Billionaire Liu Ruopeng demonstrated a Martin Jetpack at an innovator conference in Shenzhen, China in July 2015. He has been described as the “Elon Musk of China”, is the Director of the Shenzhen Kuang-Chi Research Institute, and holds hundreds of patents in China.
But in 2006, Ruopeng was a graduate student at Duke University, studying and working under Dr. David Smith, one of the world’s foremost experts on metamaterials. Ruopeng, Smith, and others developed a new technology described as an invisibility cloak, which could potentially be used to hide military vehicles from radar and other forms of electronic scanning one day in the future. Ruopeng was neither the smartest nor the hardest-working grad student in the lab, but he successfully convinced Dr. Smith to begin an ill-conceived partnership with a laboratory in China.
Soon, Ruopeng brough other Chinese workers into the lab to photograph everything and begin recreating it separately in China. Smith eventually ended the partnership after pressure from the US government, but the damage was done. Ruopeng returned to China, built an empire founded on the work he took from Duke University, and is now one of China’s leading scientists and industrialists.
Universities both in the United States and abroad have long been hotbeds of espionage. Ideological students are recruited to work for foreign governments, and sensitive research and technology are frequently stolen for the benefit of adversarial countries. Meanwhile, the FBI and CIA leverage foreign students and faculty into potential recruits who will continue to work for US intelligence after they return to their home countries.
For episode 32 of the Spycraft 101 podcast, I spoke with Dan Golden, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities. We discuss several varied cases including Liu Ruopeng, Cuban spies Ana Montes and Marta Rita Velazquez, and Glenn Duffie Shriver.
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