. Reaching that market is not a matter of walking in off the street. It runs through insiders, the retired officers and officials who know which company does what, and in this instance the alleged broker was a former chief of German intelligence and the alleged organizer a former head of an Israeli security service. That is what should trouble a reader who will never meet a spy. The instruments of the state are available for purchase, and the people selling and brokering them are the same people who once wielded them on the public’s behalf.

Christina Block, 52, owns eight percent of the company her father built from a German steakhouse chain, and is worth hundreds of millions of euros. She married Stephan Hensel in 2005 and divorced him in 2014, and a long custody war followed over their two youngest children. German courts first granted custody to the father, then on appeal to Block. Denmark, where Hensel had settled with the children and which is the one European Union country not obliged to recognize another member state’s custody rulings, held its own hearings and decided the children would stay with him. By the account German prosecutors have put before the Hamburg court, the effort to get them back began in 2021 with Block’s partner, the sports journalist Gerhard Delling, and an early attempt to smear the father and his lawyer as pedophiles, which failed.

What the prosecution describes next is an escalation, and the exact wording matters. By spring 2023, prosecutors say, Block allegedly turned to an Israeli company called Cyber Cúpula Operations, which the same reporting describes as previously employed by the family for cyber protection, and asked its staff to “rescue” the children. Der Spiegel’s reporting puts the earlier retainer the same way, hedged, with the firm said to have been engaged by the Block business for information security. Prosecutors also say Block had earlier hired the same firm to smear her ex-husband, and German prosecutors allege a further attempt to frame him by planting a hard drive loaded with child-abuse material. Each of these is an allegation within the prosecution’s case rather than a finding, and every defendant denies involvement.

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Trump Admin, US Businesses ‘Need To Be Wary’ Of AI Espionage, Intelligence Chief Warns

Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton warned that both the Trump administration and American companies “need to be wary” of foreign espionage with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), which the government now refers to as super intelligence.

Clayton, who leads the Trump administration’s Super Intelligence Force, told CNBC in a Friday interview that maintaining U.S. leadership in the AI race is critical in the face of potential foreign espionage. He noted that while AI platforms and capabilities can be used for “very good purposes,” they can also be used for “nefarious purposes.”

The intelligence chief’s comments came after President Donald Trump’s Super Intelligence Force held its first meeting at the White House on Thursday. Clayton told CNBC that the meeting was “very good” and that it built on the voluntary accord signed by Trump and multiple technology industry leaders at the White House on Sept. 29.

Asked whether Americans should be concerned about foreign espionage with AI companies, Clayton said Friday that both commercial and state-sponsored espionage are a reality facing the United States.

“It’s something that our private-sector companies need to be wary of, we as a government need to be wary of,” he said.

Clayton told CNBC that it was important for the United States to “stay on the cutting edge” of AI capabilities in order to address concerns regarding AI advances by U.S. adversaries.

“We’re not the only ones developing it. There are vectors in this technology that are coming from some of our known adversaries and competitors,” he said. “The Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans all have significant technical capability. We need to stay ahead of them.“

Many of the risks posed by AI are linked to cybersecurity and digital infrastructure, Clayton told CNBC. He described the U.S. digital infrastructure as critical infrastructure, covering everything from public utilities, such as water and electricity, to national defense.

While cybersecurity risks are not new, the rise of AI “amplifies” those risks, Clayton said. To address the risks, he said the United States is “focused on hardening those systems” and is committed to staying ahead of “nefarious actors” in the AI race.

Clayton’s warning regarding foreign espionage attempts linked to AI came after prosecutors and company officials said on Oct. 13 that Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi national and software engineer working for OpenAI, was arrested on allegations that he concealed a sophisticated recording device in an OpenAI office.

According to a court complaint, the office Alfozan allegedly planted a recording device in was frequently used to hold meetings involving highly confidential information, including government engagements, commercial relationships, product plans, and strategic decisions.

In a Tuesday press release, Clayton described the incident as a “serious situation [that] underscores why winning the global super intelligence race is a national security prerogative.”

During Friday’s interview on CNBC, Clayton added that the incident involving the Saudi software engineer at OpenAI “shows the lengths that people will go to try and supplant our leadership in this, or at least stay close to us, in this emerging technology.”

The intelligence chief’s warning also followed a series of AI swarm breaches, which has led some industry leaders to suggest that the pace of AI development needs to be slowed down and the technology needs additional oversight.

A report released last month by Anthropic found that the Iranian regime used the company’s AI models to track and target U.S. Navy ships in the Middle East. The report also said that a Chinese-linked operation used Claude to track and attempt to recruit Uyghurs who joined the Syrian army to become spies.

In addition, Anthropic’s report found that individuals affiliated with the Chinese regime used Claude and supporting Chinese AI systems to surveil groups targeted by the regime. Those targeted by the China-linked individuals included members of the Tibetan Buddhist civil society, practitioners of Falun Gong, Catholic cardinals, Presbyterian Church leaders, the New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts, and NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet.

Trump announced the formation of the Super Intelligence Force earlier this month to oversee U.S. AI policies. Clayton told CNBC that the White House task force took a number of actions during its inaugural meeting on Thursday.

Those actions included outlining a plan to implement the accords signed by technology leaders, tasking the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology with conducting a risk study, establishing committees covering different AI issues, and developing a system for the Department of Labor to regularly report on the impacts of AI on the U.S. workforce and economy.

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Russia Arrests Japanese Journalist On Espionage Charges, Tokyo Summons Ambassador

Relations between Russian and Japan have been on a downward spiral of late, as Tokyo continues cozying up to the US military as well as NATO, and amid a long-simmering dispute over the Kuril Islands, which Japan identifies as its own Northern Territories.

Russia on Tuesday arrested a Japanese journalist, which the Kremlin says is actually a spy operating on behalf of the Japanese government.

The detained Japanese national has been identified as Yuki Imai, who works for Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper – a regional outlet for Japan’s northern island. Hokkaido is one of the country’s four main islands and the daily paper he writes for has large dissemination.

The FSB security agency has accused the man of utilizing media sources to gather intelligence, specifically on Russia’s defense and intelligence capabilities.

Russian officials say they caught him retaining and storing sensitive data, in a saga that sounds parallel to the saga of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in 2023-2024.

Imai was reportedly preparing to exit the country upon his detention in the far eastern Sakhalin region.

Tokyo did not immediately issue a full-throated condemnation, only saying that the government is gathering more information on the identity of the detained and the circumstances of the case.

Toward this end, the Russian ambassador to Japan has been summoned, with a protest lodged over the detention, centered on the Kremlin issuing strong accusations yet without providing any explanation to Tokyo.

Japanese and European officials are now seeking access to the detained suspect, even as Russian state media has been airing footage of him in handcuffs.

The footage shows security raiding where he was staying and proceeding to search his electronic devices and belongings while he was held on the floor.

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British Raven System Burned by Ukrainian Defector Intel

The British public is still being told that every new shipment of weapons to Kiev is a righteous investment in democracy. The reality on the ground in the Sumy direction is simpler and far uglier. A Raven air defence system, one of the specialised short-range launchers London rushed into service for Ukraine, has been destroyed by a Russian Lancet. The strike did not come from routine reconnaissance. It came from coordinates provided by a Ukrainian soldier who had had enough.

That soldier was not a high-ranking defector or a carefully cultivated agent. He was a man inside the system who decided the beatings, the corruption, and the forced service were no longer worth enduring. He contacted Russian intelligence, gave the precise location, and the Lancet did the rest. The Raven, estimated at six to eight million pounds, is gone. Each of its ASRAAM missiles costs roughly a quarter of a million pounds. British money, British engineering, British political capital — all of it converted into scrap by a single tip from the other side’s own ranks.

The Raven itself is a classic example of the improvised Western approach. Engineers took surplus ASRAAM missiles, mounted them on Supacat trucks using launch rails stripped from retired RAF aircraft, and shipped the result to Ukraine in record time. Thirteen systems were delivered. Official claims spoke of hundreds of engagements and high success rates against drones and cruise missiles. Those claims now sit alongside the wreckage near Sumy. Mobility and “shoot-and-scoot” tactics were supposed to keep these systems alive. They did not survive the moment a Ukrainian soldier decided his own command was the greater threat.

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