Inside the murky case of the Chinese ‘bioterrorists'

Telegraph

a day ago

A plot of some kind is afoot. It is August 12 2022 and Yunqing Jian, a young Chinese plant scientist, is flying from Seoul to San Francisco. But she has a problem.
She is apparently carrying contraband – seeds she needs to smuggle through customs. She sends a worried message on the Chinese social media platform WeChat to her boyfriend, Zongong Liu, with whom she had studied plant diseases at Zhejiang University in eastern China.
Mr Liu is calm but practical. He warns that 'teacher Liang's seeds must be placed well' and reminds her she will have to pass through security again after picking up her bags.
Ms Jian is anxious. She considers hiding the seeds in her shoes, but cannot remove the insole, according to a 'condensed' and 'machine-translated' transcript provided by the FBI.
Eventually, they hit on a solution: Ms Jian stuffs the seeds into a tiny zip-lock bag and hides them in her Dr Martens, slipping through airport security undetected.
What the seeds were, no one seems to know. Nor would anyone have found out had Mr Liu allegedly not been more careless on his own trip from Shanghai to Detroit last July.
Following a routine search, US agents discovered a sheet of filter paper and four small resealable plastic bags concealed in a wad of tissue tucked into a hidden pocket of his backpack.
This time, US investigators were able to make a positive identification. Mr Liu was allegedly carrying Fusarium graminearum, a highly destructive fungal pathogen responsible for billions of dollars in agricultural losses every year. The 'toxic' fungus, the FBI said, was 'a potential agroterrorism weapon'.
Mr Liu was deported. Last week, after an 11-month investigation, the FBI arrested Ms Jian, who has been working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. Citing evidence that she had taken an oath of allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the FBI hinted at possible state backing.
The case deepened on Sunday when US authorities arrested another Chinese researcher, Chengxuan Han, upon arrival at Detroit airport. She is suspected of sending four shipments of 'concealed biological material' to the same Michigan lab where Ms Jian worked.
Federal officials were quick to allege a broader conspiracy to harm the United States.
'The alleged actions of these Chinese nationals, including a loyal member of the Chinese Communist Party, are of the gravest national security concerns,' said Jerome Gorgon, US attorney for Michigan's eastern district.
'These two aliens have been charged with smuggling a fungus that has been described as a 'potential agroterrorism weapon' into the heartland of America, where they apparently intended to use a University of Michigan laboratory to further their scheme.'
Some senior figures in the Trump administration echoed the alarm.
Kash Patel, the FBI director who has courted controversy for promoting conspiracy theories, wrote on X: 'This case is a sobering reminder that the CCP is working around the clock to deploy operatives and researchers to infiltrate American institutions and target our food supply… putting American lives and our economy at serious risk.'
Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, praised the investigation and vowed to protect 'our nation from hostile foreign actors who would do us harm.'
But not everyone in the scientific community is convinced the case is as clear-cut as investigators and politicians claim.
It is possible, they say, that Ms Jian and Mr Liu were undercover operatives on a mission to harm US interests. However, it is just as plausible that they were simply a pair of earnest, slightly nerdy researchers engaged in irregular but ultimately harmless research who foolishly tried to skirt American bureaucracy.
There is no doubt that Fusarium graminearum is a dangerous pathogen. It infects cereal crops, leading to shrivelled grains and yield loss. In some cases, it can make livestock and humans sick through mycotoxin contamination.
Yet, as scientists point out, the fungus is already endemic in the United States – and has been for more than a century. It is also widespread in the UK and Europe.
Weaponising the fungus is theoretically possible, says a senior agricultural specialist at the United Nations, who asked not to be named. Both the US and the Soviet Union once explored using a related fungus, Fusarium oxysporum, nicknamed 'Agent Green', in biowarfare targeting crops. But neither fully developed it.
'You could theoretically introduce a new strain during flowering, when cereals are most vulnerable,' he said. 'But as an act of agricultural sabotage, it wouldn't make much sense. It would be detected quickly as monitoring systems are already very stringent.'
While all three Chinese scientists allegedly lied about the work they were doing and the materials they brought into the US, scientists suggest other motives for the cover-up, such as trying to bypass complex phytosanitary importation regulations.
'It seems to me this was bad judgment fuelled by scientific excitement, not agroterrorism,' Caitilyn Allen, of the University of Wisconsin, told Chemistry World, the Royal Society of Chemistry's monthly journal.
She also disputed the FBI's classification of the fungus as an agroterrorism threat: 'Fusarium graminearum does not pose a national security threat.'
Other elements of the FBI case are also under scrutiny. While the agency emphasised Ms Jian's apparent pledge of allegiance to the CCP, this is not unusual among Chinese researchers – it is often a bureaucratic requirement for securing state research funding.
Whether the Chinese scientists were masterminds of a sinister plot or simply reckless is still unclear. Even sympathetic scientists concede their behaviour is, at times, puzzling.
Ms Jian failed to tell her supervisors – or the FBI – that she was working on Fusarium graminearum isolates, some of which her boyfriend in China had provided. Mr Liu claimed he was merely visiting his girlfriend, yet the contents of his backpack suggested otherwise.
Even so, scientists caution that to brand this as 'terrorism' would be a leap.
Further complicating matters is the broader political climate in both countries.
Chinese science is often conducted under heavy secrecy. Beijing has also fuelled international suspicion – particularly over its handling of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Accusations of Chinese involvement in agricultural sabotage are not new. In 2016, four Chinese nationals were arrested in Indonesia for allegedly contaminating chilli seeds with another crop-damaging pathogen.
In 2020, mystery seeds postmarked from China arrived at thousands of homes in the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, raising fears of a co-ordinated biowarfare campaign.
Yet early alarm often gives way to more mundane explanations. Indonesia later convicted the Chinese nationals on visa charges, not agroterrorism. The seed packets were likely part of a marketing ploy known as a 'brushing scam'.
So far, Ms Jian and Ms Han have so far only been charged with visa fraud, making false statements and smuggling, not espionage.
US politics may also be playing a role. Donald Trump, the US president, has pushed to revoke visas for Chinese students as part of a wider immigration clampdown. His administration is actively seeking misconduct cases at American universities to bolster his attacks on higher education.
Some fear the upshot of the case will be a greater suspicion of research and international scientific collaboration – a development, they warn, that would benefit no one.
Yet a balance must be struck between the shared pursuit of research that could aid humanity and the need to protect Western food security from potential state threats, analysts say.
Agriculture a 'soft target' for bioweapons
In intelligence circles, concern is growing over the risk of biological warfare targeting agriculture, even if confirmed attacks remain rare or unproven.
The US military, after all, has previously tested pathogens such as stem rust, rice blast and Agent Green with the aim of using them to destroy opium poppies in Afghanistan and coca crops in Colombia, well after the Cold War.
Since the 9/11 attacks, US security agencies have warned that agriculture is a 'soft target' for bioweapons – a concern shared in the UK where the Ministry of Defence stepped up monitoring of potential bioterror threats following the BSE and foot-and-mouth outbreaks.
Worryingly, as Barry Pavel and Vikram Venkatram noted in a 2021 paper for the Atlantic Council think-tank, the tools for biological sabotage are now more accessible than ever.
'Terrorist groups could use synthetic biology to craft bioweapons, using data to manufacture dangerous pathogens or modifying easily accessible pathogens to make them more virulent,' they wrote.
The work the Chinese researchers were doing, then, can arguably be interpreted in two ways. Either they were modifying pathogens to increase their virulence – a theory the FBI appears to favour – or they were continuing China's century-long quest to develop resistance to Fusarium and combat a blight that has devastated cereal crops across the temperate world.
Which interpretation is correct remains unclear. China has said little about the detention of the two scientists, who remain in custody. But on Tuesday evening, the Ministry of State Security – China's main intelligence agency – issued a statement that, while not directly referring to the case, seemed to offer a third explanation.
It accused foreign research institutions of recruiting volunteers inside China and inducing them 'illegally to collect data on the distribution of biological species in China'. In other words, the three researchers may not have been Chinese agents or naive rule-breakers – but perhaps something altogether more startling: covert operatives working for the United States.