A British chef who ran a number of Asian restaurants in Liverpool was jailed in America as a suspected Chinese spy, the Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Jian Fun Tso, 52, was arrested in a Department of Defence sting in Arizona after he tried to buy radiation-hardened microchips that are used in space probes and ballistic missiles.
He paid a US undercover agent more than £400,000 from his British bank account to buy the microchips, which he was going to smuggle in a suitcase through Britain and Hong Kong to mainland China.
Intelligence experts have said that such microchips would have only been destined for one institution in China – the People’s Liberation Army, which controls all weapons manufacture as well as the country’s space programme.
Tso, who is also known as Steven Tso, was jailed at the District Court in Arizona after pleading guilty to conspiracy to deliver items that are banned from export to China under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Breaking this law carries a maximum jail term of 20 years, and a fine of $1m (£763,000). But the Briton received a shorter 36-month term after pleading guilty, and has since been allowed to return to the UK.
Until now, his case was not reported either in the US or UK, but has come to light in the past few weeks after being mentioned in the American Spy Cast Museum podcast.
Tso’s is the latest case of the Chinese intelligence services recruiting Britons to work for them.
Jian Fun Tso, 52, was arrested in a Department of Defence sting in Arizona after he tried to buy radiation-hardened microchips that are used in space probes and ballistic missiles
In September, two Britons – Christopher Cash, 30, and Christopher Berry, 33 – who were charged with spying for China, walked free after their case collapsed.
Prosecutors said the case could not be won in court as the Government refused to call China an enemy. Both men have consistently denied any wrongdoing.
Recently, MI5 issued an unprecedented warning to Parliamentarians warning them and civil servants that Chinese spies are trying lure them with job offers and money through the LinkedIn app.
An MoS investigation reveals that Tso was born in the Canton region of China, but grew up in Liverpool and has become a naturalised British citizen.
He is a life-long Chinese chef who ran a number of popular eateries like Maicee Express, Tso San, and Oriental Restaurant, a £600,000 venue that burned down mysteriously in 2009.
The popular cook was married to a white woman who is now 54, with whom he has two daughters, aged 25 and 23.
But US court documents reveal that in January 2018, Tso emailed company a called Cobham in Arizona, saying he wanted to buy radiation hardened microchips for ‘auto-parking’ cars in China.
But Cobham refused, saying export of the chips to China was banned.
Tso then contacted a distributor company for Cobham, and asked to buy the chips, this time saying they were destined for a British client called John Anderson, boss of Metech, based in Liverpool.
However, the company became suspicious and called in the Defence Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) – an arm of the Department of Defence – which launched an undercover sting on Tso.
Tso paid a US undercover agent more than £400,000 from his British bank account to buy the microchips (file photo)
The first suspicious clue DCIS found was that the address for Metech was actually that of Tso’s own Chinese takeaway, Maicee Express, in Liverpool.
An undercover DCIS agent, posing as a distributor for Cobham, befriended Tso for a year, during which they met in the US as well as the luxury Inter-Continental hotel in Bangkok, Thailand.
During these secretly taped meetings, Tso confessed to the DCIS agent that the microchips, which cost almost £2,000 each, would go to mainland China, via the UK and Hong Kong.
Over a year, Tso transferred £413,039 to the undercover officer’s US bank account from his Lloyds Bank account in the UK.
Tso later told the DCIS agent that the money ultimately came from China to a number of ‘front companies’ he ran in the UK, and eventually wired to his Lloyds bank account.
On January 15th, 2019, Tso met the DCIS agent at a location in Arizona, where he revealed that a suspected Chinese agent called ‘Cindy’ was waiting in the UK for him to return with the chips in a suitcase, so she can take them to Hong Kong, after which others would carry them to mainland China.
The officer gave Tso a suitcase purportedly containing 200 of the microchips, and drove him to the Phoenix Sky Harbour Airport to fly back to Britain.
But waiting US customs officers stopped Tso and arrested him.
A year later, Tso appeared before the District Court in Arizona, and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to export items without a license in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
In his written confession, Tso states: ‘I, Jian Fun Tso, conspired with other individuals to purchase Cobham radiation-hardened programmable memory microchips.
‘I knowingly and wilfully attempted to export microchips to China without a licence or other authorization from the Department of Commerce.’
After serving a year in prison, Tso was released and deported to the UK, where he appears to be running at least two companies in Liverpool.
When the Mail on Sunday knocked on the family house in the Waterloo area, the new partner of his ex-wife said they do not have much to do with Tso.
Another friend of Tso, a British-Chinese woman who does not want to be named, said he was living quietly and wanted to leave the UK now.
The woman added: ‘He said it’s all lies, newspapers lie, and he does not want to talk to you.’
Tso did not respond to our requests for comment.
