An American fighter pilot was arrested and accused of having trained the Chinese Air Force to combat United States aircraft, the US Department of Justice announced this Thursday, February 26, which described the facts as “treason”.
The 65-year-old former Air Force officer was detained in Indiana after spending more than two years in China, according to the indictment.
US law prohibits the training of foreign armed forces without authorization.
Gerald Brown was an F-16 and other aircraft pilot for 24 years in the US forces. He served as unit commander, participated in combat missions and worked as an instructor.
Retired from active service in 1996, he continued his career in the private sector, where he was an instructor in simulators for the F-35, the most advanced combat aircraft in the United States.
According to the indictment, in 2023 he had made contact with a Chinese citizen to whom he expressed his intention to train Chinese Air Force pilots in combat operations.
On the first day of his arrival in China, in December of that year, he answered questions from Chinese authorities about the US Air Force for three hours, before remaining in the country for more than two years.
According to the Justice Department, Brown, described as a former F-35 Lightning II instructor with decades of experience flying U.S. military aircraft, “betrayed his country by training Chinese pilots to fight those he was sworn to protect,” Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s counterintelligence division said in a statement.
CIA Director Kash Patel wrote on the social network X that the FBI and its partners detained a former United States Air Force pilot who allegedly trained Chinese Army pilots, calling the case “important”.
The Department of Justice recalled that another North American pilot was accused of similar facts in 2017 and arrested in 2022 in Australia, also for alleged training for the benefit of China.
Leave a Reply