Singaporean Dickson Yeo gets 14-month prison term in US on China spying charge
- The 39-year-old academic pleaded guilty to operating illegally as a foreign agent for China and soliciting non-public information in the US
- Yeo had faced a maximum 10-year jail term on the charges, but prosecutors only requested a 16-month sentence, saying he had cooperated with authorities
Jun Wei Yeo, 39, also known as Dickson Yeo, was given a relatively light sentence and credited for 11 months already spent in prison because of his cooperation with US authorities and also the threat of contracting Covid-19 in jail, said Washington federal judge Tanya Chutkan.
“I thought a lot about this case … and it’s not an easy decision that I have to make,” Chutkan said, adding that the nature of the offence was “very serious”.
“The crime that Yeo committed was not [due] to a momentary lapse in judgment. Rather, Yeo, you relayed information about the US to the Chinese government over a period of four to five years,” she said. “I can tell that you are a highly educated man and I have no doubt that you understood what you were doing.”
I want to apologise to my American friends … it was not my intention to harm them or their family
While Yeo had faced a maximum 10-year jail term on the charges, prosecutors had only requested a 16-month sentence, saying Yeo had cooperated with the authorities. The usual sentence for such crimes is 30 months in prison, they said.
In passing the sentence, Chutkan said she did not want Yeo to “languish”, and had decided to sentence Yeo to 14 months, “somewhere in the middle” between what prosecutors had fought for and what Yeo‘s lawyer had sought.
She noted that she would have been inclined to give a 16-month sentence if it were not for the pandemic. “The cases are not dropping. They are in fact rising … I just think it is in no one‘s interest to have this man stay in the DC [jail] for another four months or so.”
Yeo choked up when delivering his remarks during the hour-long sentencing. “I‘d just like to say that I take full responsibility for my actions. I want to apologise to my American friends … it was not my intention to harm them or their family,” he said.
Yeo‘s lawyer, Michelle Peterson, said Yeo has no desire to stay in the US, and wanted “nothing more than to go home to Singapore, to his family”, adding that this was a “huge punishment” for him.
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But on November 7 when he returned to JFK airport, FBI agents approached him and asked for a voluntary interview. While he initially declined and boarded the flight, he later changed his mind and disembarked, returning to the agents and agreeing to be interviewed.
“He did not betray Singapore and he does not bear any malice towards the United States or any US citizens,” she said in the plea. “He was deeply attracted to China and its ability to uplift millions from poverty with [its] industrial policy, which led him to be easily influenced,” she said.
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Yeo was also “floundering in his academic pursuits” and was broke when he was recruited by Chinese intelligence services, Peterson said. “The Chinese gave him more respect and dignity for the work he was doing that he was able to obtain from his efforts at academia,” she added.
Peterson said Yeo‘s professional reputation had been ruined, adding that he wanted “nothing more than to return to a quiet life with his parents”.
Prosecutors on Friday argued that Yeo had “willingly” taken on a role with the Chinese intelligence services when his academic paths became difficult.
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“He worked for a foreign power on our soil, co-opted non-public information of interest to that power and he exploited individual vulnerabilities of US citizens along the way,” said Assistant US Attorney Erik M. Kenerson of the National Security Section of the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia
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Yeo would recruit these individuals and pay them to write reports, saying they were intended for clients in Asia, when in fact they were sent to the Chinese government.
About 90 per cent of the CVs were from US military and government personnel with security clearances, according to Yeo, who then sent them on to Chinese intelligence operatives if he believed they would find them interesting.
Chinese-American academic denies recruiting Singaporean as a spy
After news of Yeo‘s indictment broke, retired Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan suggested that Chinese-American academic Huang Jing, who was expelled from Singapore in 2017 over accusations he had tried to influence foreign policy for an unknown government, had recruited Yeo.
Huang, an American citizen who had been Yeo‘s PhD adviser at the Lee Kuan Yew school, dismissed the accusations, saying they were “nonsense” and “unreasonable”.
Huang’s denial came as China’s foreign affairs ministry said it had no knowledge of Yeo’s case and criticised Washington for repeatedly accusing Beijing of espionage.
In her closing remarks, federal judge Chutkan said she hoped that Yeo had learned from this, and that he would eventually be able to “pick up the pieces of [his] life”.
