San Francisco tour guide led secret life as Chinese spy, prosecutors say
By day, the 56-year-old Northern California man is believed to have worked as a tour guide and sight-seeing operator in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to federal prosecutors.
But that wasn’t his only job, prosecutors said: Xuehua Peng, a naturalized U.S. citizen who is also known as Edward, has been arrested and charged with spying for the Chinese government in his adopted country.
A criminal complaint filed Sept. 24 and unsealed Monday revealed that Peng is accused of “acting as an illegal foreign agent in delivering classified United States national security information to officials of the People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of State Security,” or MSS.
U.S. Attorney David L. Anderson of the Northern District of California said in a statement that the charges “provide a rare glimpse into the secret efforts of the People’s Republic of China to obtain classified national security information from the United States and the battle being waged by our intelligence and law-enforcement communities to protect our people, our ideas, and our national defense.”
Peng was arrested Friday at his home in Hayward and is being held without bond, prosecutors said.
His arrest came after a multi-year “double agent operation targeting the MSS” that began in 2015, according to the complaint.
“Peng is charged with executing dead drops, delivering payments, and personally carrying to Beijing, China, secure digital cards containing classified information related to the national security of the United States,” Anderson said.
A “dead drop” is an espionage tactic in which people use a secret location to exchange something to avoid the need for direct interaction.
Prosecutors said Peng “acted at the direction and under the control of MSS officials in China in retrieving classified information passed to him by a confidential human source, leaving money behind for the source, or both.”
Peng is accused of taking part in five or more successful dead drops from October 2015 to July 2018, including in the Bay Area and Columbus, Georgia. Peng left behind $10,000 or $20,000 at hotels in Oakland and Newark, California, and Columbus, Georgia, while taking SD cards from the locations with him, according to prosecutors.
The FBI secretly filmed Peng as he carried out some of his dead drops at hotels, according to prosecutors. That video — recorded in Columbus, according to the complaint — was released on Monday.
Though Peng’s immigration files show he has a mechanical engineering degree and is trained in Chinese medicine, an online public database showed he “was the registered agent of U.S. Tour and Travel, located at a specific address in San Francisco, California,” the complaint said.
Peng faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted on the charges he faces, prosecutors said.
Peng became a permanent resident of the U.S. in 2006 and was naturalized in 2012, according to the complaint.
Agent John Bennett of the FBI San Francisco Division said in a statement that “our message is clear: the FBI, along with our intelligence community partners, will pursue foreign adversaries — at any level of an operation — and disrupt their malicious activity when it is detected.”
This story was originally published September 30, 2019 at 1:31 PM with the headline "San Francisco tour guide led secret life as Chinese spy, prosecutors say."
