China accuses local woman of spying
Authorities there say she conducted mission in 1996, a claim she denies
Chinese authorities have accused a 56-year-old Houston businesswoman of going to a city in southern China two decades ago to conduct an espionage mission, recruiting Chinese citizens to spy for foreign agencies and spying on the communist nation herself, her husband said Monday.
The revelations, which he said comes from her indictment last month and conversations with her legal team, provide the first insight into why China has detained Sandy PhanGillis, who was arrested in March 2015 as she passed through an immigration control post connecting mainland China with Macau. Phan-Gillis was in China on a trade delegation that included former Houston City Councilman Ed Gonzalez.
China has provided little information about its allegations, saying only that she is suspected of stealing and spying on its national secrets and that during her arrest “a new crime of espionage” was uncovered.
The Chinese Consulate in Houston said on Monday that it had no further details on her charges other than what it has already released.
But according to PhanGillis’ husband, Jeff Gillis, who has revived a media campaign to focus attention
on her arrest as President Barack Obama prepares to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit in China this weekend, the indictment alleges that she conducted a spying mission there in 1996. Specifically it accuses her of the crime in Nanning, a city in the Guangxi province neighboring Vietnam where Phan-Gillis is currently being detained.
But Gillis said his wife’s passport shows that she did not visit China at all in 1996. Moreover, he said her legal team has indicated that Chinese authorities believe Phan-Gillis conducted the mission in June and July of that year.
But at that time he said Phan-Gillis was employed as a clerk by the Houston Police Department and pay stubs show she took only 11 hours of vacation during those two months.
“It’s just not enough time to go on a spy mission to Nanning,” he said.
Phan-Gillis, a Vietnamese refugee of Chinese descent who became a U.S. citizen decades ago, met Gillis in 2001 and they married the following year. In the last 20 years, he said she has made about 40 trips to China, either as a business consultant or in her role as president of the Houston Shenzhen Sister City Association.
He said his wife only mentioned one trip to Nanning, though it occurred several years after China accuses her of being there.
The Shenzhen Sister City Association did, however, have plans to take the Texas Southern University basketball team to Guangxi in 1996, Gillis said. Though the trip never materialized, he said Phan-Gillis would have corresponded with local officials there while trying to organize it.
“It may be that the government found out that there had been a plan for such a trip,” he said. “To me, it’s too much of a coincidence. She has virtually never been to Guangxi, and I know of only one trip she ever made to Nanning.”
Frightening phone call
He also revealed new details about the sole conversation he has had with his wife during her 18 months of detention that may provide further insight into China’s accusations.
In the frightening 16-minute phone call last September, which came as Phan-Gillis was held by state security officials under residential surveillance, he said she pleaded with him to stop his campaign publicizing her arrest and asked him to assure security agents in the room that he would do so.
Gillis said she told him that her arrest was related to people she knew two decades ago who were from the province of Guangxi but whom “she knew in the United States, not in China.” She told him that, according to Chinese authorities, these acquaintances “have been violating their law, and the law is catching up to them,” he said.
Phan-Gillis has since told her lawyers that she felt forced to admit to the espionage mission but that the confession was “faked” because she was threatened with life imprisonment during daily interrogations. The questioning was harsh and terrified her so much that at one point she even fainted and had a heart attack, causing her to be hospitalized twice.
The indictment additionally accuses Phan-Gillis of spying for foreign agencies and recruiting Chinese citizens for espionage in 1997 and 1998, Gillis said.
In that time period, he said her passport shows she only visited China in 1998 as part of a delegation of NCAA All-Star basketball teams playing friendly games.
In a plea for help to Obama, which Gillis said his wife dictated to consular officials, she asked him to speak with Xi this week.
“I am accused of being a spy for the U.S. government,” she said in the letter. “I have never been a spy.”
John Kamm, a human rights activist in China and director of the Dui Hua Foundation in San Francisco, said Phan-Gillis’ case meets the United Nations’ definition of torture because she was placed in solitary confinement with no access to a lawyer under residential surveillance in a designated location, which the U.N. has compared to an enforced or involuntary disappearance.
The detention of PhanGillis last year came as the Xi administration launched a widespread anti-corruption probe that critics say wrongly ensnared some of his political opponents.
Under Xi, who assumed his country’s head post four years ago, there has also been an increased crackdown against human rights activists, journalists and others who released sensitive financial information at a time when the slowing of one of the world’s largest economies stoked fears of not only a global recession but of unrest within China.
Experts say Chinese authorities tend to more aggressively pursue ethnic Chinese they accuse of crimes and Beijing is pushing for an extradition treaty with Washington, vowing that its national corruption campaign would extend beyond its borders for corrupt officials, business executives and their assets.
‘Very serious’ claims
Gillis, who has stayed publicly silent since his wife asked him to stop the media blitz last fall, spoke out for the first time last week, saying her indictment in July and new details about her condition in detention has made him increasingly desperate.
She was able to meet U.S. consular officials without the presence of Chinese state security agents for the first time last month and disclosed more information during an August meeting with her newly appointed legal team, Mo Shaoping, a leading human rights law firm in China.
A State Department official this weekend called the allegations “very serious.”
“We remain deeply concerned about Ms. PhanGillis’ welfare,” the agency said in a statement. “This matter is compounded by China’s unwillingness to allow her attorneys and U.S. consular officers full access to her.”
Consular officials do meet with Phan-Gillis every month, the agency said, but that is normally in the presence of Chinese authorities. Senior officials in Washington have raised her case with their counterparts in Beijing.
In July, a United Nations panel said China has arbitrarily detained Phan-Gillis in violation of international human rights norms, calling for her to be released or given proper assistance by legal counsel.
The U.N. working group said that the Chinese government told it that PhanGillis is charged with “assisting external parties to steal national intelligence,” a lesser charge than those detailed in her indictment last month.
Espionage and collaborating with spying organizations carries a sentencing range between three years and life imprisonment depending on the severity of the crime.
According to the Dui Hua Foundation in San Francisco, no American has been convicted and served time for spying in recent decades.