The Weird, Twisting Tale of How China Spied on Alysa Liu and Her Dad | WIRED

Overview

The Weird, Twisting Tale of How China Spied on Alysa Liu and Her Dad

On November 16, 2021, Matthew Ziburis sat in his car in a residential neighborhood in the Bay Area stalking an “enemy,” as he put it. A veteran of both the US Army and Marine Corps, Ziburis had previously served in Iraq. But on this mission, he was working at the behest of China’s government. The targets that autumn day were American citizens: Arthur Liu and his teenage daughter, Alysa.

Details

Arthur’s personal story was an exemplar of the American Dream. As a university student, he took part in the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China. After the crackdown at Tiananmen Square that year, he fled to the United States, settling in California. Arthur poured a small fortune and an equal amount of energy into molding Alysa into a figure skating phenom. As a national champion at age 13, she bantered along with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, and was at the time on track to represent America at the Winter Olympics the following year in Beijing.

Ziburis was surveilling the Liu home when he called Arthur, falsely claiming that he was a member of the US Olympic Committee who needed to discuss upcoming travel to Beijing, Arthur says. Ziburis was adamant that Arthur fax him copies of his and his daughter’s passports as part of a travel “preparedness check,” Liu tells WIRED. This struck Arthur as odd. In his many years dealing with sports bodies, he had never fielded such a request. Alysa’s agent did not respond to a request for comment.

Ziburis’ surveillance of Arthur and Alysa Liu that November day five years ago was just one episode in a bizarre saga that spanned from California to Beijing, touched New York City mayors and members of the US Congress, and has seen two people plead guilty and two more awaiting trial.

Unbeknownst to Ziburis, as he sat outside Aurthur and Alysa’s Northern California home, he too was being watched.

Ziburis had allegedly been dispatched to Northern California by Frank Liu, a self-styled fixer in the Chinese community from Long Island, New York, who was in turn receiving orders from a person in China named Qiang Sun. According to US authorities, Sun was working at the behest of the Chinese government. A concerned private investigator who once worked for Frank Liu had alerted the FBI to Frank’s escapades and was assisting authorities. Law enforcement was already on to Ziburis by the time he arrived. Anthony Ricco, Ziburis’ lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment.

Officers watched as Ziburis surveyed Arthur’s home and visited his law office. The heavy-set man sulking around Arthur’s office also caught the attention of a neighbor, who approached Ziburis and asked him if he needed help, Arthur says. Apparently concerned, the FBI called Arthur to warn him that Ziburis was heading to his home. By then, in part because of the harassment, Arthur and Alysa were boarding a plane to fly out of California. “It was like a movie,” Arthur says.

Alysa’s showing in Beijing in 2022 was disappointing. Burned out, she retired from the sport. Then in February, after returning to the ice after a two year hiatus, Alysa became the first US women’s figure skater to win Olympic gold since 2002—intentionally without her father by her side.

Despite her much-publicized complicated relationship with Arthur, Alysa’s success—punctuated by her signature pierced smile, racoon-tail dye job, and palpable joy for her sport—has reignited interest in the long-running case of transnational repression against her and her father. Human rights advocates and researchers have documented in recent years the lengths Beijing has taken to suppress critical voices, even those residing abroad or whose perceived transgressions date back decades.

Both Frank Liu and Matthew Ziburis were arrested on March 15, 2022. They were charged with stalking and harassing a number of Chinese dissidents in the US on behalf of Beijing. Qiang Sun, who remains at large, is believed to be in China. In December 2022, a few days after Christmas, Ziburis pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an illegal agent of China and conspiracy to engage in interstate stalking and harassment. He was paid more than $100,000 for his work, according to US authorities. Frank has maintained his innocence. His trial in New York is scheduled to begin pretrial briefings this summer.

Last year, during an interview with WIRED, Frank appeared to be trying to curry favor with President Donald Trump as a way to remedy his serious legal troubles. A foundation he runs had nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was also helping a friend compile a voluminous hagiography of Trump and wanted to pitch the Trump administration on a digital-currency-backed special economic zone along the border with Mexico. When asked about his legal troubles, Frank grew cagey. “I don't think it’s any big problem,” Frank said, “because we do so many good things for the United States.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Frank, whose Chinese name is Liu Fan, arrived in the US from China in 1986. He quickly set about making inroads in his new country. By the 1990s, he had cultivated deep ties within diaspora organizations in New York. He fashioned himself as a wealthy interlocutor who could build connections between Americans and officials in China. In 2005 he founded his own nongovernmental organization called the World Harmony Foundation, according to New York incorporation documents.

The foundation’s mission was both grandiose and exceptionally nebulous. Its goal is to “promote harmony between human beings and mother nature, between human beings, between human beings and society, between nations, between religions, between families, and harmony and care of human bodies.”

Frank’s main prop in this mission was something called the Harmony Bell—large and golden, rung with a wooden mallet, with the word “harmony” written on it in various languages. He hauled the bell to the United Nations headquarters in New York, to the lawn outside the US Capitol, and took a scaled-down version abroad, getting politicians and public figures to ring it. Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, rang the bell in October 2005. A hodgepodge of diplomats and politicians would do the same over the years—two presidents of Timor Leste, an Iranian Olympic official, and John Kerry all took part in Frank’s quixotic, campanological quest for world peace.

Frank was a near-constant presence at the UN, where he often jostled for pictures with diplomats and dignitaries. “No matter what you do, he suddenly pops up,” says Ian Williams, who met Frank when he served as president of the UN Correspondents Association. The primary goal of Liu’s foundation, Williams says, seemed to be furnishing various Chinese people with a way to shake hands with top UN officials. “It took me a while to realize that people were willing to pay a lot of money for a photo with the secretary general,” says Williams.

Frank became particularly close with the retired US congressman Lester Wolff, whom he says he met at a UN event in the early 2000s. Wolff had spent much of his time in office focused on foreign policy, particularly with regard to China and Taiwan. He had also run a TV show during his time in Congress that Frank crudely resurrected online after registering the business in New York in 2006 with Wolff, according to business records. Some around Wolff questioned Frank’s intentions with the elderly man. “He just struck me as a bit of a con artist,” says John Copen, a business associate of Wolff’s who met Frank. Copen said he became suspicious that Frank was trying to use “Lester’s panache” to further his personal ambitions, and told him as much. (Wolff died in May 2021 at the age of 102. His son, Bruce Wolff, said he was unaware of how Frank and his father met or what their business dealings entailed.)

Since the 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party has used efforts to co-opt or silence potential opposition to its policies and authority through an agency within the CCP called the United Front Work Department. Audrye Wong, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who studies China’s foreign influence, says that Frank’s foundation looked like “a classic case of how these United Front organizations operate.”

“The twin goals are to push pro-Beijing messages while silencing criticism and dissent,” Wong says. “Xi Jinping and high-level Chinese officials have explicitly called on overseas Chinese to ‘tell China's story well’ and promote China's interests. And of course, part of that is suppressing those voices that argue against the CCP.”

It is unclear exactly when Frank and Ziburis met. Frank told WIRED that he hired Ziburis to do technical work on the web show he had started with Wolff. Ziburis carried business cards that stated he was a coproducer; the address on the card, reviewed by WIRED, was a home once owned by Wolff. The two made for an odd duo. Frank styled his hair with a tidy part, and when he attended events around New York City, he often wore a maroon tangzhuang—a Chinese-style suit jacket. Despite living in the US for decades, he spoke in heavily accented English. Ziburis, by contrast, was generally unshaven and dressed for the outdoors.

Before meeting Frank, Ziburis had served four years in the US Marines and been honorably discharged in 1996. Then, after working in Ohio for a plastics company for four years, he had joined the US Army in 2000. Ziburis deployed to Iraq from March 2003 to March 2004 as a motor transport operator, according to Heather J. Hagan, a spokesperson for the US Army.

After leaving the military, Ziburis bounced around odd jobs in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. In 2009, he began working as a correctional officer at the Lancaster Correctional Institution in Trenton, Florida. More than 300 pages of state and military records obtained by WIRED show that the first years of his time as a correctional officer were largely uneventful, but his conduct soon became troubling to colleagues.

An internal investigation conducted by the Office of the Inspector General of the Florida Department of Corrections in 2015 found that Ziburis threatened inmates at the Marion Correctional Institution near Gainsville, bragging to colleagues that he wanted to “knock some heads.” At one point, records claim, Ziburis pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and wrote “vatos locos”—“crazy guys”—across the knuckles with a marker. Ziburis also allegedly threatened to have inmates beat another prisoner until the target of the attack was “screaming.” Ziburis was suspended from work for a week as punishment.

Ziburis’ problems extended beyond the workplace. In September 2018, police records show, he was involved in a car crash. He fled the scene on foot after appearing drunk to responding officers, according to an arrest report by the Florida Highway Patrol and a later staff arrest report compiled by the Florida Department of Corrections. A warrant was issued, and he was eventually arrested for drunk driving in January 2019 in the parking lot of the correctional facility where he was working. Ziburis attempted to lie about the nature of the arrest to his superiors at work, according to the staff arrest report. The charges were eventually dropped.

In late 2019, colleagues found Ziburis sleeping on the job at the Lowell Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Ocala, Florida. Photos taken by colleagues and obtained by WIRED show a disheveled Ziburis sleeping with his arms crossed in an office chair. When coworkers woke him up, records claim, Ziburis became combative. He smelled of alcohol, multiple colleagues reported, but insisted on driving home. The following day, Ziburis did not show up to work. He told a colleague he had no recollection of the incident or even of coming to work the day it happened. Ziburis was terminated from his position in March 2020. Ziburis did not respond to requests for comment.

By early 2021, Ziburis was working with Frank, who referred to him as a “bodyguard.” US authorities allege that Frank doled out tasks to Ziburis that originated from Qiang Sun, their Chinese “boss.” Authorities allege some $3 million flowed to accounts held by Frank and his spouse, some from accounts located in Hong Kong. Before targeting Arthur and Alysa, Ziburis flew to Southern California in March 2021. There he posed as a buyer representing a mysterious wealthy businessman interested in purchasing a sculpture by Chinese dissident Chen Weiming for a museum dedicated to democracy, according to interviews with Chen and court documents. Chen created enormous sculptures critical of the CCP, which he displayed in a roadside stretch of desert in Yermo, California, called Liberty Sculpture Park.

Ziburis said his backer was interested in purchasing Chen’s CCP Virus, a 27-foot artwork made of steel and fiberglass that melded the face of Chinese president Xi Jinping and a skull embossed on the left side with a sickle and hammer awash in blood-red paint. The giant head also wore a crown covered with the red barbs of a coronavirus spike protein. While visiting Chen, Ziburis surreptitiously installed a GPS tracker on Chen’s car, court records show. He then allegedly sent his movements to Sun in Hong Kong. Even while working for Beijing, Ziburis boasted about his time in the US military and expertise with explosives, says Jonas Yuan, who assists Chen at his studio and spent hours with Ziburis.

The fictional deal Ziburis promised Chen never materialized, and Ziburis soon vanished, says David Rong, who represented Chen during negotiations. Then, on July 23, Yuan received a call from the police, who had been alerted to a fire at Chen’s sculpture park. He rushed over. When he arrived, the CCP Virus statue was a smoldering pile soaked by firefighters who had arrived to extinguish the blaze. Communications uncovered by investigators show Frank and Sun debating over whether to destroy the statue. However, Ziburis and Frank were in New York City, not California, when the fire occurred, according to their indictment. Neither were charged with destroying the artwork. Gloria Orejel, a spokesperson for the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, said the department is not currently investigating the incident at the sculpture park and that it was being handled by the FBI. The FBI did not immediately respond.

The fire garnered a bit of media attention. Ziburis, perhaps concerned, ran some questions through Google that same month, records show. “Can a GPS Tracker Be Traced to Owner?" he asked. And, “are investigators allowed to put gps trackers on cars"?

As Ziburis continued to stalk dissidents, Frank carried on his hobnobbing in New York. His son sang “The Star Bangled Banner” for then mayoral candidate Eric Adams in July 2021, the same month Frank and Ziburis were allegedly discussing how to spy on a dissident in Indiana.

When congressman Tom Suozzi of New York hosted a gubernatorial campaign event at a hotel on March 1, 2022—three and a half months after Ziburis targeted Arthur Liu—Frank was on stage with his bell. The two were well acquainted. Suozzi had previously given Frank’s daughter, Harmony, an award for her volunteer work. Harmony declined to comment. Frank donated $5,830 to Suozzi, federal filings show. Standing behind Frank as he beamed for photos was Ziburis. Two weeks later, law enforcement arrested both men. Julia Prager-Hessel, a spokesperson for Suozzi, did not respond to a request for comment.

Craig Miller, a Department of Homeland Security deportation officer based in Minneapolis whom the government says accessed restricted government databases to run queries on Alysa and her father, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in late 2022. Miller’s lawyer, James Darrow, declined to comment. DHS said Miller was suspended shortly after being indicted and is no longer employed by the agency. A former DHS official who allegedly worked with Miller is also facing charges and has pleaded not guilty. The trial in New York has been delayed in part because it could involve classified materials, according to government prosecutors.

Arthur Liu says he was unnerved when he learned about the plot, but not totally surprised. He says he had been targeted once before, years earlier, by a young student who had come to California from China and sought his help. Arthur took Beijing’s efforts as a sign of weakness. “It really shows how fragile the CCP feels about its rule in China,” he says. “Any dissenting voice might topple its rule. So they have to suppress it.”

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Key Takeaways

The Weird, Twisting Tale of How China Spied on Alysa Liu and Her Dad
On November 16, 2021, Matthew Ziburis sat in his car in a residential neighborhood in the Bay Area stalking an “enemy,” as he put it
Arthur’s personal story was an exemplar of the American Dream
Ziburis was surveilling the Liu home when he called Arthur, falsely claiming that he was a member of the US Olympic Committee who needed to discuss upcoming travel to Beijing, Arthur says
Ziburis’ surveillance of Arthur and Alysa Liu that November day five years ago was just one episode in a bizarre saga that spanned from California to Beijing, touched New York City mayors and members of the US Congress, and has seen two people plead guilty and two more awaiting trial