An American journalist who spent 16 years in China as a columnist and editor for its state media was, for seven of those years, also on the payroll of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS)—the civilian agency that runs Beijing’s foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and secret-police work.

What made Thomas Weir Pauken II, 51, valuable to the Chinese regime was that he could enter the United States whenever he wanted.

On Sept. 1, a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, sentenced Pauken—arrested at a Washington hotel in February—to two years in prison.

“[Pauken] exploited his U.S. citizenship and corresponding ability to travel to the U.S. without restriction,” Assistant Attorney General John A. Eisenberg said.

From at least 2019 until February 2026, Pauken was paid at least $100,000 by a Chinese state handler he knew as “Cathy,” according to the Justice Department. His tasks were to travel from Beijing to the United States, meet people who might become intelligence assets, hand them communication devices, and pass along what Beijing wanted to know.

Experts told The Epoch Times that Beijing conducts most of its U.S. intelligence operations through people already living inside the country, relying on tasks that are largely lawful—making introductions, hosting events, logging attendee lists, or looking up individuals.

These activities unfold across student clubs, hometown associations, campaign fundraisers, and university forums—the very institutions an open society intentionally keeps accessible. In Pauken’s case, his role was to identify individuals the Justice Department called “new recruitment targets” for his Chinese handlers.

For Beijing, two jobs run parallel in the United States. One is aimed outward at U.S. politicians, campuses, and defense firms. The other is aimed at the Chinese diaspora, whose gatherings are tracked and reported back to Beijing.

Below the Legal Line

Chen helped organize the 1989 democracy protests in Guangzhou, China, and was jailed twice before his exile to the United States in 1996. An author and longtime commentator for Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, he has spent three decades inside the overseas Chinese dissident community.

“These informants are everywhere: in the Chinese community, at democracy-movement meetings, at all kinds of academic conferences in the United States, in all kinds of university forums,” he said.

“What these informants do is walk along the edge. He can say he is acting legally.”

Pauken fell between them. He was not a trained officer, and he was not walking on the edge either: He was a recruited agent—paid, run by a handler and given assignments—and what Beijing wanted from him was more people.

He also sold reports to a Wuhan group seeking information on American technology and the U.S. Department of Justice and to an expert who could help the group “engage in cyber espionage.”

Prosecutors said he encouraged a Trump administration official to contact a woman in China he believed was a Chinese intelligence officer. The Justice Department stated that he admitted trying to “infiltrate U.S. political circles” for access to classified information.

Pauken pleaded guilty in June to acting as an agent of a foreign government in the United States without notifying the attorney general. At his sentencing before Judge Leonie Brinkema, Pauken did not dispute what prosecutors found out about what he did.

“I learned a lot of secrets, and I did tell the Chinese about these secrets,” he said, referring to non-public information he shared that did not constitute national defense information.

“I thought I was helping, but now I realize I could’ve caused even more damage, including war.”

No Espionage Act count was brought. That statute reaches the delivery of “information relating to the national defense” to a foreign power and is punishable by death or life in prison.

Pauken’s lawyer, Charles Burnham, told The Epoch Times on Sept. 1 that “as the government agreed in court today, Mr. Pauken did not provide any classified information to the Chinese.”

The charge he pleaded to carries a maximum of 10 years. Prosecutors asked for three. He received two.

Nothing Beijing asked of him required breaking into anything, and that’s not a quirk of his case.

In 1999, two senior colonels in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, published “Unrestricted Warfare” through the PLA’s own publishing house. They wrote that the boundaries “between the two worlds of war and non-war, of military and non-military, will be totally destroyed.”

Why the work is shaped this way is the subject of an upcoming Epoch Times exclusive research report titled “The Structure of the CCP’s Security Apparatus: From Central Rosters to Front-Line Operational Units.”

Check out the full story for more.

—Sean Tseng; Gu Xiaohua 

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