Inside the Life of the World’s Most Dangerous Arms Dealer
Inside the Life of the World’s Most Dangerous Arms Dealer
Speaker 1: They're all on the FBI's most wanted list. Murderers, human traffickers,
millionaire fraudsters, drug lords, terrorists, and this man. He's a
threat to world peace and a key figure in the
struggle between superpowers. His name is Lee fang Wei, but
he also calls himself Carl Lee and uses several other aliases.
There's no criminal on the list with a higher bounty
five million dollars. This CIA Masade, the German BND, and
other spy agencies have been pursuing him for decades. One
US president even intervened personally to no avail.
Speaker 2: There still was this air of mystery around this Carli.
Speaker 3: He reminded me of sort of like the Colombian drug lords,
you know, like Pablo Escobar.
Speaker 4: I would say that, in all likelihood, he is an
individual who exists.
Speaker 1: He's a hunter focused on a particular prey, the most
unscrupulous arms dealer on the planet.
Speaker 2: My name is Aaron Arnold. I was a intelligence analyst
at the FBI. The Carlei case was the most unique
case that I ever participated in. I don't really recall
any cases that reached sort of this level of sophistication
and intrigue.
Speaker 1: The hunt is for a phantom who, among other things,
was able to help Iran obtain nuclear weapons, and of
whom there's just a single old photograph.
Speaker 2: This is a sort of another mystery of Carley. Why
aren't there more pictures? Why aren't there videos? You know,
it's kind of rare this day and age to be
able to hide for so long without your photo being taken.
Speaker 1: Aaron Arnold left the FBI for academia years ago, but
this particular story has clung to him ever since.
Speaker 2: It turned into, you know, one of these cases where
you know, after a day of trying to answer questions,
you'd end up with with more.
Speaker 1: Now many investigators, intelligence agency operatives, and diplomats have all
had this same experience as Aaron Arnold. A suburb of
Washington home to many of those responsible for planning America's
wars and shaping US foreign policy, Among them the man
who was probably the first to pick up Carl Lee trail.
Speaker 5: My name is Van van Deepen.
Speaker 6: For about fourteen years, I ran the office in the
State Department responsible for, among other things, missile non proliferation.
Preventing the spread of WFD and missiles is among the
president's highest national security priorities.
Speaker 1: For years, he served as National Intelligence Officer for Weapons
of Mass Destruction and Proliferation and worked for the US
Department of State until late twenty sixteen.
Speaker 6: So through all that time I had some level of
responsibility for dealing with the Karl Lee problem.
Speaker 1: The Carl Lee problem. When US intelligence agencies, going about
their daily business of collecting communication data, first came across
suspicious transactions by a Chinese businessman, no one suspected the
dimensions it would eventually assume.
Speaker 6: It would have been in the early two thousands. I
think every day, as part of my job responsibilities, I
would be reading the intelligence reporting that came in overnight,
and there would have been some what we call raw
intelligence reporting that would have, you know, first mentioned the
activities of Carl Lee.
Speaker 1: The US government soon realized they picked up the trail
of a serial offender shipping material for the construction of
ballistic missiles to Iran in breach of two thousand and
six UN Security Council sanctions on Tehran.
Speaker 6: He was pretty active, and so you know, probably every
week or two something would come up, and as things
came up, we would try to act on them.
Speaker 1: Behind the scenes, they applied pressure. The Department of State
shared information on Carl Lee's shipment routes with the governments
of other nations so they could take his containers out
of circulation when the ship discharged its cargo.
Speaker 6: Sometimes you know something would come out of the other
end of that process that you would you know, put
into play and watch develop. And sometimes you weren't able,
either because we didn't know enough or the intelligence behind
it was so sensitive that we couldn't risk compromising it
that you had to sort of sit back and let that.
Speaker 1: One and go. And so within a few years, Carl
Lee became the trusted supplier to the Iranian weapons industry.
Israel's spy agencies also stumbled upon Cara Lei at the
turn of the millennium. They feared the businessmen from China
could increase the range of their arch enemies missiles with
dramatic consequences for Israel.
Speaker 7: It was more than twenty years ago when the Iranians
came first time to North Korea asking for missiles to buy,
and the nosth Kourini were very open towards their needs
and they say, we have here on the shelf missiles
buy as many as you want there. Any question was
very interesting, what is range of the missiles? And when
the North Korean told them that the range is a
thousand kilometers to say, we don't buy. If it is
less than thirteen hundred, we don't need it. And we
all run to the maps to see what the three
hundreds will add to their capability, and it was very
clear if it is less than getting into the heart
of Tel Aviv, they are not ready to.
Speaker 1: Buy a difference of three hundred kilometers to potentially cause
hundreds of thousands of fatalities.
Speaker 7: It does matter where you hit, you kill. It's so
crowded and you'll kill many Israelists.
Speaker 1: Israel is regularly hit by smaller missiles, but partially due
to caral Lee's shipments came within range of Iranian missiles
that were at least fifteen meters long, with a potential
to carry nuclear warheads on.
Speaker 8: The Cruzever, technical solutions included replacing steel with aluminium, installing
better steering, making the warhead smaller, and amending the stability
of the aerodynamics. Suddenly you could shoot these missiles over
one size and five hundred kilometers, puitting Israel within range.
Speaker 1: The German federal intelligence agency, the B and D, British
mi I six and other secret services also began homing
in on Carl Lee during the two thousands. But just
who is the man who could plunge the Middle East
into chaos?
Speaker 2: A lot of my colleagues have spent countless hours, you know,
digging through his marriage records, death records, you know, legal
records to find out as much as they can about
this guy.
Speaker 1: Investigators obtained Carl Lee's passport number, a series of numbers
that's like a fingerprint in China. It lasts for life
and reveals one state of birth, the eighteenth of September
nineteen seventy two. The first two numbers indicate the province
where he was born. Twenty three is helong Jing, an
area in China's far northeast, directly on the border with
Russia or more precisely Siberia. In the seventies, the Chinese
called this area the Great Northern Wilderness. To this day,
few foreigners stray into Helong Jing. It's thought that Caral
Lee spent his childhood here in a place called Chahyang.
At the time, it was nothing more than a small
agricultural township He was born into 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 reported their own parents for speaking against Mao, thereby
signing their own death warrants. Many were forced into labor
in helong Jing, including educated young people from the cities.
It's very likely that Karl Lee's parents were among the
million people who drained swamps, planted fields, and made helong
Jing what it is today, China's bread basket.
Speaker 9: This is the Chinese hinterland. It's not a wealthy area.
It's a place that's heavily reliant on farming in the summer,
but that's completely cut off by snow in the winter.
It's a long way to the nearest life. In other words,
it would be relatively difficult to manufacture anything halt yet
to stand.
Speaker 1: To this day, Western visitors see helong Jang as a mysterious, lost,
almost exotic place. It's where Lei fung Wi spent the
first years of his life. Thirty years later, as Carl Lee,
he was giving the world's most powerful government the run around.
Speaker 6: It wouldn't have been long before we decided that we
needed to try to figure out a way to go
to the Chinese government, because if we really wanted to
stop him, we had to somehow persuade the Chinese government
to do it.
Speaker 1: Initially, the US believed this approach would be successful.
Speaker 6: And so then we would start dialoguing with the Chinese government,
providing them information about Carli's activities and trying to, you know,
see if we could somehow both assist and persuade them
to take action.
Speaker 1: At the time, China's government had just changed its approach
to weapons exports.
Speaker 4: In the eighties and nineties, proliferation from China was focused
mostly on exports from major state firms, firms that clearly
were connected and controlled by the Chinese government, and these
firms were selling complete systems to countries of concern.
Speaker 1: Along with the Chinese economy, Beijing's influence grew. China presented
itself as a responsible global power and endorsed several agreements
aimed at preventing missiles and warheads from falling into the
wrong hands.
Speaker 4: China definitely has international obligations to do something. I mean
their party to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. They had
said that they are adhering to something called the Missile
Technology Control Regime. So coming back to car Lee. According
to that regime, China is meant to be controlling missile
related technologies of the type that Karlee is providing.
Speaker 1: As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, China
also supported the two thousand and six sanctions on Iranian
nuclear activities, but Carl Lee continued to supply Tehran.
Speaker 10: Every month, every couple months.
Speaker 6: As the information came in, you know, we would, you know,
seek to what we called the marsh the Chinese government
about Lee and his activities. And so there's a you know,
a very long history of US to marshes to the
Chinese complaining about Lee and asking them to take action
about Lee.
Speaker 1: The talks more highly sensitive CIA spies were regularly disappearing
in China. Giving away too much information could endanger lives.
Speaker 11: Is a balance to try to figure out how much
to tell to one's diplomatic counterpart about a problem that
you've learned about through intelligence. The nightmare scenario is I
go to a diplomatic counterpart and tell them that I
know something about a terrible problem that is happening in
their country and 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 fellow. So someone has died for having
done the right thing by trying to draw attention to
a problem. And we no longer get that information either,
and everyone thinks the problem is solved, except that it's not.
It's just that my source is dead.
Speaker 1: In the White House at the time, George W. Bush,
despite the risks his administration, repeatedly chose to share sensitive
information on Karl Lee with China. In two thousand and eight,
his Secretary of State stepped in personally. Conda Liza Rice
instructed her diplomats that the US US Embassy in Beijing
to ramp up the pressure. They were told to work
on the Chinese government to ensure its intervention in the case.
Rice and several secret dispatches heavily incriminating Carl Lee. They
were concerning the supply of machinery for missile construction and
harmless sounding substances such as aluminum and graphite.
Speaker 8: When you can build thrusters of graphite which reach into
this tail into the missile's exhaust gases and change its direction,
to put it simply, so the missile can use the
stuff coming out of the back to steer itself.
Speaker 1: It's thought. Caral Lee also supplied Iran with a large
number of gyroscopes.
Speaker 8: The gyroscope is essentially the missile's brain, it's sensory organs.
It allows the missile to determine where it's moving, where
it's going, how it's moving, counter steer, and stay on
course of course play.
Speaker 1: It's these instruments that turn inaccurate projectiles into precision weapons.
Speaker 8: Is how the missile steers itself. The gyroscoup is like
the missile's nervous system, its eyes and ears.
Speaker 1: Carl Lee appeared to be supplying enough of these for
an entire arsenal of missiles.
Speaker 4: Those are fine instruments that require careful calibration. You can
see in the quantities that car Lee has applied. I
mean you have hundreds, hundreds of accelerometers, hundreds of actuators
that have been supplied. So this is not one or
two pieces that are on needs. This is something that
they need for each and every missile that they're building.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and nine, Barack Obama's Democrats moved into
the White House the new Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton,
pursued her predecessor's course unchanged. After just a few weeks
in office, she had her diplomats deliver a message to
the Chinese government. We strongly urge you to invest instigate
these activities, Signed Clinton.
Speaker 6: There are certainly lots of things that he's doing that
are illegal in China. From our standpoint, there's plenty of
domestic legal basis for the Chinese to take action, but
for whatever reason, they haven't.
Speaker 12: My name's Adam Kaufman.
Speaker 13: I started working in the Manhattan District Attorney's office in
nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 12: I was a.
Speaker 13: Street crime prosecutor, starting with very minor crimes, working your
way up until you're handling more serious and violent crime.
I then went and worked in a narcotics bureau that
prosecuted international shipments coming up from Mexico and South America,
truckloads of usually cocaine, sometimes heroin. After that, I found
myself wondering what I should do, and I went and
spoke with mister Morgenthaw.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and three, Robert Morgenthaw was the District
Attorney of Manhattan. He came from a Jewish family, that
had fled Germany escaping persecution. His father was US Secretary
of the Treasury during World War II and creator of
the Morgenthaw plan to turn Germany into an agricultural nation.
After the war, he supported the fledgling state of Israel,
which left its mark on Robert Morgenthaw. In nineteen sixty one,
his friend John F. Kennedy appointed him District Attorney of
New York. He went on to become one of the
most influential figures in US judicial history.
Speaker 13: We had a tremendous amount of personal courage. He wasn't
afraid to take on difficult cases. He suggested that I
join this little bureau called Investigation Division Central.
Speaker 12: It was a bureau that.
Speaker 13: Sort of handled mister Morganhaw's interest in international markets. In
the recognition of the place that Manhattan played in global finance.
Speaker 1: With Wall Street as a close neighbor, Morganhaw set out
to be more than just an attorney for Manhattan. He
saw himself as a prosecutor for international crime.
Speaker 13: Manhattan's unique because we have so much of global finance
passes through Manhattan, international wire payments, international securities, so much
international global business takes place within a mile of the
courthouse in Manhattan.
Speaker 1: The Morgan thought ethos was his investigators could hunt down
any criminal whose money passed through Manhattan, which happened when
someone in the city made a dollar ansfer. That meant
the long arm of Morgenthaw reached into every part of the.
Speaker 13: World, and he was not afraid to flex those muscles
and to impose himself into international finance where really very
few district attorneys would be able to go.
Speaker 1: One day, when the district attorney was well over eighty,
his path crossed Carl Leese. Morgenthaw had received a tip
off via one of his secret contacts.
Speaker 13: It was probably around two thousand and five. He called
us into his office and he told us to buy
tickets and get on a plane and head to Israel,
being told that we were going to go meet with
Israeli intelligence officials.
Speaker 12: I had no idea what to expect.
Speaker 1: When the New York investigators arrived, they'd never heard of
Carl Lee. All they knew was their boss was very
worried about the country his father had once supported.
Speaker 13: He viewed Iran as a threat to Israel, but he
also had a view based on terrorism. He also viewed
it as a threat to New York and to the
citizens of New York, you know, coming out of nine
to eleven.
Speaker 1: These were the years when the world found out about
Iran's secret ambitions to build a nuclear bomb for Israel
an existential threat. The reason for a highly unusual meeting.
Speaker 13: I had never heard of a local prosecutor going to
meet with foreign intelligence services. That was something that I
had never heard of. You know, we're not the federal government,
and we weren't the CIA, we weren't anyone like that.
But for mister Morgan Thaw, it was sort of business
as usual. The Israeli has had an extensive program, as
you would expect, focusing on Iranian WMD and missile procurement.
Speaker 1: The Foreign Spy Agency MASSAD had been watching Carl Lee
for a while, but China was one of Israel's key
trading partners and the government didn't want any open conflict
with Beijing. So all of a sudden, the New York
prosecutors were in a room with the head of MASSAD.
Speaker 13: I remember sitting in a meeting with Meyer Degan, and
mister Degan saying, we don't want intelligence to sit on
a shelf. We want to act against it, and I
understand that mister Morganhaw feels the same way, and so
we want to help you make cases if we can,
that you can bring to expose what Iran is doing.
And he said, we want to give you the tools
and if you can use them.
Speaker 12: We want you to.
Speaker 1: Israel's Masad began secretly collaborating with US prosecutors in regards
to a mysterious businessman in China.
Speaker 13: They gave us some opening information and it was about
Carl Lee.
Speaker 1: To this day, the authorities believe he's here in one
of Asia's most important port cities. It's about one thousand
kilometers to the south of Carl Lee's home, hey long Jang,
not far from the border with North Korea, a metropolis
of millions that profited in the nationwide economic boom of
the nineteen eighties. At the time, the nation was opening
up to the west. Thanks to him. Deang Chaoping Mao's successor,
he set up special economic zones in China where foreign
investment was possible. That's how Dang brought capitalism to China
in nineteen eighty four. He also made Dallian a special
economic zone. It's not possible to say precisely when Carl
Lee's family ended up there. Despite meticulous research, no details
of his youth exist. People that knew him didn't talk.
The authority is divulged nothing, as though issued with a
blanket directive to remain silent. Rumors and vague scraps of
information are all we have to go on. It's thought
he attended a school in Dallian named Number twenty four,
an elite school for the children of high ranking party officials.
That would match the claim that Carl Lee's grandfather was
a highly decorated colonel in the People's Liberation Army. It's
also thought that Carl Lee worked intermittently for the state,
but it's not known in what capacity. One thing's for sure.
He made full use of Dallian's advantages. The port city
is a great place to do business, legal or otherwise.
Speaker 4: You have a lot of foreign US firms or European
firms that have branches there that have manufacture things in China.
From an opportunistic point of view, it's a great place
if you want to be a proliferator, because there are
a lot of places to hide.
Speaker 1: Here. In Dallian. A business was registered in the late
nineteen nineties, its name Limped Economic and Trade Company. According
to the Chinese company's register, Carl Lee's father, Lea Gui
Jin had himself listed as the company's legal representative on
the fourth of June nineteen ninety eight. This company was
the seed for Carl Lee's commercial empire.
Speaker 13: The Israelis gave us some of the substance and content
of certain emails that showed references to WMD and other
materials for weapons procurement, missile production, things like that.
Speaker 12: We would work until late at night.
Speaker 13: We'd order in pizzas, beers and just work on this
thing all the time.
Speaker 1: The prosecutors were in luck because in one particular aspect,
Carl Lee had been extremely reckless.
Speaker 13: Some of the email addresses were from US providers Hotmail
or Yahoo. Because they were in the US, there was
a procedure to get access to the content of those
emails from the email service providers.
Speaker 12: So we had a starting point.
Speaker 13: We had some very talented, tenacious prosecutors working on the case,
and they just dug into the information. They were making connections.
Speaker 1: What they found trumped all their findings to date. The
investigators stumbled upon innumerable transactions and a seemingly impenetrable network
of dummy companies.
Speaker 13: We found so many channels of WMD proliferation of money
moving through different countries.
Speaker 12: He had a real global network. I remember that very well.
Speaker 5: I'm sure.
Speaker 13: This mission was so fundamental, especially when we started seeing
what was in the emails themselves.
Speaker 12: It became very real.
Speaker 1: He wrote. We are the same company, the factory, the
people as the previous LIMT. The only difference is that
the company's English name has changed to Sino Metallurgy and
Men Metals Industry.
Speaker 13: He would email people and say, well, don't worry about
US sanctions. I'm just going to change the name of
my company. I mean, he was brazen in the emails.
Speaker 1: He urged his business partners into the fray. This is
very important, he wrote, otherwise the money can be blocked.
Like last time.
Speaker 13: There were transactions between metallurgists all over the world, providing
material that Carl Lee would then provide to Iran, and
Carl Lee had to pay for those materials in US dollars.
US dollar payments almost always clear through banks in the US,
and especially back in the early two thousands, most of
those banks were in Manhattan, so if the wire payment
said Carl Lee or Lifang Wei, then yes, the banks
would have stopped them. But if the wire payment said
the Bright and Shiny Metallurgist Company, then there's nothing for
the US banks to see and the payment just goes through.
That was the whole idea of Carl Lee in setting
up all of these dummy companies. It was to fool
the US banks into processing payments that otherwise would have
been blocked.
Speaker 1: Although he was hiding thousands of kilometers from Manhattan, investigators
wanted Carl Lee to face trial in New York.
Speaker 13: The legal theory we came up with was that by
sending the wire payments in false names, caused the bank
records of the Manhattan banks to have false information and
falsifying records. Falsifying the records of a business is a
New York state crime, and so all of this came
down to the falsifying of business records of banks in Manhattan.
Speaker 1: After months of investigations, they indicted Karl Lee.
Speaker 14: The Manhattan District Attorney, Robert Morgenthaw announced a one hundred
and eighteen count indictment against a Chinese citizen.
Speaker 13: April seventh, two thousand and nine, was the press conference
that we had to announce the indictment of Carl Lee.
It was the opportunity for mister Morgenthaw to show to
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 WMD to Iran.
Speaker 12: He wanted the world to sit up and take note
of this.
Speaker 1: Robert Morgenthal filed for the extradition of Carl Lee, who
was thirty six years old at the time.
Speaker 14: The big question is did the Chinese government know? After all,
Chinese banks were involved in some of these transactions. Chinese
companies have long been accused of using shell companies in
the United States Kitty Pilgrim Sierra New York.
Speaker 1: But the Chinese government appeared disinterested in the extradition attempt,
and Carl Lee was cautious. It's thought he left China
for business in Tehran on a direct flight. That way,
he wouldn't run the risk of being detained on a
foreign stopover, and delivered directly to the US.
Speaker 15: And I remember seeing his name a lot in US
documents and thinking, you know who is this guy? My
name is Daniel Salisbury. I'm a researcher at King's College
in London, where I research proliferation and arms exports and
arms and pargos.
Speaker 1: Daniel Salisbury is a researcher at the Department of War Studies.
The academics maintain good connections with Western intelligence agencies and
are often interested in the same things. Their specialty is
digging up information accessible to anyone but found by few.
Speaker 15: When you start looking at these cases, a lot of
information is kind of hidden in plain sight. So we
used help from some Chinese linquists and really started exploring
what was out there on the internet.
Speaker 1: The researchers used Chinese keywords to comb through commercial registers,
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 their base in London.
Speaker 15: We found that most of his businesses were linked to
two addresses. So the usual mentioned appears to be a
large office block in downtown daim There's not quite a skyscraper,
but it is quite tall, has a lot of flaws
and I imagine this is the administrative part of the operation.
Working with our Chinese linguists we were able to find
some pictures of the outside of the building and get
a sense for what it looked like and what kind
of things could go on there. You know, a lot
of businesses were registered their administrative functions, including iron people
and that kind of things.
Speaker 1: They made another discovery one that totally changed their impression
of Carl Lee. One of the companies they were able
to attribute to him had a website and it showed
it wasn't just a dealer.
Speaker 15: You had a lot of product listings for various different
types of graphite. We actually realized that the address out
of town wasn't just a business address, a warehouse or
an office.
Speaker 5: But it was actually the large graphite factory.
Speaker 15: It really changed the scale of the problem in our mind.
You know, it was real kind of mind blowing discovery.
Speaker 13: Looking at the.
Speaker 15: Satellite imagery, it's a pretty big place. I think online
it was stating about eighty thousand square mesas well. It's
quite difficult to verify exactly what's going on inside those buildings,
but with a factory pumping these things out in China,
it becomes a completely different kind of problem.
Speaker 1: Following months of preparation, a fact finding mission to China itself,
in the city where investigators, spy agencies and the London
researchers believed Carl Lee was hiding. All the tracks left
by the world's most wanted arms dealer converged in this
city in Dahlian.
Speaker 5: Since as a field of film and.
Speaker 9: Many many companies with an alleged connection to Carl Lee
are registered in Dahlian Gestriat, we assumed that if we
were going to find him anywhere, and that's where he'd be.
Speaker 1: When the pandemic began, China cut itself off from the
rest of the world. The government expelled many foreign journalists
and stopped issuing visas for short term reporters. The only
way of getting closer to Karl Lee for this film
was to call on those who were long term residents
in China, in this case Christophe Geeson and Mattias Bullinger,
who's the camera man. The two begin their search for
a single individual in a metropolis of seven and a
half million.
Speaker 5: That's all tit is to feel.
Speaker 9: We tesked ourselves to visit many of the companies that
are or were registered there and find out what we
can actually see. Can we talk to vimkamand who might
provide us with the next set of clues. In this
puzzle laid out in front.
Speaker 5: Of us, Hutton.
Speaker 9: Vain vised we find clues that would ultimately verify his existence,
asked Boyd Vine. The first building we visit. It was
an office tower block more or less in the center
of Dahlim. The King's College report mentioned it as the
presumed center where Karl Lee's empire is very likely to
be based.
Speaker 5: Devashin Khali Akali's imperiums and it's hut.
Speaker 9: In the past, Carl Lei's companies are said to have
rented a whole floor there, the twenty fifth floor of
this building. So we took the lift up there.
Speaker 1: Kan Was he actually there in person? Did he have bodyguards?
Would he call the police at the end of the corridor?
Speaker 5: A surprise and THESEABOIDA hasn't done acht.
Speaker 9: There were eight offices or apartments. We knocked on every
single door incident, and no one had ever heard of
the businesses registered to that building.
Speaker 5: Golden at Niemutgerhut.
Speaker 9: The Trail of Nowhere, Arischpoenznichts.
Speaker 16: My name's Thomas countryman I was a Foreign service officer
for a total of thirty five years. From nineteen eighty
two to twenty eleven, I served in five different embassies
overseas at the United Nations, at the White House, at
the Pentagon, mainly focused on issues in Eastern Europe and
the Middle East.
Speaker 1: Countryman has served several presidents over his career. When it
came to US foreign policy, he was viewed as an
all rounder with a keen eye for detail.
Speaker 16: But then from twenty eleven to twenty seventeen, I was
the United States Assistant Secretary of State Proliferation.
Speaker 10: In short, the Bureau.
Speaker 16: Of International Security and Non Proliferation 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.
Speaker 12: And in that job, one of.
Speaker 16: My important tasks was to constantly raise with the Chinese
government our concern about the illegal exports of high tech
material that mister Lee was organizing from China to Iran.
Speaker 1: This building in Beijing's Diplomatic Quarter played a crucial role
here the Iranian Embassy.
Speaker 16: His usual means of contact was through the Iranian Defense
Attache in Beijing. The primary job of the Iranian Defense
Attache in Beijing is to acquire technology that is needed
for Iran's military programs.
Speaker 1: When Countrymen took up his post, Carl Lee had already
been doing business with Iran for a decade.
Speaker 16: The problem was that he had become, in essence, the
most valuable member of the Iranian ballistic missile team. So
you can't say that his arrest would have ended the
Iranian ballistic missile program, but we're convinced that it would
have slowed it down significantly. I spoke about him in
every conversation that I had with Chinese counterparts. We would
often see each other at the same meetings in New York,
in Vienna, in Geneva, but we also met in each
other's capitals in Washington and Beijing.
Speaker 1: The case put a huge strain on relations between the
two superpowers.
Speaker 6: They sort of washed their hands of it, saying, hey,
this is in China, this is some guy. But on
the other hand, were incredibly put out by US sanctioning
Chinese entities, So they sort of tried to have it
both ways, and so, you know, oftentimes the rhetoric could
get a little heated when it came to, you know,
them being upset about US sanctioning Chinese entities, including Carl Lee.
Speaker 1: But why was China doing nothing? The US had a
hunch they thought Carl Lee must have had powerful allies
within the Chinese government.
Speaker 16: Well, I believe it's difficult for a mid level official
in the Chinese government to stop him. If he is
well connected, if he's got lawyers, if he's got influence,
that is more resources than the Chinese mid level official
somebody like me can use against him. What concerns us
is that the officials above that level did not seem
to care about this sufficiently to take some action.
Speaker 1: After public prosecutors in New York. Now the FBI, America's
most powerful investigative authority, set its sites on Carl Lee.
Speaker 2: I think that the scope and scale of his sort
of operation really eclipsed any other type of case that
the FBI was familiar with at the time.
Speaker 1: The FBI assigned an entire group of investigators and analysts
to work on the case of the Chinese businessmen.
Speaker 2: I'd rather not talk about sort of the specifics of
who and how many were working on those, Like any
HR personnel issues are kind of off limits with intel stuff,
it can't be in like a documentary. But Carley was
a major focus and something that was a priority investigation
at the FBI, you know, for a number of years.
Speaker 6: When roughly the twenty fourteen time frame, not only had
Karl's activities you know, continued to develop and worsen, but
other options that other agencies were thinking about pursuing started
to become inviable. So, for example, there would be some
agencies that would you know, would like to try to
prosecute Karli in the US courts, and after a number
of years they sort of recognized that just wasn't going
to happen.
Speaker 16: It did become clear that we had both an obligation
and an opportunity with the Chinese government to press harder
to get the Chinese government to stop mister Lee from
exporting this technology to Iran.
Speaker 1: At the time, China was on the brink of a
new era. Chi Jingping took over the reigns of power
in twenty twelve. For the US, there's a chance to
shine a spotlight on the matter with Carl Lee.
Speaker 16: Included a diplomatic approach to China that emphasized not only
at my level, but at higher levels of the US government.
Speaker 6: The name has gone to President Obama. I'm also aware
that President Obama mentioned that name to the Chinese, you know,
specifically complained about it. Unfortunately, that did not result in
any real change in Carl's activities and behavior.
Speaker 1: The US government then launched a response of unprecedented scale
in the case of an arms dealer.
Speaker 16: We had several meetings, sometimes at the State Department, sometimes
at the Executive Office building next to the White House
that's part of the White.
Speaker 1: House, by agencies, investigating authorities, and several ministries joined forces
to plan a coordinated strike.
Speaker 6: There became sort of a Carle Blitz that was rolled
out by the Inner Agency. And so you saw, you know,
a US criminal indictment. You saw some additional sanctions, including
sanctions of new types coming out, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 16: It included the legal pressure of the FBI.
Speaker 2: So this was Carly's mistake that in his illegal transaction
he used the American financial system, and so this was
the lever that the FBI Department of Justice had to
pull and ultimately ended up seizing almost seven million dollars
of Carle's money.
Speaker 6: You saw, you know, a reward for his information leading
to his capture.
Speaker 1: The US announced a five million dollar bounty for information
leading to his arrest. Much like drugs Lord El Chapo
or Osama bin Ladin after his attacks on two US embassies.
Speaker 2: You know, if you look at sort of averages, you know,
you usually see you know, a million or so five
is high. It's significant, it means something, right, Yeah, it's
it's a lot of money.
Speaker 1: The next day, the Chinese government issued its first public
statement on the Karli case.
Speaker 12: Mayfa e Union.
Speaker 9: Shushut Energy.
Speaker 5: Mayfa even did the j.
Speaker 1: Beijing and Washington started openly trading blows.
Speaker 17: We are very clear about the activity that this individual
has undertaken and their threat to international stability and security.
And that's 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.
Speaker 13: If he's in China, what's the need to put this Well.
Speaker 17: As the release said, he's a fugitive right now, so
I'm not going to speculate on where he might be.
Speaker 1: On Capitol Hill, senators unleashed their fury.
Speaker 18: So the Chinese government says they can't figure this out.
They can't figure out how to shut him down. A
guy's like him. But the good news is they can
figure out other things.
Speaker 10: In China.
Speaker 18: They figured out how to arrest five women who belonged
to a feminist organization.
Speaker 10: Last year.
Speaker 18: They figured out how to jail forty four journalists.
Speaker 10: Last year.
Speaker 18: They figured out how to put twenty seven thousand Muslim
minorities in the Wiga region in prison.
Speaker 10: Last year. They could figure that out.
Speaker 16: But they can't figure out mister Lee has money and lawyers,
and the wigers and the women's and goos and the
others do not. The Chinese government has demonstrated that it
has the authority and the capability to put out of
business anyone that it wishes to put out of business.
Speaker 1: And then suddenly a website appeared online about Lee Fung Wei,
alias Carl Lee. The administrators said their aim was to
spread information about him. The page included drawings of Carl
Lee's face, photo montages, and articles in English, Chinese and
Arabic about his alleged complicity in the suffering of thought
thousands of children in them any civil war where Irani
and missiles are being deployed, and about arms deeels. But
who's responsible for the website? It's a course project, right
the administrators who are evidently students, a lecturer gave them
the idea.
Speaker 2: I can't imagine there's too many classes out there that
are teaching Carl Lee. It's a very bizarre sort of topic,
a little as a you know, a little kind of
out there, and I feel like myself and my colleague
probably know all the people that are teaching on CARLEI,
and they have no idea what this.
Speaker 10: You know, who has created the site? I'm Jeff Stein.
Speaker 3: I've been covering national security issues for about forty years now,
and that followed my own service in the Army as
an Army intelligence case officer, where I began to get
insights into how the clandestine mentality worked, and that served
me well over the years. I was with Newsweek for
many years in the Washington Post, and now, in my
semi retirement, I am the founding editor in chief of
spy Talk, a website that covers intelligence issues. I think
I first heard about him in around early twenty fifteen.
I began to hear of sanctions being applied to this
fellow who we call Carl Lee or Lee fung Way.
So I began looking into it, and I found that
federal officials were more than happy to brief me and
let me know what was going on, and I wrote
a major story for Newsweek.
Speaker 1: The title of his article how China helped Iran go nuclear.
It shared a number of details from intelligence agency sources.
Speaker 3: He liked luxury cars, but I was told also that
he was sort of a stay at home guy.
Speaker 10: He didn't go far from Dag.
Speaker 3: Yet we didn't learn a lot more about him, except
that we did have a stringer go there and do
some reporting on him to locate his offices in his home,
so we knew he was there, We knew he existed,
but we couldn't gather any more information on him.
Speaker 10: Then came the Trump administration.
Speaker 13: I'm angry when China's making five hundred billion dollars a
year and shucking our our jobs and sucking our money
out of our country and we don't do anything about it.
Speaker 3: The Trump administration was on a campaign to blame China
for everything, and as part of that, some White House
officials summoned me to come down to the White House
and discuss the case of Theliflung Way.
Speaker 10: And that was in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 3: And certainly the Trump White House well knew my feelings
about its foreign policy, which were negative, and I often
had testy exchanges with the White House spokespeople when I
called them for a comment on something, so that they
reached out to me to talk about this case and
invite me down to the White House or the adjacent
old Executive Office building.
Speaker 10: The talk was quite unusual. I was very amused by that,
but we were on the same page with that issue
with the liflong way.
Speaker 1: While the White House launched a Karl Lee pr offensive,
the threat posed by Iranian missiles was thrust into sharp
focus in late twenty seventeen, Trump's UN ambassador briefed the
media standing in front of the wreckage of a ballistic
missile fired on Saudi Arabia by Iran's allies in Yemen.
Speaker 19: The missile's intended target was the civilian airport in Rheai,
through which tens of thousands of passengers travel each day.
Just imagine if this missile had been launched at Dallas
Airport or JFK or the airports in Paris, London or Berlin.
That's what we're talking about here, That's what Iran is
actively supporting on your way.
Speaker 1: Initially, many wondered whether the US was once again telling
the same old story, just as they had done before
the Iraq War. From the presenting alleged evidence of Saddam
Hussein's WMD program, the State Department the department, but the
experts were certain security.
Speaker 8: The missile and its configuration was precisely what we knew
from Iran, what Iran had very proudly unveiled a few
years ago in several videos and presentations.
Speaker 1: One of the pieces of wreckage betrayed some information the
logo of a certain Iranian arms company, one of Karl
Lee's most important clients. The attack on Riod marked the
start of a whole series of strikes which continued to
this day.
Speaker 5: We see them using those missiles.
Speaker 20: We've seen them using them in Iraq, We've seen them
using them in Saudi Arabia, in Syria, where they've had
significant impact. We see also Iran proliferating these missiles across
the region. So for example, Lebani's has Belah is the
most popular proxy, most popular customer of Iranian missiles. But
also now the Hufi's and Yemen have been using to
a really significant extent Iranian missiles.
Speaker 1: And when Iran and the US edged close to war,
Iranian missiles were a significant factor.
Speaker 20: The One attack that stood out in recent years was
the Iranian attack on the Iraqi bases hosting US forces
in January twenty twenty. Iran had launched a dozen missiles
targeting these sites. It was extremely dangerous. It did result
in over one hundred traumatic brain injuries among US service members.
Had this strike resulted in US fatalities, we would have
seen a much more significant US response than really we
had seen in the past years. And I don't know
how far the esc lationis spiral would go down.
Speaker 1: One thing is certain. Without Karl Lee's help, Iran's ballistic
missile program wouldn't be where it is today. But what's
the Chinese government saying? The chance of finding an answer
is highest outside of China. The Munich Security Conference an
annual gathering for leaders and state ministers, military officials, and
spy agency chiefs from all over the world. In February
twenty twenty, the guest list included one of China's highest
ranking politicians, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, whose ministry had been
negotiating with the US over Karl Lee for two decades.
Speaker 12: Here, how are you.
Speaker 2: Thank you so, mun.
Speaker 4: Friend? Why for?
Speaker 1: During their time in Munich, Wang Ye and other guests
from less democratic nations had to endure something that would
never be allowed back home, uncomfortable questions from reporters.
Speaker 10: That's a question, man.
Speaker 9: The question is, why don't you tell mister lefan Way
also known as ky Lee, is on the FBI most
Wanted list.
Speaker 3: For sure?
Speaker 18: Home can.
Speaker 1: The groundless charge? The Chinese Foreign Minister's response.
Speaker 11: China doesn't admit, of course, providing any missile related materials
or components to Iran, so it's a little bit hard
to have hard evidence here. My own suspicion is that
they find themselves to have something of a coincidence of
interest in that trade.
Speaker 1: Carl Lee's businesses align with chi jinping strategy. He views
his nation as the second remaining superpower, soon to outstrip
the US economically and militarily. Chinese strategists believe a strong
Iran would benefit China in this regard.
Speaker 11: To complicate US strategy in the Middle East, perhaps encourage
Western governments to become more distracted by Middle Eastern problems
and less worried about what might be happening in the
Indo Pacific that China might be.
Speaker 5: So that's very convenient for them.
Speaker 1: 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 invasion of Taiwan. But
just where is the man who's become a key figure
in the struggle of the superpowers of the past years
and decades. The reporter team in China is on its
way to one of the most crucial companies in Carl
Lee's network, the Dalian Karut Industry. The business is registered
to this building.
Speaker 5: It's va.
Speaker 9: It wasn't in office, it was just a regular Chinese compound.
Speaker 1: The the company really does exist. There's documented evidence of
its exports. It even won a court case against a
supplier who was in breach of contract. But the door
is opened by an old woman holding a knife. She's
been chopping vegetables.
Speaker 5: That's with frak vuziden hair came to the Halo Jiao.
Speaker 9: When we asked the woman where she came from, raq
she said Helong Jiang did. And when we asked which
region exactly and mentioned the name Chaha Yana, she said, yes,
that's precisely where she came from.
Speaker 11: Is mocked.
Speaker 1: Chaha yang the small agricultural township where Carl Lee is
thought to have spent his childhood more than a thousand
kilometers from Dallian.
Speaker 5: That's is sure.
Speaker 9: Now, that's a very very remarkable situation to find someone
in another province that comes from precisely this place with
around ten thousand inhabitants.
Speaker 1: Stumped, how is she connect to Karl Lee? Did she
just let him use her address? Maybe she's known him
since he was a child from their homeland in the
far North.
Speaker 5: I'd finach khli frakten.
Speaker 9: When we asked about Carl Lee, her response was that
she didn't know how to contact him to Then, relatively
quickly she referred to her age, telling us she was
over eighty, and then it was our job to find
him in Sophieton.
Speaker 1: To this day, this apartment here is the official HQ
of Dallian Cairot Industry, at least that's what it says
in the Chinese company's register. In this story, every answer
leads to even more mysteries, such as the question of
who's behind the website? Who is Lee fang Wi. One
thing we do know the administrators don't want anyone to
know who they are. They've 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 profit
hungry arms dealer Carl Lee has nothing to fear from
investigators and prosecutors because he can always hide behind the
Chinese state.
Speaker 15: It's incredible, right. I don't think we've ever seen that
kind of thing done with a proliferator either. I mean,
it looks fairly sophisticated and well thought out. It seems
like someone has put some resources into this, and I
get a sense reading it as well, and having seen
various Chinese comics that the Chinese government has used to
talk to people about national security issues in China, it
looks like someone has seen those and thought, Okay, this
maybe is a good way to talk to a Chinese audience.
Speaker 1: And then suddenly a possible lead to the website creators
does crop up on this Facebook profile. The owner of
the profile seems to be studying international security in Germany
and admits that the who is liefang Wei website is theirs.
They are evidently studying in Heidelberg. In any case, they
liked many sites connected to the university there and Heidelberg's
student life The strange thing is at Heidelberg University, no
one's heard of a student called Chung Zing Boa, never
mind an internet site or study project about a Chinese
arms dealer. Neither relevant professors nor student representatives.
Speaker 13: Through our analysis of bank records and our analysis of emails,
we saw that he was doing a lot of business
in Euros. We did see that a lot of those
payments cleared through Frankfurt, and so we decided that we
would go try to encourage the Germans to take an
action similar to what we had done. So we went
over to Germany. We had put together a book, a
dossier of the euro payments that we had knowledge of.
So we were showing the originating bank, the parties, the dates,
and the banks that were processing the payments through Europe
and specifically the German banks that were clearing the payments.
And we went over to Bond and we met with
a woman, a federal prosecutor in charge of sanctions enforcement
in Germany, and we met with a team of UH
investigators from the federal police and we we presented our
information to them.
Speaker 12: We had a good meeting.
Speaker 13: They asked the right questions, They were clearly thinking about it,
and then the sort of team of police investigators took
us out for dinner and beers. We had a nice
German dinner we had. I think I think that I
recall brought worst a bunch of beers. Uh and then uh,
you know, and then they excused themselves, and I think
my colleagues and I stayed out a little bit longer
as we might. From our perspective, nothing ever came of it.
There was never a sort of a similar prosecution of
Carl le that that never that never happened.
Speaker 1: There's one more lead on the ominous website to an
Arab Facebook group linked to the site. It's administrator's name
Kareem Mostapha. It looks like they're also studying in Germany
and living in Berlin. Strikingly, the profile is structured precisely
like that of Jangzeng Boa. Both have nondescript profile images
with glasses and a book, and both were first active
on Facebook within two days of each other. Something else
they have in common, they're both untraceable. These apparent students
aren't registered with authorities in Berlin or Heidelberg. It's as
though they don't really exist at all.
Speaker 15: The fact that these people are ghosts and basically don't exist.
Would fit with a theory of this being run by
a state.
Speaker 2: It leads us to think that, you know, perhaps this
is you know, a government operation. It might maybe a
government operation too to try to sort of get the
word out about.
Speaker 15: Carly, especially in the states that spend a lot on
intelligence and have you know, many thousands of people working
in this area. It's quite possible that there's someone in
an office somewhere whose job it is to run these
kinds of operations, you know, maybe against Carli, but also
against other narco traffickers or other non state threats as well.
Speaker 1: So the site could be the work of spy agency personnel.
Speaker 15: It's quite possible that people making those videos know something
about him and have a good sense of how he
might react to something like that, and you know, it's
obviously a very targeted.
Speaker 1: Thing to do in spy speak, information operations or I own.
Speaker 2: There's also sort of maybe also a name and chame
sort of component, you know, maybe get under his skin
a little bit, The idea of you wered of like
tickling the wire, right, so you know, maybe sort of
doing something to cause a reaction, right that you can
perhaps monitor better or enhance your own information by doing that.
Speaker 15: Just to sort of think, Okay, maybe Kovenment taxpayers dollars
somewhere or are going into the making of these falting
pig videos, you know, is really something strange to see.
Speaker 1: Of all the possibilities, too, nations stand out.
Speaker 15: Probably the countries that seem to have had the biggest
interest in Cali, so that that would be the US
or probably Israel.
Speaker 1: Israel would be the most plausible. The nation's intelligence services
are known for unconventional cyber operations, and no country faces
a greater threat from Iranian missiles, a threat that's continued
to grow over recent years, also because of the activities
of Karl Lee. This is particularly evident in the north
in the Golan Heights. Israel captured this territory from Syria
in nineteen sixty seven and has occupied it ever since.
The Rocky Plateau is of strategic importance for Israel to
monitor one of their bitterest enemies, Hesbelah, which holds positions
to the north of here. In Lebanon, Army spokesperson Jonathan
Conricus was stationed here for a long time.
Speaker 21: What you see behind us is really think of it
as a highway as a smuggling highway for Iran by
which Iran transfers missiles, component infrastructure, machinery to produce or
to convert all that is transported from Iran Iraq via
Syria and the very areas that you can see close
to the Syria and Lebanese border.
Speaker 1: For years now, Iran has been trying to supply its
Hesbela allies in Lebanon with precision missiles. Based on what
we know, Carl Lee's businesses have been instrumental in the
development of these very same projectiles.
Speaker 21: What Risbala will try to use their precision guided missiles
for the most sensitive and high value targets like our port,
our airport, government facilities, hazardous materials.
Speaker 1: The entire nation became aware of the existential nature of
this threat in connection with the port city of Haifa,
where thousands of tons of ammonia were stored. If the
chemical were to be released somehow, that would potentially risk
hundreds of thousands of lives, something the leader of Hezbollah
knew only too well.
Speaker 21: Hassan Asala has said, without any shame, Yes, I will
aim for the ammonium container in Haifa. I will try
to strike it, and I would try to kill as
many civilians as possible.
Speaker 12: Z hawiyat ammonia Haifa nat.
Speaker 21: So that's the meaning of the enemy that we're dealing with.
Speaker 1: The ammonia that in Haifa was emptied following this threat
from the leader of Hezbollah, 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
navigation instruments to Tehran and all Western spy agencies could
do with look on powerlessly from the sidelines.
Speaker 10: The euphacials, I remember, were very angry.
Speaker 3: Maybe that was just a Trump motif, because they were
always angry about China, blaming China for this, and that
they were at a campaign against China.
Speaker 10: So I wrote the story.
Speaker 1: In twenty nineteen, Jeff Stein published an article in Newsweek
on new Donald Trump sanctions against Carl Lee and on
the authorities cold fury with the Chinese government.
Speaker 10: They said to me, this is just the start these
new sanctions. We're going to do more. We're going to
really teach China a lesson. With leifong Wi.
Speaker 1: At about the same time, a member of the Trump
administration began denouncing Lee Fung Wei alias Carl Lee and
China's government on Twitter. It was the Assistant Secretary of
State at the time, Christopher Ford.
Speaker 11: Leifung Wi was for a long time that perhaps the
most notorious of the proliferation traffickers in China, and nothing
ultimately was done. It continued to be a problem for
a very long time. When I was in government, we
stepped up that pressure on China, trying to get them
to pay more attention to it.
Speaker 1: The Trump administration started ramping up the pressure on both
China and Iran at the same time. The latter country
was the responsibility of Brian Hook, a hardliner and close
presidential confidante. He was a US Special representative for Iran
at the time.
Speaker 22: The Iranian regime has been chanting death to America. Iran
has been very successful at its mission to try to
terrorize the Middle East. It is a corrupt religious mafia
that has really impoverished its own people in order to
fund an ideology that they export around the world. What
is different about this administration's approach is that we are
putting in place a pressure campaign that doesn't have any
historic precedent.
Speaker 1: But strangely, Brian Hook remained tight lipped over the man
who was probably the most crucial foreign supplier to the
Iranian missile program.
Speaker 22: I don't have anything any comment on Carl Lee. Don't
have anything. I don't have any new information to share
with you on that.
Speaker 1: It was mid twenty nineteen when all of a sudden
silence fell over Washington.
Speaker 10: Well we haven't heard anything since, said, so what's going on?
Speaker 1: Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Ford also suddenly stopped commenting
on Carl Lee.
Speaker 11: We decided to stop tweeting. That's about all I can say.
Speaker 5: Okay, okay, that's not helpful.
Speaker 10: I understand the silence was deafening.
Speaker 5: As they say it was.
Speaker 10: It's a mystery to me.
Speaker 3: And then I, you know, tracked these same officials a
couple of years later.
Speaker 10: Everyone's a while would call say, yeah, what's going on. Well,
they're not talking about it.
Speaker 3: Officials are reticent to talk about him at all, or
they have memory loss, they suddenly can't remember.
Speaker 10: I have to remind them, you know car Lee, the Chinese,
Oh that guy, you know.
Speaker 3: So they're not talking about car Carle may not even
be on their mind at all. And if he is
on their mind, they're not making a public what they're doing, and.
Speaker 1: Then the website who is Lee Fong Wai went offline?
What's happened to Carl Lee? On the investigative trail in China,
the team travels northwards from Dallian. It's thought that Carl
Lee's graphite factory is located one hundred kilometers from the
port town. This according to information unearthed by researchers at
King's College in London. The factory that distinguishes Carl Lee
from many others in his particular line of work, the
one that makes him both a trader and a manufacturer. Welcome,
reads the word on the chimney and the name of
the company, Sinotech Carbon. The company has existed since two
thousand and six. A quarter of the shares belonged to
Carl Lee and the rest belonged to his younger brother,
Lee Fangdong.
Speaker 9: Tfnaturally, the question was, of course, is it an industrial
ruin down of us? Is there anything left of it
art or are graphite products still being actively produced there?
Speaker 5: Ti Understudd.
Speaker 1: A question that can only be answered in close quarters.
Speaker 5: The maziestimkoboid in niets.
Speaker 9: When you approach the building It almost feels like an
industrial ruin a complex where you get the sense that
nothing's happening there anymore. But then you spot areas with
the latest surveillance technology, loads of cameras watching anyone approaching
the site of the factories fabrikt.
Speaker 1: The investigation could be brought to an abrupt end at
any moment, but instead the opposite happens.
Speaker 5: Kandas Fabriklendo Problemos.
Speaker 9: Bughin you can easily enter the plant grounds. The gates
are open. Interestingly that there was no one there to
speak to at the.
Speaker 5: Time dom Di Monhete Schwechhenkun.
Speaker 1: On the site of a factory owned by one of
the world's most wanted men. And indeed there are tons
of graphite here, the materials so urgently needed by Iranian
missile engineers and supplied to them in huge volumes by
Carl Lee.
Speaker 5: Komos.
Speaker 9: And it seems dilapidated. But it's not the case that
there's no longer anything there. Production and is clearly going
on in one section of the industrial site.
Speaker 5: Zanzid does that. Let's take a fairly.
Speaker 9: Considering this is supposed to be the most dangerous arms
dealer in the world. The FBI has put a five
million dollar bounty on this man. And suddenly you arrive
at what's supposed to be the hub of his entire empire,
and you think, wow, so this is the most dangerous guy,
and here it looks like we're out in the middle
of nowhere. Then you do start to wonder, does all
this really out of pasta sam.
Speaker 1: The two men still have two cards up their sleeve,
two telephone numbers from Carl Lee's closest circle. So as
not to jeopardize the filming, they make the calls after
the factory visit.
Speaker 9: Van Dong is the fun Le fung Weifang Dong is
the younger brother of Lee Fung Wei. That was really
quite a remarkable telephone call because he just confirmed many
details for us. He said, yes, they did business with
Iran in the past, but that they no longer do.
A second thing he said was that the factory is
still active and their products are still being manufactured there.
So he confirmed what we saw on the site and
said that unfortunately we wouldn't be able to meet his brother.
Then we called another numbers he had. There had been speculation,
primarily in the King's College research report, that this could
lead us to the older brother of the.
Speaker 5: Family, Familia sim Kun. When we asked him about.
Speaker 9: Lefang Wei as alias Carl Lee, he said he couldn't
reach him himself at the moment.
Speaker 1: Where is Carl Lee and why is no one in
Washington talking about him anymore?
Speaker 3: At the beginning of the Biden administration, I have made
some sort of gentle inquiries about Carl Lee and zero
zip not silence. You know, I'm a former intelligence case officer.
I've been covering the CIA and other intelligences for years.
Speaker 10: So I wondered, well, maybe we doubled Lee fung Way.
Maybe he's our guy.
Speaker 1: Now, Carl Lee a double agent betraying his own business
partners to the enemy. It's a bold theory, but there
certainly have been such cases in the past.
Speaker 10: I mean, I have no evidence of that whatsoever, but
that's the way my mind works.
Speaker 3: I mean, I couldn't find any other logical explanation of
why the US would suddenly go silent about Leifong Wi.
Speaker 10: But he wouldn't have a very long life in China.
Speaker 3: I mean, CIA's operations in China, from public reporting we know,
have been a disaster. There's security lapses allowed dozens of
CIA sources in China to be rolled up and thrown
in jail or executed.
Speaker 1: So and then a new lead appears online for thirty
one minutes in the Chinese edition of Wikipedia. In the
article on Lefangwei. The version history reads on the eighth
of January at twenty twenty one, at six fifty eight am,
an anonymous user added the following passage. In April twenty nineteen,
Lee fang Wei was detained by the police on suspicion
of smuggling goods and articles banned from import and export
by the state. In late twenty twenty, Lee was held
in pre trialed attention in the city of Dallian. At
seven twenty nine am, the passage was removed by the
same user. The reason provided that the information had not
come from a reliable source, is that the answer that
he's in prison, But then why is the FBI still
trying to track him down with a five million dollar bounty.
There's still one address to check out. The last on
the list the headquarters of a company sixty percent of
which is still owned by Carl Lee personally.
Speaker 5: In Dezeon.
Speaker 9: In this garbage field compound, there's a company that's still
active Filmady Hoktefist.
Speaker 1: It's called Dallian Trust Industry and has made millions in sales.
Official customs data show that components for nuclear reactors have
been exported from here.
Speaker 5: I'd sad on clean tab.
Speaker 9: When we first rang the bell, no one came to
the door, so we checked with the house next door
to make sure we got the right address, and they said, yes, yes,
that's correct, but we should go around the back, as
the neighbor might be in the garden.
Speaker 5: But EVENTU gotten sign.
Speaker 1: Could it be right here? The answer to everyone's questions.
Speaker 5: Viacomdom.
Speaker 9: We went around the back and asked about Carl Khali.
We're looking for a man named leifang Wi.
Speaker 10: Do you know him?
Speaker 8: I may have heard of leifang Wai. Isn't he in prison?
Speaker 16: Where?
Speaker 9: What do you mean he's in prison? Is he in trouble?
Speaker 19: Yes?
Speaker 9: He was jelled for a few things.
Speaker 5: You know what I mean?
Speaker 8: I think he's in prison.
Speaker 9: And suddenly he asked why we wanted to know, And
a short time later our conversation with him.
Speaker 5: Was overdem for buye mde Gansen for mind Breau address and.
Speaker 9: Visiting the supposed office addresses of Cara Lei's companies in Dallian.
Do you get a sense that everything's totally.
Speaker 5: Off yes, absolute needs Yeah, as it does.
Speaker 9: Yes, these are private addresses. These people are private individuals, pensioners.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 9: None of them are running any businesses.
Speaker 5: In Vina, the Ala Khanda films.
Speaker 9: They probably have no idea exactly what's being done.
Speaker 5: In their names. Baska now in yamnam Dot understate food.
Speaker 1: It sounds like the perfect cover, a defensive shield of
the unsuspecting, a labyrinth that swallows up anyone trying to
get near to Lee Fang Wei, to Carl Lee, to
Patrick David or Charles, to Sonny Bye or song Da Hi,
whatever he calls himself. But could the neighbors still be
right that the fifty year old is now in jail
because after two decades the Chinese government took him out
of commission. If anyone would know that it's Christopher Ford,
the senior official who suddenly stopped condemning Carl Lee and
the Chinese government on Twitter, was one of.
Speaker 10: The reasons that.
Speaker 5: He might have been arrested at that point in time
that you stopped tweeting.
Speaker 11: As I say, I'm not a positioned to talk about
any specifics with respector Carlee.
Speaker 1: Christopher Ford doesn't give a specific answer because recent developments
in the Carl Lee saga are classified, but his words
do hint at something.
Speaker 11: I always sort of suspected as we do attention to
Carl Lee. They if we were lucky, they would actually
stop some of the network. If we were less lucky,
they might still do something to him in a way
that would undercut our criticism and allow them to say
that this is not a problem and have US be
unable to contradict them.
Speaker 1: In the past, the US government would often secure concessions
from Beijing whenever the two nations discussed trade, and indeed,
during the period in question, Chinese Head of State Xi
Jinping called on Donald Trump to avert the imposition of
new heavy goods tariffs. Beijing did make some concessions at
the time, with indications that the arrest of Li fang
Wei might have been one of them. But even if
that's true, has the problem been solved? Is the world
a slightly safer place?
Speaker 11: For a long long time, lefung Wei was sort of,
as we say, the poster child for the proliferation problem.
But I should say if Lifung Wei were hit by
a meteorite tomorrow, the proliferation problem would not evaporate. These
are fairly well established institutions that appear to have some
degree of official at least protection and perhaps permission to
do this.
Speaker 1: It's thought his network continues to be active with or
without him.
Speaker 15: This is a very kind of murky area, and it's
it's something that we may hear about laser or you
may never hear about it, you know, even when the
archives are opened in thirty forty years time.
Speaker 10: This is kind of just the typical.
Speaker 2: Carlee story, right, It's just kind of more strange weirdness.
Speaker 5: Day after day, a.
Speaker 1: Last ditch attempt, another call to the younger brother's number.
Where is Carl Lee? In one out of the.
Speaker 5: Eating Tea, the number you have dialed is not in service.
Speaker 1: In one out of the line eating the number you
have dialed is not in service.