Nvidia tech titan Jensen Huang is hardly the only high-profile power broker whose world has been upended by news that he could have been compromised by pillow talk with a Chinese spy. The company’s founder announced his resignation on Thursday.
Huang is not the only bold-faced name taken down by extramarital Chinese spy allegations. Former California Congressman Eric Swalwell was duped by a campaign volunteer who was actually eyes and ears for China’s Ministry of State Security, according to the Justice Department. This year alone, a Los Angeles area mayor and a ritzy Orange County realtor were hit with federal charges for spying.
Wanying “Heather” Zhang, 34, was arrested last month at Los Angeles International Airport before she could hop on a plane back to China on charges that she was spying on the Taiwanese President’s son on behalf of her motherland while living in Irvine. She is now charged with operating as an unregistered foreign agent.
In the July issue, Los Angeles investigated the case of Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang, arrested by federal prosecutors in L.A. for secretly funneling intelligence to China. Wang pleaded guilty this summer to acting as an unregistered foreign agent, and was slated to be sentenced in October. After a flurry of sealed filings, the disposition of her federal case in California’s Central District remains unclear.
Former California Congressman Eric Swalwell’s mounting problems connected to allegations of sexual misconduct were ramped up this summer when the FBI raided his home, the same week the White House released documents connected to his own affair with a Chinese spy more than a decade ago. That Chinese spy, a fetching young former campaign volunteer for Swalwell, Christine Fang, whom friends called “Fang Fang” was in fact an agent of China’s Ministry of State Security.
Fang was even friendly with another Chinese spy who had been driving the late California Senator Dianne Feinstein around for years. Russell Wong was a Chinese national who worked for Feinstein for roughly 20 years as a driver, office gofer, and liaison to the local Asian-American community. He, like Fang, has since fled California and have not faced charges in the United States.
Now Jensen Huang, the Chief Executive Officer of Nvidia, a tech company whose hardware is key to training AI models, which is part of an intellectual property war between the U.S. and China, has resigned. He was under investigation by his board members for an affair with Chinese businesswoman Alice Huang, whom U.S. intelligence determined is a Chinese spy. Huang, a former television reporter in China, was working in Silicon Valley in tech when she met the Nvidia founder.
When the scandal broke, Huang insisted in a letter to his employees: “I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security.”
For years, the FBI has been sounding the alarm about what former FBI Director Christopher Wray called China’s “broad and unrelenting” threat to United States interests. “The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America’s will to resist,” he said in remarks at the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats in Nashville.
California has long been one of the major targets for espionage, as reported by Los Angeles in 2023. The state is also home to the largest Chinese diaspora in the United States, representing roughly 1.9 million Chinese residents. “Because of its high-tech and political clout, California is a happy hunting ground for human intelligence,” former CIA officer John Woodward, now a professor at Boston University and author of the book Spying, told Los Angeles.
No one is apparently safe from the Ministry of State Security’s efforts, including intelligence agents and officers. In 2000, the Los Angeles FBI field office was rocked when it was revealed that one of the bureau’s mostly highly paid spies, Katrina Leung, was in fact a double agent sleeping with her FBI handler, Agent James Smith, and having what the Office of Inspector General would later call a “sporadic affair” with another veteran agent William Cleveland.
“FBI officials had learned of several incidents indicating that Leung had provided classified U.S. government information to the PRC without FBI authorization,” according to an OIG report. “During the 18 years Leung was an asset, the FBI paid her over $1.7 million in services and expenses.”
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