By RACHANEE SRISAVASDI, The Orange County Register, USA, Tuesday, June 2, 2009 -

SANTA ANA- A former Boeing engineer betrayed the United States by providing confidential information about the Space Shuttle program to the People’s Republic of China, a federal prosecutor said in opening statements Tuesday.

“Information, security and betrayal,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Staples said in the trial of Dongfan “Greg” Chung. “These are the three pillars of the government’s case.”

The defense attorney for Chung,  a 73-year-old grandfather who resides in Orange � countered that his client refused Chinese officials’ overtures to reveal classified information on military and space technology secrets.

“So much of this evidence is (about) what my client didn’t do,” Thomas Bienert Jr. said. “It makes him a non-spy. People were trying to get him to give him things.”

Chung was arrested in February 2008, after an unsealed indictment accused Chung of giving secrets to China since the late 1970s. He is charged with 10 counts, including six of economic espionage, as well as acting as an agent for the People’s Republic of China.

The case comes two years after the conviction of another former Orange County engineer, Chi Mak, on charges of exporting sensitive defense technology to China.

Mak, who was sentenced to 24 years in prison, knew Chung.

In fact, federal agents interviewed Chung during the Mak investigation. During a September 2006 interview, Chung said he met Mak around 1980 at a meeting in Los Angeles organized by a Chinese organization, FBI Agent Kevin Moberly said during his testimony Tuesday.

“He told me he suspected Chi Mak was providing sensitive information to China,” said Moberly, the trial’s second witness.

Agents also found information in Mak’s home about Chung, prosecutors said.

During a search of Mak’s home in June 2006, a letter was found from a senior aviation official in China. That missive, dated May 2, 1987, was addressed to Chung and asked him to provide information on airplanes and the space shuttle, according to prosecutors.

Chung, who has been out on bond since his arrest, listened intently to the first day of testimony. His wife sat in the courtroom gallery’s back row and took notes. The couple’s two sons did not attend the proceedings.

Chung, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was born in China in 1936 and moved to Taiwan in 1948, according to the government’s trial brief. He came to the United States in 1962, and got a master’s degree at the University of Minnesota, and was later hired by Boeing, prosecutors said………

- The Orange County Register