As Covid-19 began to spread in New York in March 2020, government officials held a private conference call to discuss their response to the pandemic. But there was someone else who had no business being on the call: a Chinese government official.

According to federal prosecutors, the official was secretly brought into the conversation by Linda Sun, an official in Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration at the time.

“Turn your phone on silent,” Sun admonished the Chinese official in a written message during the call, according to prosecutors.

At the end of the 32-minute conversation, prosecutors said, the officer sent Sun a two-word evaluation: “Very useful.”

The call was one of the instances highlighted in a 64-page indictment that accuses Sun of abusing her positions in New York state government to gain benefits from the Chinese government. In exchange for shaping government messages to align with Chinese priorities and excluding Taiwanese officials, she and her family received a range of benefits, including millions of dollars in bribes, free travel and more than a dozen Nanjing-style salted ducks.

Sun, 41, who worked under Cuomo and his successor, Governor Kathy Hochul, has pleaded not guilty.

U.S. intelligence officials have long expressed public and secret concerns about China’s complex efforts to spy on and exert influence in American society, including bribing members of the military and technology industries.

Beijing’s long-term strategy also includes targeting local and state officials to gain more support for China and insight into policy-making as those officials rise to higher office, officials say.

Sun’s case is typical of China’s tactics, says Dennis Wilder, a former high-ranking CIA official who focused on China at the CIA.

“This is a classic Ministry of State Security operation,” said Wilder, referring to China’s main intelligence agency. “They’re targeting naturalized American citizens with close ties to China. They speak Chinese. They have family in China. They want business opportunities in China.”

One of the top priorities of Chinese intelligence services is to “disrupt Taiwan” everywhere, including in the Chinatowns of American cities or in state legislatures, Wilder said.

“Someone working for Hochul would be very useful in that regard. She would be able to push the pro-Beijing side and thwart the Taiwanese side,” said Wilder, now an assistant professor at Georgetown University.

Craig Singleton, senior China expert at the Washington-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the case shows how China is trying to use covert actors to influence policy decisions at all levels of U.S. government.

“Just as TikTok has raised concerns about data collection and influence, this situation underscores the lengths China is willing to go to infiltrate and manipulate American institutions from within,” Singleton said.

“The indictment of Linda Sun highlights a broader Chinese strategy to infiltrate and exert influence in the U.S. government at all levels, from local to federal, by exploiting trust and access within political circles,” he said.

A sustainable influence campaign

Sun is the latest in a series of New York residents accused by federal prosecutors of being a secret Chinese agent.

Last month, Yuanjun Tang, who was granted U.S. citizenship after seeking political asylum, was charged with spying on Chinese democracy activists and dissidents. Federal prosecutors say Tang, 67, helped Chinese authorities infiltrate a group chat on an encrypted messaging application used by numerous Chinese dissidents.

In early August, Shujun Wang, a Chinese-American academic who co-founded a pro-democracy group in New York, was convicted of using his reputation to gather information on dissidents and pass it on to the Chinese government. Wang, 75, is scheduled to be sentenced in January.

Prosecutors said both men acted on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security.

Last year, Chinese nationals Lu Jianwang, 61, and Chen Jinping, 59, were arrested on charges of operating an illegal police station in New York to “surveillance and intimidate” critics of the Chinese government, the Justice Department said. The station, located in a Chinatown office building, was raided by FBI agents after it closed in fall 2022.

The Chinese government has repeatedly rejected the federal prosecutor’s allegations.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning declined to comment on the allegations against Sun on Wednesday.

“I will not comment on domestic U.S. affairs,” she said at a regular briefing in Beijing. “However, we oppose any malicious attempts to incriminate, slander or defame China.”

Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said he knew nothing about the details of Sun’s case.

“But in recent years, the U.S. government and media have frequently exaggerated stories about the so-called ‘Chinese agents,’ many of which later turned out to be untrue,” he said. “China requires its citizens abroad to abide by the laws and regulations of the host country, and we firmly oppose the groundless slander and defamation of China.”

Sun, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in China, worked for the New York state government for about 15 years. She and her husband, Chris Hu, who was also charged, lived in a $3.5 million home in a gated community in Manhasset, Long Island.

With the millions they received from the Chinese government, they also bought a $1.9 million home in Honolulu, Hawaii, and luxury cars, including a 2024 Ferrari, according to federal prosecutors.

Chinese-Americans with extensive family ties in China are potentially vulnerable to recruitment by the Chinese government “because you can threaten families and offer them incentives,” said Wilder, the former CIA official. The message from Beijing, he said, is: “Your family will have a much better life at home if you work with us.”

The campaign is not just focused on the US, experts say. There have been a number of allegations of Chinese espionage in Canada and across Europe, including the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. China has denied all allegations.

“Of course, Western states also spy on and in China, that’s the usual old game,” says Stephan Blancke, associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a London-based think tank.

The difference is that “there are numerous cases in which people of Chinese origin or Chinese citizens are massively threatened, intimidated and put under pressure by Chinese secret services.”

Blancke added that the Sun case was “extremely serious because it shows the political level to which the Chinese secret services now have direct or indirect access.”

In 2022, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center, which reports to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, released a report warning that China was stepping up its influence campaign in the United States.

“The PRC is aware that U.S. state and local leaders enjoy a certain degree of independence from Washington and may seek to use them as proxies to advocate for U.S. domestic policies desired by Beijing. These include improved U.S. economic cooperation with China and reduced U.S. criticism of Chinese policies toward Taiwan, Tibetans, Uighurs, pro-democracy activists, and others,” the report said.

According to the indictment, Sun succeeded in removing references to the plight of the Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group that has long been persecuted in China, from Hochul’s public statements in early 2021.

At an event on Wednesday morning, Hochul called the allegations against Sun “absolutely shocking.”

“The idea that a foreign government has the audacity to infiltrate a government organization like New York State needs to be addressed,” she added.