US Arrests Ex-Air Force Pilot Over Unauthorised Training Of Chinese Military

The US Justice Department has announced the arrest of a former Air Force fighter pilot accused of unlawfully training Chinese military personnel.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, the department said Gerald Brown, 65, was arrested in Indiana after recently returning to the United States from China, where he had been since December 2023.

Brown is accused of having “conspired with foreign nationals to provide combat aircraft training to pilots in the Chinese Air Force” without obtaining the required licence from the US State Department.

Reacting to the development, Kash Patel, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), posted on X: “Major story… the FBI and our partners have arrested a former US Air Force Pilot who was allegedly training pilots in the Chinese military.”

According to the statement, Brown spent 24 years in the United States Air Force, during which he “commanded sensitive units with responsibility for nuclear weapons delivery systems, led combat missions, and served as a fighter pilot instructor and simulator instructor on a variety of fighter and attack aircraft.”

He retired from the military in 1996 and later worked as a cargo pilot. The Justice Department said he subsequently became a US defense contractor, training pilots to fly the A-10 and the state-of-the-art F-35 fighter jets.

Brown allegedly began negotiating a contract in August 2023 with Stephen Su Bin, a Chinese national who was imprisoned in the United States for four years beginning in 2016 over a separate espionage scheme. He then travelled to China in December 2023 to commence the training role.

Commenting on the case, Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division said: “The Chinese government continues to exploit the expertise of current and former members of the US armed forces to modernize China’s military capabilities.”

He added, “This arrest serves as a warning that the FBI and our partners will stop at nothing to hold accountable anyone who collaborates with our adversaries to harm our service members and jeopardize our national security.”

— AFP