He had been hailed by Chinese state media as a model for his efforts to promote Beijing’s interests in the United States. He was in fact an F.B.I. informant.
John Leung was an unlikely spy. In the small Oklahoma town where he lived, people knew him as a former restaurant owner and a father. In Houston, where he often traveled, they knew him as a political organizer in the city’s vibrant Chinese community.
And in China, they knew him as a benevolent patriot, a man who arranged musical performances and embraced official causes like unifying the mainland with Taiwan.
In fact, Mr. Leung was an informant for the F.B.I., gathering intelligence on China, according to two senior United States officials. That work landed him in Chinese custody in 2021, after he traveled to the mainland at the age of 75. He was later sentenced to life in prison, a first in decades for an American accused of espionage.
Mr. Leung was freed last Wednesday in a rare prisoner swap between Washington and Beijing. Six months shy of his 80th birthday, he was put on a plane to the United States with two other Americans who had been detained in China, along with three Uyghurs, members of an ethnic group that faces repression by the Chinese government.
In return, Washington released Xu Yanjun, a convicted Chinese spy who had been serving a 20-year sentence and Ji Chaoqun, 31, who had reported to Mr. Xu and was serving an eight-year sentence. A clemency order for a third Chinese national, Jin Shanlin, who had been in prison for possessing child pornography, was signed on the same day as an order for Mr. Xu. China said Washington also handed over a fugitive.
Mr. Leung had cultivated an image as a philanthropist, which brought him access to Chinese power circles. In Houston, he directed groups that promoted Beijing’s political interests. He attended Chinese state banquets. And he rubbed shoulders with senior Chinese officials, including its foreign minister, its ambassador and three consuls general to the United States.
But that carefully curated image was a ruse.
To piece together the story of Mr. Leung’s unusual trajectory from small-town restaurateur to prisoner in a high-stakes geopolitical dispute with China, The Times interviewed dozens of people who knew him, including relatives in the United States and Hong Kong, business associates in Houston and acquaintances in New York’s Chinatown. Reporters also drew on corporate records, archival materials and other documents.
Much remains unclear about Mr. Leung’s relationship with the F.B.I. China’s Ministry of State Security said that he was spying while in China, but U.S. officials said that Mr. Leung had not worked for the F.B.I. for years and that the bureau had discouraged him from making the trip.
Some of the pro-China groups Mr. Leung was involved with have been linked to organizations that have come under U.S. government scrutiny. One was affiliated with the National Association for China’s Peaceful Unification, which the Trump administration designated in 2020 as a foreign mission, accusing it of seeking “to spread Beijing’s malign influence in the United States.”
“Chinese intelligence operatives are known to use these organizations as cover for their clandestine operations,” said Dennis Wilder, a former U.S. intelligence analyst on China and a senior fellow at Georgetown University.
Mr. Leung’s work with such groups could have made him a useful informant, said Nigel Inkster, the former director of operations and intelligence for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. He described Mr. Leung as a likely “access agent,” with “no access to secrets himself but access to people who might have them.”
Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director, has called Beijing the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.”
China’s spy agency has publicized what it portrays as Mr. Leung’s treachery, saying that he “collected a significant amount of intelligence related to China.” The ministry said he lured Chinese officials into U.S. hotel rooms for “pornographic traps,” an allegation that former and current bureau officials said was false, explaining that the F.B.I. does not use such tactics.
The Chinese spy agency also released a video of Mr. Leung made while he was in custody, in which he expressed regret for what he had done. (Prisoners in China have in the past been coerced into making such televised confessions for propaganda purposes.)
Mr. Leung, who upon arriving in the United States was sent to an Army medical center outside San Antonio, could not be reached for comment. He was met there by a son, according to Nury Turkel, a lawyer who was there to welcome his mother, one of the Uyghurs released by Beijing. Calls and messages left for family members were not returned.
David Tang, a director with Mr. Leung of several pro-China groups in the Houston area, said he was happy to hear the news that Mr. Leung was back in the United States. He said he did not believe that he was a spy and that his release pointed to his innocence. “The mistake finally was corrected.”
An Arrest, and Charges Dropped
Mr. Leung was born in 1945 in Hong Kong’s New Territories, a largely mountainous, lush expanse of villages and farmland. He moved to New York in the 1970s, where he worked a low-level mailroom job at the United Nations while starting travel agencies in Chinatown with his brothers.
The travel business boomed. One agency, Leung Brothers Travel, had offices in New York and Toronto. It was the exclusive booking agent for Singapore Airlines, which often made it a necessary stop for people hoping to travel to Asia, said Tom Yiu, a longtime travel agent in Toronto.
New York’s Chinatown was roiled by crime, with Chinese gangs waging bloody turf wars, and Mr. Leung ran a side business selling guns, according to two longtime acquaintances. In 1980, his partner at a second travel agency was shot dead by two masked men while Mr. Leung crouched in the bathroom, according to acquaintances and to Chinese-language news reports from the time.
A few years later, he moved with his wife at the time, Kin Lan Ng, to Durant, a small college town in southeastern Oklahoma. The couple opened a Chinese restaurant in a strip mall, bought a modest home and raised three sons, according to property and ancestry records, and an interview with one son, Kit Leung.
In 1984, Mr. Leung was arrested in Durant in the attempted purchase of a .22-caliber pistol and a silencer from an undercover federal agent. He was charged with possession of an unregistered firearm, court records show.
Rick Musticchi, a former agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who sold Mr. Leung the gun and silencer, told The Times that he had approached Mr. Leung after getting a tip from an informant that he was involved in illegal activity and preparing to travel to China.
Mark F. Green, Mr. Leung’s lawyer on the case, said that prosecutors dropped charges after Mr. Musticchi did not show up to a hearing.
China’s spy agency said that U.S. intelligence operatives first contacted Mr. Leung soon after, in 1986, and formalized the relationship in 1989. The Times could not verify those allegations.
For a small-town restaurant owner, Mr. Leung soon developed unusually high-level connections inside China, which was opening to the West. He set up a group that promoted business and cultural ties between Oklahoma City and the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, according to corporate records.
Mr. Leung also organized musical exchanges between Southeastern Oklahoma State University, The Juilliard School in New York and cities in China. He arranged for the Chinese classical pianist Li Yundi to perform in Oklahoma in 1999.
The performances he set up in China were sometimes disorganized, said Aaron Wunsch, a Juilliard pianist who joined several of them. Mr. Wunsch said he once arrived to find the piano wrapped in plastic and missing legs. But, he added: “He would talk in a genuine way about China and how he loved China and the U.S.”
Mr. Leung’s efforts earned him accolades inside China. In 2004, he was featured as one of 55 “outstanding overseas Chinese representatives” in People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece.
At a 2008 state banquet in Beijing celebrating the founding of China, he posed for a photo with Yang Jiechi, then the foreign minister, said Mr. Tang, who had also attended the event.
Li Liangzhou, a now-retired director of Guangzhou’s foreign affairs office, helped Mr. Leung organize many of the exchange trips. “He didn’t ask us about inside government information,” Mr. Li said in a phone interview in March. “We didn’t expect him to be a spy at all.”
Expanding Into Houston
In the mid-2000s, Mr. Leung began setting up pro-China groups in Houston, which was home to a large Chinese community and a Chinese consulate.
There, Mr. Leung drafted an alternative past. Mr. Tang, the other organizer of the pro-China groups, said he met Mr. Leung at a party in Houston, and they bonded by speaking Cantonese. Mr. Leung, who sometimes donated money to their groups, said he had come from wealth. He said he owned ranches in Oklahoma, sometimes showing up with farm eggs. He did not mention having owned a restaurant, despite the fact that his new friend was also a restaurateur, according to Mr. Tang.
The two joined forces in the Texas Council for the Promotion of China’s Peaceful Reunification, a group with links to the Washington, D.C.-based group the Trump administration later designated as a foreign mission.
Mr. Tang rejected the Trump administration’s characterization and said the group was set up to support American policy on China. He said he and Mr. Leung attended a 2018 protest against a stopover in Houston by Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s president at the time.
Mr. Leung also became a director of the Chinese Civic Center in Houston, according to its tax filings. It serves the Chinese community and houses a separate service center that has come under scrutiny for suspected ties to Beijing. In 2023, the Justice Department accused two men of operating an “illegal overseas police station” out of a similar outpost in New York.
Xie Bin, a cybersecurity specialist in Houston, said he met Mr. Leung during this period at a mid-autumn festival event attended by Chinese diplomats. “He was the one who greeted everyone,” Mr. Xie said.
But Mr. Leung never found a home in Houston, said Mr. Tang, staying instead at a Ramada close to Chinatown.
The Chinese government’s efforts in Houston were becoming a focus for the F.B.I. Beginning in 2018, the bureau spent over a year investigating suspected intellectual property theft at Texas Medical Center by researchers with ties to China.
Relations deteriorated, and the Trump administration closed the Chinese consulate in Houston in July 2020, saying it was a hub of spying. Beijing responded by shuttering the U.S. consulate in Chengdu.
From a Life Sentence to a Surprise Release
In 2023, a Chinese court said Mr. Leung had been arrested two years earlier by state security agents from Suzhou, a city in Jiangsu Province. He had traveled to Jiangsu regularly for years, making inroads there with officials.
In China, where the top leader, Xi Jinping, has empowered security agencies to hunt down spies, Mr. Leung’s arrest and life sentence were hailed as a win.
In the United States, Mr. Leung’s case got little news coverage.
Kit Leung said in January at his home in Texas that Mr. Leung took him and a brother to Hong Kong to witness its handover to Chinese control in 1997 but that he and his father later became estranged. He said he learned about his imprisonment through news reports. Mr. Leung’s ex-wife, Ms. Ng, a New York resident, said she hadn’t spoken to him in years.
Another son moved into Mr. Leung’s house in Durant, neighbors said, and told them that his father had died. Reached there in January, that son, Carl Leung, declined to comment.
But under intense secrecy, the Biden administration was working out the contours of a swap with Beijing. During a global summit in Peru last month, President Biden discussed a potential trade with Mr. Xi.
When Mr. Leung and the two other American prisoners were released, they were met by Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China, at the Beijing airport. He handed them their U.S. passports. President Biden and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken separately called all three men when they landed in Alaska for refueling.
For Mr. Leung, it was the end of his time in Chinese custody — as well as the end of a ruse.
