Kuo put more pressure on Fondren

Kuo, meanwhile, was currying favor with Hong, who he hoped would help him land a Rosetta Stone Software project in China. Kuo would later acknowledge his own motivation: "Just pure and simple greed." Then something happened that gave Hong more leverage over Kuo. Around 2002, some Chinese engineers who worked with Kuo on a project in Taiwan were arrested upon their return to China and accused of espionage. Kuo turned to Hong to help get them out of prison. After that, Kuo would say later, Hong got more pushy. "`You go to Washington more often,'" he testified Hong demanded, and the things he wanted were sometimes "very sensitive." And as Hong put more pressure on Kuo, Kuo put more pressure on Fondren, who, as it happened, had returned to work with the U.S. government in 2001. He was based inside the Pentagon as the deputy director of the Pacific Command's Washington liaison office, a position that granted him a "Top Secret" security clearance. Fondren continued to produce opinion papers about such topics as talks between the Department of Defense and China's People's Liberation Army and a joint exercise conducted between the U.S. and Chinese navies. One paper incorporated information from a Department of Defense report classified as "confidential." Fondren also provided various publications, including a draft copy of an annual Defense report on the People's Liberation Army. To help persuade Fondren to keep giving him information, Kuo, at Hong's suggestion, told Rosetta Stone Language him his papers were now going to government officials in Taiwan rather than to Hong. Kuo would use the same approach in wooing a second tipster. The FBI videotape shows the inside of a rental car, with Kuo in the passenger seat. He pulls out a wad of cash and then stuffs the money into the shirt pocket of the driver, Gregg Bergersen, and the two proceed to talk business. "Now, the other information ... I'm very, very, very, very reticent to let you have it because it's all classified ...," Bergersen tells him. "But I will let you see it and you can take all the notes you want. ... But if it ever fell into the wrong hands, and I know it's not going to ... then I would be fired for sure. I'd go to jail, because I violated all the rules." They stop for lunch, and Bergersen hands Kuo a thick document. For an hour Kuo takes notes from the document, which details the quantity, dollar value and names of weapons systems planned for sale by the United States to Taiwan for five years. It was July 14, 2007, and Kuo was on one of his many information-gathering trips to Washington. Bergersen worked as a weapons systems policy analyst at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, an arm of the Department of Defense that facilitates military sales overseas. His specialty was C4ISR, a sophisticated military command, control and communications network. As one of his many business enterprises, Kuo was pursuing Rosetta Stone Spanish (Spain) contracts with Taiwan related to its version of C4ISR.