Information security

'The Shadow War': How a Chinese spy stole some of the Pentagon's most sensitive secrets

To his American friends and contacts, Stephen Su was an affable businessman and gregarious guy.

"People liked him," Bob Anderson, the FBI's former head of counterintelligence, told me. "They didn't think he was an asshole and I know that sounds stupid, but people are people and that's how it started."

Stephen Su, who also went by his Chinese name Su Bin, lived in his native China but traveled frequently to the United States and Canada, to build a business in the aviation and aerospace sectors. His company, Lode-Tech, was a small player in a field of giants. However, from 2009 to 2014, Su steadily and deliberately built a network of close business contacts inside far bigger US and Canadian defense contractors who held some of most sensitive US military contracts.