US Navy pilot arrested in Australia worked with Chinese hacker, lawyer says

By Kirsty Needham

SYDNEY (Reuters) – A former U.S. Navy pilot who was fighting extradition from Australia because the U.S. accused him of training Chinese military pilots to land on aircraft carriers unknowingly worked with a Chinese hacker, his lawyer said.

Daniel Duggan, 55, a naturalized Australian citizen, feared that requests from Western intelligence agencies for sensitive information would endanger his family, the lawyer said in a court filing seen by Reuters.

The lawyer’s filing supports Reuters reports linking Duggan to convicted Chinese defense hacker Su Bin.

Duggan denies allegations that he violated US arms control laws. He has been held in a high-security Australian prison since his arrest in 2022 after returning from six years working in Beijing.

U.S. authorities found correspondence with Duggan about electronic devices seized from Su Bin, Duggan’s lawyer Bernard Collaery said in the March submission to Australian Attorney General Mark Dreyfus, who will decide whether to hand Duggan over to the U.S. after a judge hears Duggan’s extradition case.

The case will be heard in a Sydney court this month, two years after his arrest in rural Australia, at a time when Britain warned its former military pilots not to work for China.

Su Bin, arrested in Canada in 2014, pleaded guilty in 2016 to stealing U.S. military aircraft designs by hacking major U.S. defense contractors. He is listed in the extradition request as one of seven co-conspirators with Duggan.

Duggan knew Su Bin as an employment agent for the Chinese state-owned aviation company AVIC, lawyer Collaery wrote, and the hacking case had “completely nothing to do with our client.”

Although Su Bin “may have had improper ties to (Chinese) agents, this was not known to our client,” Duggan’s attorney wrote.

“OPEN INTELLIGENCE CONTACT”

AVIC was blacklisted by the US last year as a company linked to the Chinese military.

Messages retrieved from Su Bin’s electronic devices indicate that he paid for Duggan’s trip from Australia to Beijing in May 2012, according to extradition documents filed by the United States in the Australian court.

Duggan asked Su Bin for help in sourcing Chinese aircraft parts for his Top Gun tourist aviation business in Australia, Collaery wrote.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) and US Navy criminal investigators knew Duggan was training pilots for AVIC and met him in the Australian state of Tasmania in December 2012 and February 2013, his lawyer wrote.

ASIO and the US Navy Criminal Investigation Service did not respond to Reuters requests for comment on the meetings. ASIO had previously said it would not comment as the matter was still before the courts.

“An ASIO official suggested that Mr Duggan may be collecting confidential information in the course of carrying out his legitimate business activities in China,” his lawyer wrote.

Duggan moved to China in 2013 and was barred from leaving the country in 2014, his lawyer said. Duggan’s LinkedIn profile and aviation sources who knew him said he worked in China as an aviation consultant in 2013 and 2014.

He renounced his U.S. citizenship, which was backdated in a certificate to 2012, at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 2016 after “open intelligence contacts by U.S. authorities that may have endangered the safety of his family,” his wrote Attorney.

His lawyers are opposing extradition, arguing there is no evidence the Chinese pilots he trained were military pilots and that he became an Australian citizen in January 2012, before the alleged crimes.

The US government argued that Duggan only lost his US citizenship in 2016.

(Reporting by Kirsty Needham in Sydney; Editing by William Mallard)