China’s navy and air force have been “aggressively recruiting Western military talent” to train their aviators in complex aerial maneuvers taught by U.S. armed forces, the American-led Five Eyes intelligence sharing network said in a bulletin on Wednesday.
The warning came as former Marine and naturalized Australian citizen Daniel Duggan, 55, fights to avoid extradition to the United States after being accused of training Chinese military pilots at a school in South Africa from 2010 to 2012, when he was a U.S. citizen.
The joint bulletin from the Five Eyes countries – the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand – warns that China's People's Liberation Army "continues to target current and former military personnel" to train pilots in advanced techniques.
Recruitment is “not always obvious, as companies may not initially promote the PLA’s role,” it says. “Job locations may be in China, South Africa, or elsewhere, with lucrative contracts and the opportunity to fly exotic aircraft, with vague details on the ultimate customers.”
Western nations have taken action to counter the threat, the bulletin adds, including putting “commercial restrictions” on private schools like the Test Flying Academy of South Africa, where Duggan worked and said he believed he was only training civilian Chinese pilots.
Duggan, who became an Australian citizen in 2012 and has six school-aged children with his Australian wife, was charged with violating the U.S. Arms Export Control Act for accepting US$100,000 to train Chinese pilots without permission from the State Department.
According to an indictment, Duggan provided "instruction on the tactics, techniques and procedures associated with launching aircraft from and landing aircraft on a naval aircraft carrier" and acquired a U.S. Navy and Marines training aircraft – a T2-Buckeye – to assist.
He also lived in Beijing between 2014 and 2020, according to reports, and was an acquaintance of convicted Chinese hacker Su Bin, who was arrested in Canada in 2016 and charged with theft of U.S. military aircraft designs by hacking American defense contractors.
Duggan renounced his American citizenship at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 2016, and was arrested in Australia in October 2022. He has since been held in a maximum security prison two hours west of Sydney, from which he has strenuously denied the accusations.
Michael Casey, the director of the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said Wednesday’s bulletin was meant to warn ex-service members that China’s efforts to recruit them “continue to evolve in response” to countermeasures by Five Eyes militaries.
The bulletin should “deter any current or former Western service members from actions that put their military colleagues at risk and erode our national security,” he said.