NAVAL STATION NORFOLK, Va. — Accused spy Lt. Cmdr. Edward Lin has his day in court Thursday, facing charges of espionage, attempted espionage and falsifying official documents — his leave chits. The crimes he's accused of could put him away for most of the rest of his life, but there is plenty of reason to doubt that outcome. Here's what you need to know:
The Navy originally intended his court-martial to run for two weeks, but on Wednesday, convening authority Fleet Forces Command announced it had been curtailed to just two days. That suggests a major development, such as a plea deal in the works or a major change in the significance of the charges.
Those developments would make sense due to a growing doubt that Lin, who has been in confinement for more than a year and a half, could be proven a spy by the government in court.
Lin was arrested in September 2015 boarding a flight to China. Investigators feared Lin, who was a member of an elite and covert aerial surveillance squadron in Hawaii and had access to some of the Navy's deepest secrets, was traveling to meet a contact. Indeed, after two days of intense interrogation, Lin gave what amounted to a confession to telling secrets to contacts in Taiwanese diplomatic circles. But when prosecutors began peeling back the onion on Lin's confession, it became clear that Lin may have given a false admission.
A Navy Times investigation that ran in January uncovered a deposition of one of Lin's primary contacts — a Taiwanese Naval Officer who is now retired and living in the U.S. — which cast significant doubt on whether Lin had actually told him anything classified. Justin Kao described a cordial relationship between he and Lin, where Lin would occasionally share open source information with him over email, but Lin didn't share any of the secrets he had access to.
Furthermore, an NCIS investigation known as the Rogue Archer report — also obtained by Navy Times — showed that Lin at one point suggested Kao go through official Pentagon information-sharing channels when Kao asked about potentially sensitive submarine-launched torpedo test results.
In fact, there is stronger evidence the Lin was — or had been — a spy for the United States. The investigation revealed that Lin was an operative in a joint FBI/NCIS task force at some point in his career, but was read out of the program during the period of the accusations for spying and not reporting travel and foreign contacts.
But while Lin may not have been John Walker, the notorious Navy mole who spied for the Soviet Union for nearly 20 years, that doesn't mean he didn't do anything wrong. The government amassed evidence of plenty of red-flag behavior that triggered the spy investigation. Experts who reviewed the case for Navy Times said not reporting foreign contacts, and supplying information to Taiwanese diplomats outside of the proper channels, was a huge legal issue for Lin. He will likely have to face the music for not accurately filling out his leave chit and taking foreign trips without properly informing his chain of command.
But what's 100 percent clear is that initial reports — attributed to unnamed government officials — that Lin was potentially a spy for China and that he could be trading secrets for sex were entirely false. The NCIS investigation did not reveal any substantial connections between Lin and China. The flight to China that Lin was arrested while boarding was a pleasure trip to meet a Chinese woman he met online, the Navy Times investigation revealed.
It should be noted, however, that while Navy Times amassed a substantial body of evidence that Lin was likely not a spy, it did not have access to the classified documents involved in the case. Statements made at a hearing that referenced those documents, however, indicated there were a pair of emails between Lin and another contact that contained statements that were retroactively classified by U.S. Pacific Command.
Lin's fate is likely to become more clear over the next 24 to 48 hours. In the mean time, read the full Navy Times investigation here:
David B. Larter was the naval warfare reporter for Defense News.
