Camp Grayling, Michigan, is the largest National Guard training base in the United States. It encompasses 148,000 acres of training grounds and is used for combined arms field training exercises. If you were an intelligence agent for a nation unfriendly to the United States, it's a place that you would want to observe, the better to observe United States forces in the field. In August 2023, five University of Michigan students - all of them Chinese nationals - were confronted by a non-commissioned officer (NCO) in the woods near the base, and at the time, were questioned and let go.
Now, they are being charged with misleading investigators, and suspiciously deleting data from their phones.
U.S. authorities charged five Chinese nationals with lying and trying to cover their tracks, more than a year after they were confronted in the dark near a remote Michigan military site where thousands of people had gathered for summer drills.
The five, who were University of Michigan students at the time, were not charged for what happened at Camp Grayling in August 2023. Rather they are accused of misleading investigators about the trip and conspiring to clear their phones of photos, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court.
The FBI noted in the Tuesday court filing that there have been instances of college students from China taking photos of vital defense sites in the United States.
The implications of this are chilling. This looks a lot like intelligence-gathering, and intelligence-gathering of military sites and military operations, at that.
Here's how this situation developed:
In the summer of 2023, the five were confronted after midnight near a lake by a sergeant major with the Utah National Guard. One said, "We are media," before they collected their belongings and agreed to leave the area, the FBI said.
The FBI learned that the men had booked a room at a nearby motel a week before they were spotted outside Camp Grayling, 200 miles north of Detroit.
Four months later, one of the men was interviewed by border officers at the Detroit airport before traveling to South Korea and China. He told investigators that he and others had taken a trip to northern Michigan "to see shooting stars," the FBI said.
A check of his external hard drive revealed two images of military vehicles taken on the same night of the encounter with the National Guard officer, the FBI said.
They weren't media. And they weren't there to see shooting stars. One doesn't take pictures of military vehicles while looking for shooting stars.
China has been conducting intelligence-gathering operations in the United States for some time now. From spy balloons to fake students, China has been penetrating American institutions, monitoring American military operations, and pushing aircraft and ships closer and closer to American territorial waters. Those aren't the acts of an ally. These are the acts of a nation that is up to something. It's not clear what; China can surveil American military bases in the continental United States until their eyes bleed but, barring intercontinental ballistic missiles, they have no capacity to strike at those bases.
It's worth remembering China continues to make overtures to Russia - and Iran.
As this is a developing story, RedState will provide updates as they become available.