DETROIT — In April of this year, a Chinese businesswoman sent a message to an elderly American she had been meeting in Washington. “Xi’s team just came to [her],” she wrote, and went on to list what they had come about: procurement, rare earth metals, United States Treasury bonds, trade mechanisms, and tariff exemption for billions of dollars in non-sensitive goods.
Five months later, Customs and Border Protection officers pulled her out of the arrivals line at Detroit Metropolitan Airport and read the message back to her.
Di Jin, 41, who also uses the names Sophie Jin and Xin Sui, was charged September 11 in the Eastern District of Michigan with acting inside the United States under the direction or control of a foreign government without notifying the attorney general, according to a criminal complaint filed that day and obtained by The Bureau.
The affidavit supporting the complaint was sworn by Robert Holbrook, an FBI special agent assigned to the counterintelligence division of the bureau’s Detroit field office. It is the second Chinese counterintelligence case Holbrook has brought in Detroit in 16 days, and at least the eighth federal case in Michigan since 2022 in which prosecutors have alleged a Chinese state connection, deception of federal investigators, or both.
Jin arrived at Detroit Metro on September 8 aboard a Delta flight from Shanghai Pudong. She told CBP officers she had come to spend 11 days with an 81-year-old friend in Washington. Officers referred her to secondary inspection. Searching her belongings, they found the friend’s business card. It identified him as a United States government official.
Then they confronted her with the April message. Jin admitted, according to the complaint, that people from a think tank she believed was tied to the Chinese government had asked her to travel to Washington and gather information. She said she had reported on earlier American trips through a Chinese contact who used a false name and who instructed her to delete their messages before she travelled. She had deleted them a few days before this flight.
Two FBI interviews followed. Many of her answers, Holbrook wrote, “continued to be disorganized, evasive, and unresponsive.” But by the end of them, he wrote, “Jin ultimately admitted that she had conducted intelligence gathering work in the United States on behalf of PRC intelligence officials who, in turn, allegedly assisted her with her business interests in China.”
What the affidavit describes is a system.
The Ministry of State Security, which handles China’s civilian intelligence collection, combines functions the United States splits between the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency: counterintelligence, foreign intelligence, and political security. The United States is a principal target.
The ministry supplements its trained officers, the affidavit says, with “non-professional collectors called ‘cut-outs’ or ‘co-optees’” who “can operate under a variety of covers, posing as diplomats, journalists, academics, or businesspeople both at home and abroad.”
The PRC’s military and civilian intelligence services task these non-professional collectors with “spotting, assessing, targeting, collecting, and handling sources or assets” who have access to classified, proprietary, sensitive or open-source material Beijing can use, the FBI says.
The ministry’s interest in Jin, she allegedly admitted, began in Tianjin in 2012. Officers of the ministry’s Tianjin bureau—formally the Tianjin State Security Bureau—approached her, she told agents, because of what the affidavit calls “her alleged connections to Airbus.”
The European manufacturer has operated an aircraft final-assembly line in Tianjin since 2008 and opened a second there in October 2025. At the time of the approach, she was enrolled in a pilot-training program in Los Angeles that she never completed. The Tianjin officers, she said, directed her to obtain information from a specific event in the United States and hand it over on her return.
She had entered on an F-1 student visa issued that August, which expired in July 2013. Between 2013 and this year, she returned on B-1/B-2 visitor visas on at least seven occasions.
In 2016, she attended what she described as a national-security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School, where, she told officers, she met “influential individuals.” The affidavit does not name them.
She told officers she had studied communications and advertising and that she owned two unprofitable companies in Tianjin that she financed through “introduction fees” earned by connecting politicians and officials with businesses.
The affidavit is explicit about how such arrangements are financed.
Chinese intelligence services prefer to meet their sources inside China, where their control is greatest, and will arrange or pay for the travel that makes those meetings possible. They compensate the people who work for them, Holbrook writes, "not only in cash, but also through other means, including business considerations or other types of assistance."
The more sustained phase of the alleged tasking relationship began in February 2024, when Jin was put in contact with intelligence officers in Shanghai who were interested in working with her because of her “networks [in] several countries.”
Before she flew to the United States that year, she met them in Shanghai and told them she intended to see four Americans: Government Contacts 1 and 2, and two former United States government officials the complaint calls Government Contacts 3 and 4. Their names and positions, the affidavit notes, are known to law enforcement.
The officers directed her to collect information on Chinese and American relations from all four. She met two, she said, and reported what she learned on her return. They also gave her a cover story for use if she were questioned on American soil: that she worked with a think tank in Beijing.
She repeated the sequence in June 2025—briefed before departure, meeting Contacts 1 and 2, reporting after returning. She came back in March 2026, she told agents, to gather intelligence again, and saw Government Contact 1.
The most explosive material in the file comes from searches of Jin’s three phones, to which she consented.
On July 6, 2024, one day after Jin flew into Los Angeles from Hong Kong, Government Contact 1 sent her a text message.
“Don’t think you should come now—altho [sic] it would be great to see you,” he wrote. “It may not be safe for me. How many players are in this game? I believe you are what you say—a business woman, not intel agent. How can we be sure you aren’t being tracked, not only by Chinese Intelligence. This could bring me under security scrutiny. I don’t want to do anything that could raise doubts & give appearance of being disloyal to my oath & to the US. They could think my seeing you means I may be providing information to you.”
Their relationship, he insisted, was personal and good. He simply did not want to have to explain it to security.
Then the message went further.
“I believe you are not an intel agent per se. But as a Chinese business person you have to work with Chinese Military Intel—normal course of business in China. Let’s give it a little time. I want to find out more about how much surveillance you might be under from our side, if any, because you are being tracked & reporting back to Chinese Intel.”
Jin replied: “Understand! I will see friend in DC. You can come out if you want. I don’t want to bring you any risk… fully understand.”
Government Contact 1 then told her that if she was going to be in Washington, they should meet.
Communications with both Government Contact 1 and Government Contact 2 were found on one or more of Jin’s three phones, the affidavit says.
When CBP officers telephoned Government Contact 1 after Jin arrived in Detroit two years later, he said he had not known she was travelling to the United States. He said he might have dinner with her if she reached Washington and believed she might be an “informer” for the PRC government.
Justice Department database checks run on September 10 confirmed that none of the names Di Jin, Sophie Jin or Xin Sui had ever been registered as a foreign agent or notified the attorney general under Section 951.
Sixteen days before Jin’s charging, Holbrook swore a different affidavit in the same courthouse.
Weiheng Zeng, a Chinese national studying at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, was charged August 26 with making false statements to federal officers. According to that affidavit, Zeng admitted taking paid assignments from a contact he believed worked for the Chinese government—specific aircraft, specific tail numbers, $20 to $30 per accepted photograph, paid through a Bank of China account.
The taskings included FedEx facilities at Toronto Pearson in October 2025 and Chicago’s O’Hare in April 2026. He was supplied China Telecom SIM cards that bypassed Canadian networks and a cover story for the Chicago trip. He had entered the United States roughly 24 times since receiving a visitor visa in 2022.
Five Chinese nationals, then University of Michigan students, were charged in 2024 after allegedly photographing military equipment at Camp Grayling during a Michigan National Guard exercise and attempting to conceal it.
Haoxiang Gao, another Chinese national at the university, was charged in 2025 with registering and voting illegally in the 2024 presidential election; authorities say he then fled to Shanghai through Detroit Metro while on bond, using a Chinese passport bearing a different number from the one he had surrendered. Prosecutors have not alleged Gao acted for the Chinese state.
Six Chinese researchers were charged across three cases in 2025 over biological materials brought into University of Michigan laboratories, one of them Fusarium graminearum, a crop-damaging fungus prosecutors called a potential agroterrorism weapon.
Also in the Midwest, between January and June 2020, Customs and Border Protection officers at Chicago’s O’Hare seized 1,513 shipments containing 19,888 counterfeit American driver’s licences, most arriving from China and Hong Kong.
What they were for remains contested.
A FBI intelligence information report written in August 2020 and recalled by the bureau the following month—then declassified and provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2025—carried a source’s allegation that China was mass-producing the licences so that students and immigrants sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party could cast mail-in ballots.
The report states on its face that it is “not finally evaluated intelligence,” that it had not been fully evaluated or corroborated, and that its source had indirect access and no established reporting history.
Jin is scheduled for a detention hearing today in Detroit, and the allegations against her are not proven in court.