3 Americans, including FBI informant, freed in prisoner swop with China

WASHINGTON – Three Americans who were detained in China have been released in a prisoner swop with Beijing, the Biden administration said on Nov 27. One of the men had been an FBI informant, according to senior US officials.

Mr John Leung, Mr Kai Li and Mr Mark Swidan were heading to the US on Nov 27 after months of diplomatic manoeuvring to free them. Mr Leung and Mr Li had been held for three years and eight years, respectively. Mr Swidan was held for more than a decade.

“Soon they will return and be reunited with their families for the first time in many years,” said Mr Sean Savett, a National Security Council spokesman. He said no other Americans are “wrongfully detained” in China, a designation that indicates that the US government sees a person as the equivalent of a political hostage or that the charges are fabricated.

In return, the United States released Mr Xu Yanjun, a Chinese intelligence officer serving a 20-year sentence after he was arrested in Brussels in 2018 and extradited to the United States in a dramatic FBI operation, according to two US officials.

On Nov 27, Mr Xu was listed in the Federal Bureau of Prisons system as “not in BOP custody”.

The exchange has been in the works, under intense secrecy, for months. During a global summit in Peru earlier in November, President Joe Biden discussed a potential prisoner swop with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a meeting at Mr Xi’s hotel.

Hostage diplomacy has risen in recent years, as tensions between the United States and both China and Russia have grown.

Those two superpowers increasingly see detaining US citizens as a way to get back spies, arms dealers and others. The American government has warned US citizens to reconsider travel to those countries or to be alert there.

For Mr Biden, the successful negotiations made for a diplomatic win as he tried to cement his legacy in the final weeks of his presidency.

And it appeared to validate his strategy on China, which has been to engage in intense competition but also maintain high-level channels of communication for diplomacy on specific issues.

But Mr Richard Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said Mr Xi is most likely trying to set the stage for relations with the incoming Trump administration.

“It’s a way to signal a potential for mutually beneficial transactions if you will, which potentially would appeal to somebody like Donald Trump,” Mr Haass said.

Negotiations over detainees often happen independently of other policy discussions. One example is the 24-prisoner multi-country swop with Russia earlier in 2024, which went ahead despite tensions between Washington and Moscow over the war in Ukraine.

The latest swop was announced as the Americans were in the air, flying back to the United States on the morning of Nov 27.

Mr Leung, 79, had provided information to the FBI for years about Chinese activities, according to two American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss details of the matter.

He was outwardly pro-Beijing and frequently appeared with Chinese consular officials in Houston, before the Trump administration closed the office in 2020 and said it was a hub of spying. His FBI contacts discouraged him from travelling to China soon afterwards, but he went anyway. The Chinese authorities arrested him, and, in 2023 a court in the city of Suzhou sentenced him to life in prison.

Mr Swidan, 49, a Texas businessman, has been held since 2012 on drug-related charges, which his family has said are false.

Mr Li, 62, was convicted by a Shanghai court in 2018 of providing state secrets to the FBI, according to a report from the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

Mr Li’s son Harrison Li said his father ran a business selling technology to customers in China. In letters from prison, he had written that US government agents approached him about export compliance. He said that his father believed that the Chinese government used the contact as an excuse to arrest him.

Mr Swidan and Mr Kai Li had been designated by the State Department as wrongfully detained, but Mr Leung was not, most likely because of his work for the FBI. The State Department did not immediately comment on the reason.

As for Mr Xu, he is a rare instance of a trained Chinese spy caught in a complex operation and imprisoned by the Americans. His case was an embarrassment for China: He was lured from his home­land to Belgium in a sting operation by the FBI.

China does not typically do prisoner exchanges, but that may be changing. After Canada arrested Ms Meng Wanzhou, a senior executive of Huawei, the flagship Chinese telecommunications company, in 2018 at the request of the US government, China arrested two Canadian men and charged them with espionage. In 2021, China freed the two men, Mr Michael Kovrig and Mr Michael Spavor, just hours after the Justice Department asked Canada to release Ms Meng following a legal deal.

Mr Biden has now helped secure the release of more than 70 Americans that the US considered wrongfully detained overseas, according to the White House.

“This is a moment of joy for the three families,” said Mr Peter Humphrey, a British citizen who was held in China for two years on what he said were phony charges. He added that the Biden administration needed to do more for the many other Americans in prison in China, even if they are not designated as wrongfully detained and never make headlines. “None of them have had fair and impartial and transparent trials.” NYTIMES