Trial begins for U.S. informant to China

You’re a former U.S. Air Force officer, and your local New Orleans furniture salesman asks you to share with him some top secret military information. What do you do? Well, we guess it depends on what you’re being offered in return, but if you happen to be James Fondren of Annandale, Virginia, it appears you may opt to sell some classified intel to the Chinese spy who sells sofas as a cover.

Indeed, Fondren is currently on trial before a jury in a federal court in Alexandria, where the first witness to testify against him was Tai Shen Kuo – the furniture salesman who solicited the goods on U.S.-China military relations from Fondren and subsequently gave the papers he obtained to a Chinese government agent.

Fondren allegedly sold to Kuo 30 reports replete with classified information over the course of a decade (1998-2007; he retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel in 1996). Each paper went for between $800 and $1500.

Kuo has already been convicted of espionage (he pleaded guilty) and is due to serve a sentence of over 15 years. Of course, he’s testifying against Fondren with the hope that he’ll be able to knock some time off of his own sentence.

According to Fondren’s defense lawyer, Asa Hutchinson, Fondren was just one of many victims of Kuo’s conniving ways. Apparently, Kuo told Fondren he was using his ‘opinion papers’ (Fondren reportedly did not hand over verbatim reports but paraphrased and added his own two cents) to further his contacts in the Chinese business community…and Fondren allegedly believed him.

He had no idea Kuo was a spy, said the defense, but Kuo testifies that his cover was extremely flimsy, and that he slipped up several times in such a way that should have left no doubt in Fondren’s mind as to Kuo’s true interest in the military papers. Kuo says Fondren knew the papers’ final destination was the Chinese government, and that he clearly revealed this knowledge in email correspondence with Kuo.