The world’s most dangerous arms dealer | DW Documentary

They are all on the FBI's

most

wanted list murderers human traffickers scammers millionaires drug traffickers terrorists and this man is a threat to

world

peace and a key figure in the struggle between superpowers his name is Lee fengwei but he also calls himself Carl Lee and uses several other aliases there is no criminal on the list with a reward greater than five million dollars the CIA Mossad the German BND and other spy agencies have been pursuing him for decades a US president even intervened personally without success there was still an air of mystery around it Carly, it reminded me of the Colombian drug traffickers, you know, like Pablo Escobar.

I would say that in all likelihood he is an individual who exists, thanks to the alien, he is a hunter focused on a particular prey, the

most

unscrupulous

arms

dealer

on the planet. My name is Aaron Arnold. I was an intelligence analyst at the FBI. The Carly case was the most unique case I was involved in. I really don't remember any case that reached this level of sophistication and intrigue. The hunt is for a ghost who, among other things, could have helped Iran obtain nuclear weapons and of whom there is only one old photograph. This is kind of another Carly mystery.

Why aren't there more photos? Why are there no videos? Yes, this is a bit strange. day and age to be able to hide for so long without having your photo taken, but this particular story has stuck with him since it became one of those cases where you know that after a day of trying to answer questions you would end up with More now, many researchers, intelligence agency agents and diplomats have had the same experience as Aaron Arnold, a Washington suburb where many of those responsible for planning America's wars and shaping US foreign policy live, among them the man who was probably the first to retake Carly's Trail my name is Van van diepen for about 14 years I headed the office in the state department responsible for, among other things, missile nonproliferation, preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction and missiles is one of the president's top national security priorities during the years I served as the National Intelligence Officer for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Proliferation and worked for the US State Department until the end of 2016.

So all that time I had some level of responsibility to deal with the Carly problem, the Carl Lee problem, when the US intelligence agencies were going about their daily business of collecting communications data they ran into For the first time with suspicious transactions made by a Chinese businessman, no one suspected the dimensions that I would eventually assume would have been in the early 2000s. I think every day, as part of my job responsibilities, I would be reading the intelligence reports. that it came overnight and there would have been some what we call raw intelligence reports that would let you know that he first mentioned Carl Lee's activities.

The US government soon realized they had found the trail of a serial criminal who was shipping ballistic missile construction materials to Iran in violation of 2006 UN Security Council sanctions against Tehran. . He was quite active, so probably every week or two something would come up and as things came up we would try to act on them, behind the scenes they would apply pressure on The State Department shared information about Carl Lee's shipping routes with the governments of other nations so that they could remove their containers from circulation when the ship unloaded its cargo. Sometimes you know something would come out the other end of that process that you would know. put into play and watch it play out and sometimes you couldn't because we didn't know enough or because the intelligence behind it was so sensitive that we couldn't risk compromising it, you had to sit back and let it go and So, after a few years, Carl Lee became the trusted supplier of the Iranian

arms

industry.

Israel's spy agencies also came across Carl Lee. At the turn of the millennium, they feared that China's businessmen could increase the range of their archenemy's missiles, with dramatic consequences for Israel. It was more than 20 years ago when the Iranians first came to North Korea asking for missiles to buy. Indonesia were very open to their needs and said we have as many missiles as you want here on the platform. Any question was very interesting. What is the range of the missiles and when the North Koreans told them that the range is 1000 kilometers they say that we do not buy if it is less than 1300 we do not need it and we all run to the maps to see what the 300 will increase their capacity and it was very clear that if it is less than reaching the heart of Tel Aviv, they are not willing to buy a difference of 300 kilometers to potentially cause hundreds of thousands of deaths, no matter where it hits. you kill so many people and you will kill so many Israelis.

Israel is regularly attacked by smaller missiles, but partly due to Carl Lee's shipments, the country came within range of Iranian missiles that were at least 15 meters long and had the potential to carry nuclear warheads, including replacement ones. steel with aluminum installing better guidance making the warhead smaller and modifying the stability of the aerodynamics suddenly these missiles could be fired at more than 1,500 kilometers putting Israel within range the German federal intelligence agency the BND The British MI6 and others Secret services also begin to focus on Carl Lee during the 2000s, but who is the man who could plunge the Middle East into chaos?

Many of my colleagues have spent countless hours, you know, digging into their marriage records, death records, legal records, to find out everything they can about Investigators like this got Carl Lee's passport number, a series of numbers. which are like a fingerprint in China, they last a lifetime and reveal the date of birth on September 18, 1972. The first two numbers indicate the province where he was born. 23 is hey long Jing an area in the far northeast of China directly on the border with Russia or more precisely Siberia in the 70s the Chinese called this area the Great Northern Desert to this day few foreigners deviate to hey long Jing Foreigner is believed that Carl Lee spent his childhood here in a place called Chahayang at that time it was nothing more than a small agricultural township.

He was born in one of the darkest periods of Chinese history. Mao Zedong's cultural revolution. The nation was in the grip of a wave of fanaticism and violence. Children denouncing their own parents for speaking out against Mao, thus signing their own death sentences, many were forced to work in Heilongjing, including educated young men from the cities. Carl Lee's parents were most likely among the million people who drained swamps, planted fields, and made Heilongjing what is today the bread basket of China. This is inland China, it is not a rich area, it is a place that relies heavily on agriculture in summer and winter, but is completely isolated by snow in winter.

It is a long way to the nearest port; In other words, it would be relatively difficult to manufacture. To this day, Western visitors see Heilongjang as a mysterious, lost, and almost exotic place. It's where Lee Fangwei spent the first few years of his life, thirty years later, when Carl Lee was giving the most powerful government in the

world

the escape he wouldn't have had much before. We decided that we had to try to find a way to go to the Chinese government because if we really wanted to stop it we had to somehow persuade the Chinese government to do it.

Thank you Initially, the United States believed that this approach would be successful and so we would then enter into a dialogue with the Chinese government by providing them with information about Carly's activities and trying to see if we could somehow help them and persuade them to take action at the time. China's government had just changed its approach to arms exports in the 1980s and China's proliferation in the 1990s focused primarily on exports from major state-owned companies, companies that were clearly connected to and controlled by the Chinese government. and these companies sold complete systems to countries of interest along with the Chinese economy, Beijing's influence grew.

China presented itself as a responsible global country. China definitely has international obligations to do something, I mean its part in the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. They have said they are adhering to something called the missile technology control regime. Returning to Carly, under that regime, China is supposed to control missile-related technologies of the type that Carly provides as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. China also supported the 2006 sanctions on Iranian nuclear activities, but Carl Lee continued to supply Tehran every month, every two months, as information came in, you know, we would look for what we call the swamp, the Chinese government on Lee and their activities, so there is a, you know, a very long history of American demarshas with the Chinese complaining.

Lee and asking them to take action on Lee, the conversations were very sensitive. CIA spies regularly disappeared in China. Too much information could endanger lives. It is always a balance trying to determine how much to tell the diplomatic counterpart about a problem that you have. I have learned through intelligence that the nightmare scenario is that I go to a diplomatic counterpart and tell them that I know something about a terrible problem that is happening in their country and to ask them to please stop it, they go home and tell their security service what I have told them which allows them to identify the source and shoot the poor thing then someone has died for having done the right thing by trying draw attention to a problem and we no longer get that information either and everyone thinks the problem is solved unless it isn't, it's just that my source is dead in the White House at the time, George W.

Bush, despite Of the risks that his administration repeatedly chose to share confidential information about Carl Lee with China, it does not help his secretary of state to intervene personally, Condoleezza Rice instructed. Their diplomats at the US embassy in Beijing to increase pressure told them to work on the Chinese government to ensure its intervention in the case Bryce sent several secret dispatches strongly incriminating Carl Lee were related to the supply of machinery for the construction of missiles and harmless missiles. With sound substances like aluminum and graphite, you can build propellants with graphite that reach the missile's exhaust gases and change its direction, in short, so that the missile can use what comes out of the bag to steer, Carl thought.

Read. He also supplied Iran with a large number of gyroscopes. A gyroscope is essentially the brain of the missile, its sensory organs, it allows the missile to determine where it is moving, where it is going, how it is moving, countersteering, maintaining course and of course touching, it is these instruments that rotate. inaccurate projectiles in precision weapons is the way the missile steers itself the gyroscope is like the missile's nervous system its eyes and ears Carl Lee seemed to be supplying enough for an entire arsenal of missiles those are excellent instruments that require a careful calibration as you can see from the quantities that Carly has applied, I mean there are hundreds of accelerometers, hundreds of actuators that have been supplied, so it's not one or two pieces that Iran needs, it's something that they need for everyone and each of the missiles they are building, those of Barack Obama.

Democrats came to the White House new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed her predecessor's course unchanged after only a few weeks in office had her diplomats deliver a message to the Chinese government we strongly urge it to investigate these activities signed Clinton certainly there are many things that she is doing that are illegal in China from our point of view, there are many domestic legal bases for the Chinese to take action, but for some reason they don't have them. My name is Adam Kaufman. I began working at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office in 1994. I was a street crimes prosecutor, starting with very minor crimes and working my way up to handling more serious and violent crimes.

Then I went and worked in a Narcotics Bureau that processed international shipments, mostly coming from truckloads from Mexico and South America. cocaine, sometimes heroin, after that I asked myself what I should do and I went and talked to Mr. Morgenthau in 2003. Robert Morgenthal was the district attorney of Manhattan. He came from a Jewish family that had fled Germany to escape persecution. His father was Secretary of State of the United States. Treasury during World War II and creator of the Morgenthal plan to turn Germany into aagricultural nation after the war supported the fledgling state of Israel which left its mark on Robert Morgenthal in 1961 his friend John F.

Kennedy appointed him district attorney of New York. He became one of the most influential figures in American judicial history. We had an enormous amount of personal courage. He was not afraid to take on difficult cases. He suggested that I join this little office called the Central Research Division. It was such an office. Mr. Morgenthau's interest in international markets was driven by recognition of Manhattan's place in global finance with Wall Street as a close neighbor. Morgenthau set out to be more than just a Manhattan lawyer; He saw himself as a prosecutor for international crime. The only one in Manhattan.

Because so much of global finance passes through Manhattan, international transfers, payments, international securities, so much global international business takes place within a mile of the Manhattan courthouse, Morgan thought the spirit was that his researchers could hunt down any criminal whose money passed through Manhattan, which happened when someone in the city made a dollar transfer, which meant Morgenthal's long arm reached all parts of the world and he wasn't afraid to flex those muscles and prevail in international finance, where really very few district attorneys could go one day when the district attorney was over 80 years old and crossed his path Carl Leese Morgenthal had received a tip through one of his secret contacts, probably It was around 2005.

He called us into his office and told us to buy tickets and get on a plane and head to Israel and they told us we were going to meet with Israeli intelligence officials. He had no idea what to expect alive when the New York investigators arrived; they had never heard of Carl. All Lee knew was that his boss was very concerned about the country his father had once supported. He saw Iran as a threat to Israel, but he also had a vision based on terrorism. He also saw it as a threat to New York and the citizens of New York, you know, after 9/11.

These were the years when the world discovered Iran's secret ambitions to build a nuclear bomb for Israel. An existential threat. The reason for a very unusual meeting. I had never heard of a local prosecutor going to visit. meeting with foreign intelligence services that was something I had never heard of, you know, we're not the federal government, we weren't the CIA, we weren't anyone like that, but to Mr. Morgenthal it was kind of business as usual, the The Israelis had an extensive program, unsurprisingly, focused on acquiring Iranian missiles and weapons of mass destruction, the foreign spy agency Mossad had been watching Carl Lee for a while, but China was one of the key trading partners of Israel and the government did not want any open conflict with Beijing, so all of a sudden, New York prosecutors were in a room with the head of Mossad.

I remember being in a meeting with Meyer Dagon and Mr. Degan saying, "We don't want intelligence to sit on the shelf, we want to act against it, and I understand that." Mr. Morgenthau feels the same way and that's why we want to help him bring cases, if we can, that can expose what Iran is doing and he said we want to give him the tools and if he can use them, we want him in Israel's Mossad. They began secretly collaborating with US prosecutors in connection with a mysterious businessman in China. They gave us preliminary information and it was about the Choral League to this day.

Authorities believe it is here in one of Asia's most important port cities. Thank you. There are about 1,000 kilometers left to get there. south of Carl Lee's home hey long Jang not far from the North Korean border a metropolis of millions that benefited from the national economic boom of the 1980s at a time when the nation was opening up to the West thanks to he, Xiaoping Mao's successor. He established special economic zones in China where foreign investment was possible. That's how he brought capitalism to China in 1984. He also turned Dalian into a special economic zone. It is not possible to say precisely when Carl Lee's family ended up there despite meticulous research.

There are no details of his youth. There are people who knew him who did not speak, the authorities did not divulge anything, as if they had issued a general directive to remain silent, rumors and vague fragments of information are all we have to go on. He is believed to have attended a school in Dalian called No. 24, an elite school. For the children of senior party officials that would match the claim that Carl Lee's grandfather was a highly decorated colonel in the People's Liberation Army, Carl Lee is also believed to have worked intermittently for the state, but it is not known in what capacity. quality, one thing is for sure. took full advantage of dalian the port city is a great place to do business legally or otherwise with foreign american companies or european companies that have branches there that make things in china from an opportunistic point of view it's great it's great place yes you want to be a proliferator because there are many places to hide here in Dalian a company was registered in the late 1990s its name limped as an economic and commercial company according to the Chinese company registry Carl Lee's father, Lee GUI Jin, had been included listed as legal representative of the company on June 4, 1998.

This company was the seed of Carl Lee's business empire. The Israelis gave us some of the substance and content of certain emails that showed references to weapons of mass destruction and other materials for weapons acquisition, missile production, things like that. We worked late into the night, ordered pizzas, beers, and worked on this all the time. The prosecutors were lucky because in one particular respect Carl Lee had been extremely reckless, some of the email addresses were from US providers Hotmail or Yahoo, because they were in the US there was a procedure to gain access to this content of those emails by the email service providers, so we had a starting point: we had some very talented and tenacious prosecutors working on the case and they just dug into the information they found.

They were making connections What they found surpassed all their findings to date Investigators stumbled upon countless transactions and a seemingly impenetrable network of shell companies We found so many proliferation channels of weapons of mass destruction money moving through different countries He had a global network real I remember that very Well, this mission was so fundamental, especially when we started to see what was in the emails, it became very real, he wrote We are the same company, the factory, the people who used to limp, the only difference is that the company's English name changed to Sino Metallurgy. and the Min Metals industry, I was emailing people and saying, “Well, don't worry about the US sanctions, I'm just going to change the name of my company.” I mean, he was brash in the emails, he urged his business partners to get into the fight, this is very important.

Otherwise he wrote that the money can be blocked like last time abroad there were transactions between metallurgists around the world providing material that Carl Lee would then provide to Iran and Carl Lee had to pay for those materials in US dollars. Payments in US dollars are almost always settled through banks in the US and especially in the early 2000s, most of those banks were in Manhattan, so if payment for water said Carl Lee or Lee Fong Wei, then yes, the banks would have stopped them, but if the transfer payment said shiny shiny metal urges. then there is nothing for US banks to see and the payment is simply made;

That was Carl Lee's idea in creating all these fictitious companies, was to trick American banks into processing payments that otherwise would have been blocked even though he was hiding thousands of miles from Manhattan the instigators wanted to face trial in New York The legal theory we came up with was that by sending the electronic payments under false names, Carly caused the Manhattan banks' bank records to have false information and falsified the records. of a company is a New York state crime and this all came down to falsifying bank business records in Manhattan after months of investigations charged Carly, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau announced a charge of 180 to 18 and died on April 7, 2009.

It was the press conference we had to announce Carl Lee's indictment. It was Mr. Morgenthau's opportunity to show the world that this Chinese proliferator was sending material to Iran that was going to kill people. He wanted an indictment that said China is providing weapons of mass destruction. to Iran, he wanted the world to sit up and take notice of this. Robert Morgenthau requested the extradition of Carl Lee, who was 36 years old at the time. The big question is whether the Chinese government knew, after all, that Chinese banks were involved in some of these. Transactions Chinese companies have long been accused of using shell companies in the United States Kitty Peregrinos Siena New York, but the Chinese government seemed uninterested in the extradition attempt and Carl Lee was cautious because he was thought to have left China to make business in Tehran on a direct flight that way. he wouldn't risk being detained on a foreign stopover and delivered directly to the US, and I remember seeing his name on US documents a lot and thinking: you know who this guy is.

My name is Daniel Salisbury. I am a researcher. at King's College London, where I research arms proliferation, exports and embargoes. Daniel Salisbury is a researcher in the war studies department. The academics maintain good connections with Western intelligence agencies and are often interested in the same things that his specialty is digging up information. accessible to anyone, but few find it. When you start looking at these cases, a lot of information is hidden in plain sight, so we used the help of some Chinese linguists and really started exploring what was on the Internet. The researchers used Chinese keywords to review business records, customs and court databases in This Way Daniel Salisbury and his colleagues were able to shed light on Carl Lee's network of companies from his base in London, we discovered that the Most of his businesses were tied to two addresses, thank you, so the usual mansion.

It appears to be a large office block in the center of Dalian, it is not a skyscraper, but it is quite tall, has many defects and I imagine this is the administrative part of the overseas operation. By working with our Chinese linguists, we were able to find some photos of the exterior of the building and get an idea of ​​what it looked like and what kinds of things might happen there. You know, a lot of companies with administrative functions, including hiring people and that kind of thing, were registered, and they turned me into Discovery, one that totally changed their impression of Carl Lee, one of the companies that they were able to attribute to him had a website and demonstrated which was not just a distributor, it had many product listings for several different types of graphite and we actually realized that the city address was not just a business address, a warehouse or an office, but it was actually a large graphite factory.

It really changed the scale of the problem in our minds. You know, it was a really mind-blowing discovery to show the satellite images. Quite a big place, I think online it said about 80,000 square meters. Well, it's pretty hard to verify exactly what's going on inside those buildings, but with a factory pumping this stuff out in China, it becomes a whole different kind of problem after months of preparation. A fact-finding mission to China itself in the city where spy agency investigators and London investigators believed Carl Lee was hiding all traces left by the world's most wanted arms

dealer

converged on this city to feel the movie and many companies with an alleged connection.

Cara Lee are registered in Dalian we assumed that if we were going to find him anywhere and he would be there when the pandemic began China isolated itself from the rest of the world the government expelled many foreign journalists and stopped issuing visas for The only way to get close to Carl Lee for this film for the short term reporters was to call those who resided for a long time in China, in this case Kristoff Geeson and Matthias Bulinger, who is the cameraman, the two begin their search for a single individual in a metropolis of seven million andhalf last year for all the titles, we challenge ourselves to visit many of the companies that are or were registered there and find out what we can actually see, who we can talk to and who could provide us with the next set of In this puzzle presented in front of We found clues that would finally verify its existence.

The first building we visited was an office tower more or less in the center of Dalian Kings College. The report mentions it as the alleged center where a Lee coral was located. The empire is most likely based on empires and it is hot. Thank you. It is said that he rented an entire floor there, the 25th floor of this building, so we took the elevator there. Was he actually there in person? Did he have bodyguards? I would call the police? At the end of the corridor, a surprise, there were eight offices or apartments, we knocked on each door and no one had heard of the companies registered in that building.

The LED trace nowhere. My name is Thomas Countryman. I was a Foreign Service officer for a total of 35 years, from 1982 to 2011, working in five different embassies abroad, at the United Nations, at the White House, at the Pentagon, primarily focused on Eastern European and American issues. Middle East. He has served several presidents throughout his career when it comes to the U.S. In foreign policy, he was considered an all-rounder with an eye for detail; then, from 2011 to 2017, I was US Undersecretary of State for Nonproliferation; In short, the Office of International Security and Nonproliferation has a job that we described as keeping the world's most

dangerous

weapons out of the hands of the world's most

dangerous

leaders and in that job one of my important tasks was to constantly raise the Chinese government our concern about illegal exports of high-tech material that Mr.

Lee was organizing from China to Iran Twitter played a crucial role here Iranian embassy his usual means of contact was through the Iranian defense attaché in Beijing the attaché's main job Carl Lee had already been doing business with Iran for a decade, the problem was that he had essentially become the most valuable member of the Iranian defense team in Beijing to acquire the technology needed for Iran's military programs. Iranian ballistic missiles, so it cannot be said that his arrest would have put an end to the Iranian ballistic missile. program, but we are convinced that it would have slowed it down significantly.

I talked about him in every conversation I had with my Chinese counterparts. We often saw each other in the same meetings in New York, in Vienna, in Geneva, but we also met in each other capitals in Washington and the Beijing questions between the two superpowers, they sort of washed their hands of it saying, hey, this is in China, this is one guy, but on the other hand, they were incredibly upset that we sanctioned the Chinese entity, so they tried to have it both ways. So, you know, often the red ones might get a little heated when it comes to, you know, they're upset that we sanctioned Chinese entities, including Carly China, making Carl Lee must have had powerful allies within the Chinese government.

Well, I think it is difficult for a mid-level official in the Chinese government to stop him if he is well connected if he has lawyers if he has influence that is to say more resources than the mid-level Chinese official someone like me can use against him what What worries us is that officials at the top at that level didn't seem to care enough about this to take any action after New York prosecutors, now the FBI, the most powerful investigative authority in the United States, set their sights on Carl. Read. I think the scope and scale of his type of operation really dwarfed any other. type of case the FBI is familiar with at the time, the FBI assigned an entire group of investigators and analysts to work on the Chinese businessmen case.

I would prefer not to talk about the details of who and how many were working. On topics like any HR personnel issue is off limits with the Intel stuff, it can't be in a

documentary

, but Carly was a major focus and something that was a priority investigation at the FBI, you know, for several years, when Around the period of 2014, not only did Carl's activities, you know, continue to develop and get worse, but other options that other agencies were thinking about implementing began to become unviable, so, for example, there would be some agencies that you would know would like to try. prosecute Carly in the US courts and after several years they recognized that that was simply not going to happen, but it became clear that we had both an obligation and an opportunity to the Chinese government to push harder to get the Chinese China was on the brink of a new era.

Xi Jinping took power in 2012. For the United States, the opportunity to highlight the issue with Carl Lee included a diplomatic approach. to China who emphasized not only at my level but at higher levels of the US government that the name went to President Obama. I'm also aware that President Obama mentioned that name to the Chinese you know, specifically complained about it abroad, which didn't work. For any real change in Carl's activities and behavior, the US government launched a response of unprecedented scale. In the case of an arms dealer, we had several meetings, sometimes at the State Department, sometimes in the executive office building next to the White House, which is part of the White House spy agencies, the Investigating authorities and several ministries joined forces to plan a coordinated attack.

We became kind of a Carly Blitz that was implemented by the interagency agency and so you saw a criminal indictment from the US, you saw some additional sanctions, including sanctions of new types that came out, etc., etc., included legal pressure from the FBI, so this was Carly's mistake, that in her illegal transaction she used the American financial system, so this was the lever that the FBI Department of Justice had to pull and finally ended up seizing almost Seven million dollars of Carly's money saw, you know, a reward for her, you know, information that led to her capture.

The United States announced a five million dollar reward for information leading to his arrest, just like drug lord El Chapo or Osama Bin Laden after their attacks on two US embassies, you know, if you look at a kind of average, you know you normally see millions, about five is high, it's significant, it means something true, yeah, it's a lot of money. The next day, the Chinese government issued its first public statement. In Carly's case, Beijing and Washington began openly trading blows. We are very clear about the activities that this individual has undertaken and his threat to international stability and security and that is why we were very clear from the State Department that we would offer a reward for information about his whereabouts that could bring him to justice if he is in China what is the need to put this right as the statement says he is a fugitive at this time so I am not going to speculate on where he might be in the Capitol.

The senators unleashed the Fury on him, the Chinese government says they can't solve this, they don't know how to stop him or guys like him, but the good news is they can solve other things. In China, they found out how to arrest five women who belong to a feminist organization last year they discovered how to imprison 44 journalists last year they discovered how to imprison 27,000 Muslim minorities in the Uygha region last year they could solve it, but they cannot understand it, coward Mr. Lee has money and lawyers and the Uyghurs and women's NGOs and the rest don't, the Chinese government has shown that it has the authority and ability to put anyone who wants out of business and suddenly a website appeared on line about Lee fengwei Alias ​​​​Carl Lee administrators said their goal was to spread information about him.

The page included drawings of Carly's face, photo montages, and articles in English, Chinese, and Arabic about her alleged complicity in the suffering of thousands of children in the Yemeni Civil War, where Iranian missiles are being deployed, and about arms deals, but? Who is responsible for the website? It is a course project. Write to the administrators, who are obviously students. A lecturer gave them the idea. I can't imagine there are too many classes out there that are teaching Carly. It's a very It's a bit of a weird topic, you know, a little bit out there and I feel like my colleague and I probably know all the people who are teaching about Carly and have no idea what you know who created this site.

Thanks, I'm Jeff Stein. I've been covering national security issues for about 40 years and that followed my own service in the military as an Army Intelligence Case Officer, where I began to understand how the underground mentality worked and it served me well over the years. I was at Newsweek for many years at the Washington Post and now, in semi-retirement, I am the founding editor-in-chief of Spy Talk, a website that covers intelligence topics. I think I first heard about him in early 2015. I started hearing that sanctions were being applied to this guy we call Carl Lee or Lee Fungway, so I started digging and found out that federal officials were more than happy to inform me and let me know what was going on. and I wrote a major story for Newsweek, the headline how China helped Iran go nuclear.

He shared a number of details from intelligence agency sources. He liked luxury cars, but I was also told that he was a stay-at-home kind of guy. We didn't go very far from Dalian, we didn't learn much else about him except we had a Stringer go there and do some reports on him to locate his offices in his house, so we knew he was there, we knew he existed, uh and uh , but we couldn't gather more information about him abroad, then came the Trump administration. I'm angry when China makes 500 billion dollars a year and sucks our jobs and our money out of our country and we do nothing.

In this regard, the Trump administration was on a campaign to blame China for everything and as part of that, some white hat officials summoned me to go to the White House and discuss the cases that have been around for a long time and that was in 2018. And certainly the Trump White House was well aware of my feelings about his foreign policy, which were negative, and I often had testy exchanges with White House spokespeople when I called them to comment on something, so they reached out to me to talk about this case and they invited me. to the White House or the adjacent former executive office building, the conversation was quite unusual.

I mean, I found that very funny, but we were on the same page on that issue with one leaf too far away as the White House launched a Carl Lee PR offensive. The threat posed by Iranian missiles was highlighted in late 2017. Trump's UN ambassador briefed the media in front of the remains of a ballistic missile fired at Saudi Arabia by Iran's allies in Yemen. The intended target of the missiles was the civil airport in Riyadh. that tens of thousands of passengers travel every day, imagine if this missile had been launched at Dulles or JFK airport or at the airports of Paris, London or Berlin, that's what we're talking about here, that's what Iran actively supports.

Initially, many wondered if the The US was once again telling the same old story just as they had before the Iraq war, presenting supposed evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program, the state department we are working with, but The experts had certain information, the missile in its configuration was precisely what they knew about Iran, but Iran had revealed with great pride a few years ago in several videos and presentations, one of the remains of the plane betrayed certain information, the logo of a certain Aviation Company. Weapons Iranian one of Carl Lee's most important clients The attack on Riyadh marked the beginning of a whole series of attacks that continue to this day we see them use those missiles we have seen them used in Iraq we have seen them used in Saudi Arabia In Syria where they have had a significant impact we also see Iran proliferating these missiles throughout the region, so for example, the Lebanese Hezbollah is the most popular customer of Iranian missiles, but also now the Houthis in Yemen have been using in A significant factor is that the only attack that stood out in recent years was the Iranian attack on the Iraqi bases that host the US forces in January 2020.

Iran had launched a dozen missiles targeting these sites, it wasextremely dangerous and resulted in over a hundred traumatic brain injuries among US service members who suffered this attack resulted in deaths in the US, we would have seen a much more significant US response than we had actually seen in previous years and I don't know how far the escalating spiral would go. One thing is for sure without Carl. Lee's help to Iran's ballistic missile program wouldn't be where it is today, but what does the Chinese government say? The chances of finding an answer are greater outside of the China conference, an annual gathering for leaders and ministers of state, military officials and heads of spy agencies from around the world. world in February 2020, the guest list included one of China's highest-ranking politicians, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, whose ministry had been negotiating with the US for two decades over Carl Lee, thank you very much during their stay in Munich, Wang Yi and other guests from less democratic nations had to endure something that would never be allowed at home.

Awkward questions from journalists. The question is: why don't you stop Mr. Lifan Wei, also known as Kylie? He is on the FBI's most wanted list. People here are unfounded accusations against Chinese foreigners. Minister's Response China, of course, does not admit to having provided any missile-related materials or components to Iran, so it is a bit difficult to have hard evidence here. My own suspicion is that they have some sort of coincidence of interest in that trade. Carl Lee companies align with XI Jinping's strategy he sees his nation as the second remaining superpower that will soon surpass the US economically and militarily Chinese strategists believe that a strong Iran would benefit China in this sense it would complicate the US strategy would perhaps encourage Western governments to become more distracted by Middle East problems and less concerned about what may be happening in the Indo-Pacific, that China may be behind it, which is very convenient for them, for example, in case China decides to carry out its threats one day if military maneuvers turn into war and the People's Liberation Army launches an offensive. invasion of Taiwan, but where is the man who has become a key figure in the superpower struggle of recent years and decades?

The team of reporters in China is on its way to one of the most important companies in Carl Lee's network, Dalian Kara Industry. the company is registered in this building, it was not in the office, it was just a normal Chinese complex, an Israeli complex, the company really exists, there is documented evidence of its exports, it even won a court case against a supplier who breached the contract, but the door is opened by an old woman holding a knife who has been cutting vegetables when we asked the woman where she came from she said and when we asked her from what region exactly and mentioned the name she said yes that is precisely where she came from , the small agricultural municipality. where it is believed that Carl Lee spent his childhood more than a thousand kilometers from Dalian.

It is surely a very remarkable situation to find someone in another province who comes precisely from this place with around 10,000 inhabitants. How is she connected to Carl Lee? she just let him use her address, perhaps she has known him since he was a child from her homeland in the far north when we asked her about Carl Lee her response was that she didn't know how to contact him and then relatively quickly she referred to his age . telling us that it was over 80 years old and then it was our job to find it to this day this apartment here is the official headquarters of the Dalian carat industry at least that's what it says in the Chinese company's registration in this story every answer leads to even more Mysteries like the question of who is behind the website, who is Lee Fangwei, something we do know, the administrators do not want anyone to know who they are have opted for an anonymous domain registration the content of the site is increasingly strange and elaborate the message of this comic is the unscrupulous and prophet-hungry arms dealer Carl Lee has nothing to fear investigators and prosecutors because he can always hide behind the Chinese state, it's incredible, right, I don't think we have Never seen that kind of thing done with a proliferator.

I mean, it seems pretty sophisticated and well thought out. like someone has invested some resources into this and I have a feeling from reading it too and having seen several Chinese comics that the Chinese government has used to talk to people about national security issues in China, it seems like someone has seen them and I thought that was okay, this is maybe a good way to talk to a Chinese audience and suddenly a possible lead to the creators of the website appears in this Facebook profile. The owner of the profile appears to be studying International Security in Germany and admits who he is.

Lee Fangwei's website is theirs, they are evidently studying in Heidelberg, in any case, they liked many sites connected to the university there and Heidelberg student life. The strange thing is that at the University of Heidelberg no one has heard of a student named Changing Boa, much less a website or a study. project about a Chinese arms dealer neither relevant professors nor represented through our analysis of bank records and our analysis of emails we saw that he was doing a lot of business in euros, we saw that many of those payments were settled through Frankfurt, so We decided that we would go and try to encourage the Germans to take action similar to what we had done, so we went to Germany.

We had prepared a book, a file of the payments in euros that we were aware of, so we showed it to the bank of origin. the parties the dates and the banks that were processing the payments across Europe and specifically the German banks that were settling the payments and we approached Bond and met with a woman from the federal prosecutor in charge of sanctions enforcement in Germany and We met with a team of federal police investigators and presented our information to them. We had a good meeting. They asked the right questions. They were clearly thinking about it and then this kind of team of police investigators invited us to dinner. and beers we had a nice German dinner, I think I think, when I remember the sausages, a lot of beers, uh, and then, you know, and then they apologized and I think my colleagues and I stayed out a little longer As we could from our perspective, nothing ever came of it, there was never any sort of similar prosecution of Carly, that never, that never happened, there is one more clue on the sinister website to an Arab Facebook group linked to the site, the name of your administrator, Kareem Mustapha, it seems that Surprisingly, you are also studying in Germany and living in Berlin, the profile is structured precisely like that of Zhang Zhang boa.

They both have nondescript profile pictures with glasses and a book and they were both first active on Facebook within two days of each other. What they both have in common are that they are untraceable the parents the students are not registered with the authorities in Berlin or Heidelberg it's like they don't really exist at all the fact that these people are ghosts and basically don't exist would fit with a theory that this is run by a state leads us to think that maybe this is a government operation, maybe it could be a government operation to try to get the word out about Carly, especially in states that spend a lot on intelligence and if you know thousands of people working in this area, it's quite possible that there is someone in an office somewhere whose job it is to run these types of operations, you know, maybe against Carly but also against others. drug traffickers or other non-state threats, as well as by agency personnel, it is possible that the people who make those videos know something about him and have a good idea of ​​how he might react to something like that and you know it's obviously something very specific what to do. in spy talk information operations or IO there's also kind of a name and shame component that you know, maybe it gets under your skin a little bit, um, the idea of ​​uh, you were heard about like tickling the cable, so, you know, maybe something like that. of doing something to provoke a reaction, maybe you can better monitor or improve your own information by doing that just to think it's okay, maybe taxpayer dollars from the government somewhere or participate in making these videos of pigs that they fart, you know it's really a strange thing.

To see all the possibilities, two nations stand out, probably the countries that seem to have had the biggest interests in Carly, so it will be the US or probably Israel. Israel would be the most plausible. The nation's intelligence services are known for their unconventional cyber operations. and no country faces a greater threat from Iranian missiles, a threat that has continued to grow in recent years also due to the activities of Carl Lee. This is particularly evident in the north, in the Golan Heights, Israel captured this territory from Syria in 1967 and has occupied it. Since the rocky plateau is of strategic importance for Israel to monitor one of its bitterest enemies, Hezbollah, which maintains positions north of here in Lebanon, army spokesman Jonathan Conrikus was stationed here for a long time, which What you see behind us is really thinking about it. as a highway as a smuggling highway for Iran along which Iran transfers missile components infrastructure Machinery to produce or convert all of that is transported from Iran Iraq through Syria and the same areas that can be seen near the Syrian-Lebanese border Iran has been attempting to supply its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon with precision missiles based on what we know, Carl Lee's companies have been instrumental in the development of these same projectiles, so Hezbollah will attempt to use its precision-guided missiles for the most sensitive and high-value targets like our Port our airport government facilities with hazardous materials and the entire nation realized the existential nature of this threat in relation to the port city of Haifa, where thousands of tons were stored of ammonia, if the chemical were somehow released, potentially putting hundreds of thousands at risk. of lives something that the leader of Hezbollah knew very well has said without any shame: yes, I will target the ammonium container in Haifa, I will try to attack it and I will try to kill as many foreign civilians as possible, so that is the meaning of the enemy with which we are dealing, the Haifa ammonia depot was emptied after this threat from the Hezbollah leader, but there are other chemical plants in Israel that could be a target for Iranian precision-guided missiles, also because for years Carl Lee supplied instruments navigation.

Tehran and all the Western spy agencies could do with watching helplessly from the sidelines, the officials I remember were very angry, maybe that was just a reason for triumph because they were always angry because China blamed China for this and because they were in a campaign against China. So, I wrote the story in 2019. Jeff Stein published an article in Newsweek about Donald Trump's new sanctions against Carl Lee and about the authorities' cold fury at the Chinese government. They told me that this is just the beginning of these new sanctions that we are going to apply. Let's do more, we're really going to teach China a lesson with Lee Funway around the same time that a member of the Trump administration began denouncing Lee Fungway, aka Carl Lee, and the Chinese government on Twitter.

It was the deputy secretary of state at the time, Christopher Ford. Lee Fungway was for a long time perhaps the most notorious of China's proliferation mongers and in the end nothing was done. It remained a problem for a long time, when I was in government we increased the pressure on China trying to catch them. To pay more attention to it, the Trump administration began increasing pressure on China and Iran at the same time that the latter country was the responsibility of Brian Hook, a close and hardline presidential confidant. He was the US special representative for Iran at the time.

Iranian regime has been singing death to the United States. Iran has been very successful in its mission of trying to terrorize the Middle East. It is a corrupt religious mafia that has actually impoverished its own people to finance an ideology that they export around the world. What is different? About this administration's approach is that we are launching a pressure campaign that has no historical precedent, but strangely, Brian Hook remained tight-lipped about the man who was probably the most important foreign supplier to the Iranian missile program. Do you have any comments about Carly? I don't have any new information to share with you.

It was mid-2019 when a silence suddenly fell over Washington.Well, we haven't heard anything since then, so what's going on? Status Christopher Ford also suddenly stopped commenting on Carl Lee I decided to stop tweeting that's all I can say wow okay okay that's not helpful. I understand the silence was deafening as they say it's a mystery to me and then, you know, I tracked them down. The same officials, a couple of years later, would occasionally call to say, "Hey, what's going on" when they're not talking about it. Now, the visuals are reluctant to talk about them or have memory loss.

Suddenly, they can't remember. You have to remind them that you know Carly, the Chinese one, oh, that guy you know, so they're not talking about Carly. Carly may not even be on their minds, and if he is on their minds, they won't go public with what they're doing. doing and then the website who is Lee Fong Wei went offline what happened to Carl Lee on the research trail in China the team travels north from Dalian Carl Lee's graphite factory is believed to be located 100 kilometers from the port city this according to information discovered by researchers at King's College London the factory that distinguishes Carl Lee from many others in his particular line of work the one that makes him both a traitor and a welcome manufacturer read the word on the chimney and the company name synotec carbon the company has existed since 2006. a quarter of the shares belong to Carl Lee and the rest belongs to his younger brother Lee fangdong, naturally the question was, of course, whether it is an industrial ruin, now, if anything remains of it, if graphite products are still actively produced there. question that can only be answered up close when you approach the building, it almost feels like an industrial ruin, a complex where you have the feeling that nothing happens there anymore, but then you see areas with the latest surveillance technology, a lot of cameras watching anyone who approaches. factory site, the investigation could end abruptly at any moment, but instead the opposite happens, you can easily enter the plant grounds, the doors are open, why, strangely, there was no one there to talk to at that time on the side of a The factory is owned by one of the most wanted men in the world and, in fact, there are tons of graphite here, the material that Iranian missile engineers so urgently need and that Carl Lee has given them. supplied in large volumes, it seems dilapidated, but it is not true that there is nothing anymore. clearly there is production in a section of the foreign thief industrial site in the world the FBI has put a 5 million reward on this man and suddenly you arrive at what is supposed to be the center of his entire empire and you think wow!

He's the most dangerous guy and here we seem to be in the middle of nowhere so you start to wonder if all this really matters the two men still have two cards up their sleeve two phone numbers from Carl Lee's inner circle for Not to put filming in jeopardy, they make the calls after the factory visit, which was actually a pretty remarkable phone call because it just confirmed a lot of details for us. He said yes, they did business with Iran in the past, but they don't do anything anymore. What he said was that the factory is still active and the products are still being manufactured there, so he confirmed what we saw on the site and said that unfortunately we would not be able to meet his brother.

Then we called another number. There had been speculation mainly. in the King's College research report that this could lead us to the eldest brother in the family. um Alias, he said that he couldn't reach you at this time. Where is Carl Lee and why does no one in Washington talk about him anymore at first? of the Biden administration, I asked kind of polite questions about Carl Lee and zero, no silence, you know, I'm a former intelligence case officer. I've been covering the CIA and other intelligence for years, so I'm wondering, well, maybe we double Lee. In some ways, maybe he's our man now, Carl Lee, a double agent who betrays his own business partners to the enemy.

It's a bold theory, but there have certainly been similar cases in the past. I mean, I have no evidence of that at all, but that's how my mind works. I mean, I couldn't find any other logical explanation for why the United States would suddenly keep silent about Leaf for a long time, but he wouldn't have a very long life in China. I am referring to the CIA's operations in China, according to public reports, which we know have been a disaster. It was that security failures allowed dozens of CIA sources in China to be arrested and imprisoned or executed, and then a new clue appears online for 31 minutes on the Chinese edition of Wikipedia in the article about Lee Fangwei, the history of versions is read on January 8, 2021 at 6:58 a.m. an anonymous user added the following Passage from April 2019 Lee fengwei was detained by police on suspicion of smuggling goods and items prohibited from Import and Export by the state in late 2020 Lee was detained in pretrial detention in the city of Dalian 7 29 am the passage was deleted by the same user the reason given that the information did not come from a reliable source is that the Responda is in prison, but then why is the FBI still trying to locate him with a reward of 5 million?

There is still one address left to check the last one on the list, the headquarters of a company, 60 of which are still personally owned by Carl Lee in In this garbage-filled complex there is a company that is still active filming it is called Dalian Trust Industry and has earned millions in official sales. Customs data shows that components for nuclear reactors have been exported from here abroad. Could it be right here? The answer to everyone's questions circulated. in the back and asked about the coral leaf. We are looking for a man named Lee Fang Wang. Do you know him?

Maybe you've heard of Lee Fangwei. Isn't he in prison? What do you mean he's in prison? Is he in trouble? Yes, he was. I was frozen by some things, you know what I mean, I think he's in prison, then and suddenly he asked why we wanted to know and shortly after our goodbye conversation with him, you get the feeling that everything is totally out. of place. Absolute needs, yes, these are private. these people are being addressed are private pensioned individuals none of them run any business they probably have no idea exactly what is being done in their name abroad sounds like the perfect cover a defensive shield from the unsuspecting a labyrinth that swallows anyone Let him try to approach Lee Fungway, Carl Lee, Patrick David or Charles, Sunny, bye or song da Hai, whatever his name is, but could the neighbor be right in saying that the 50-year-old man is now in jail because after In two decades the Chinese government removed him from service if anyone knew he was Christopher Ford, the senior official who suddenly stopped condemning Carl Lee and the Chinese government on Twitter.

It was one of the reasons he may have been arrested at that time that you stopped tweeting like I say, I don't. a position to talk about specific details regarding Carly Christopher Ford doesn't give a specific answer because recent developments in the Carly saga are classified, but his words hint at something I always suspected when we brought attention to Carly. If we were lucky that they stopped part of the network, if we were less lucky, they could still do something to them in a way that would undermine our criticism and allow them to say that this is not a problem and that we could not contradict them in In the past there are concessions trade and, in fact, During the period in question, the Chinese head of state, Xi Jinping, asked Donald Trump to avoid imposing new heavy tariffs on products.

Beijing made some concessions at the time, with hints that Lee Fang Wei's arrest might have been one of them, but even if that were true, has the issue been resolved? Has the world been a slightly safer place for a long time? Lee Fungway was kind of, as we say, the poster child for the proliferation problem, but should we say that Lee Fungway will be hit by a meteorite tomorrow the proliferation problem will not evaporate these are fairly well established institutions that seem to have at least some degree of official protection and perhaps permission to do this it is believed that his network is still active with or without it it is a foreign murky area and it is something that we may hear about later or you may never hear about it, you know, even when files open in 30 or 40 years, this is a typical Carly story, right? more strange oddities uh day after day one last try another call to little brother's number where's Carl Lee? the number you have called is not in service the number you have dialed is not in foreign service foreign