Bradley Hall

Bradley Hall, the FBI lead investigator on the Xu Yanjun case, walks through how a spy’s intimate online diary exposed clandestine operations. He describes diary entries mixing personal life, gambling, and meticulous work logs. The conversation covers recorded recruitment tactics, a four-level source taxonomy, targeted industrial espionage, and methods used to recruit and exploit Western experts.

Bradley Hall, an FBI counterintelligence special agent who led the investigation, shares firsthand details. He walks through spotting initial leads like secondary airline screening and cash. The story follows flipping an insider, manipulating contacts with digital clues, and staging a European meeting that forces a major confrontation.

Bradley Hall, an FBI counterintelligence agent who led the GE investigation, gives a first-hand account of the operation. He describes how the lead emerged at airports and why GE faced a fraught cooperate-or-conceal choice. Hear how a company engineer was handled as a double, the digital breadcrumbs that exposed an MSS officer, and the staged European meeting that set the sting in motion.

In Episode 4 of The Sixth Bureau, a series from The Big Take, we follow a spy from China’s Ministry of State Security as he tries to plan a delicate overseas meeting with a valuable source. But the person he’s talking to isn’t working alone. The Sixth Bureau from Bloomberg News follows an MSS intelligence officer whose mission was to acquire the crown jewels of American aerospace companies. With aliases, blackmail and the occasional break-in, he targeted corporate giants. That is, until his sloppiness — and a cunning FBI sting — led to a stunning reversal: Xu Yanjun became the first Chinese intelligence officer ever convicted on American soil. The Sixth Bureau is the story of superpowers, their secrets and how one Chinese spy got caught. Listen to Episodes 1 - 3 here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bradley Hall, an FBI Special Agent who worked the investigation and served as an expert witness, walks through surveillance, controlled communications and suspect interactions. The conversation covers the Paris Air Show as an intelligence target. It also outlines how LinkedIn recruitment, university ties and stolen GE engine files led to an FBI sting and a surprising legal turnaround.