A California man has been indicted in connection with his attempt to export radiation hardened, space qualified chips to the People’s Republic of China without an export license. The indictment, if true, tells an interesting tale.

According to the indictment, which was unsealed on Monday, the defendant Philip Chaohui He owned and operated a company called Sierra Electronic Instruments, of which he was the only employee. Estimated sales revenues for 2010 were $110,000. I was unable to locate any website for the company, and the company’s web footprint consisted of two sparse directory entries.

Even so, He and Sierra got their hands on $549,654 worth of radiation hardened, space qualified memory chips from Aeroflex, a Colorado Springs chip designer and manufacturer. Seven months later, He drove his car to the Port of Long Beach and to a PRC-flagged ship there which had recently arrived from Shanghai and was scheduled to return in a week. The chips in question were in the defendant’s trunk concealed “in several plastic infant formula containers placed inside five boxes which were sealed and labeled as “milk powder” written in Chinese.

The indictment doesn’t describe what happened next, but it’s pretty clear. The federal agent that had been tailing Mr. He informed his buddies who swooped down on Mr. He, waving guns and shouting typical law enforcement stuff at him before dragging him away in handcuffs. The indictment suggests that before the dockside bust, the feds had snooped into his bank account and phone records and identified numerous phone calls to the PRC and, more ominously, two wires from the PRC to Mr. He totaling just under $500,000. As a result, Mr. He’s careful concealment of the goods in baby formula was a waste of time.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess what happened here. Obviously, Aeroflex smelled a rat when this one-man storefront operation wanted to lay his hands on a half-million dollars worth of highly specialized space-qualified circuitry, so they alerted the authorities. All the while Mr. He was agonizing over whether it was safest to hide the goods in baby formula, cans of dog food or boxes of knitting needles, he was already a marked man. Had he gone in for a smaller amount (for which he certainly would have been paid less) he might be basking in the Southern California sun. Indeed, he reminds me of the would-be bicycle thief who tried to walk out of my condo building’s parking garage with two bicycles rather than racing off swiftly on one bicycle.

He went down too.

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