Contact is taking a holiday!

Baimadajie Angwang, accused of ‘reporting on activities of Chinese citizens’, targeted a community center in Queens, stoking divisions in the community

For staff of the Tibetan community centre in the New York neighbourhood of Woodside, the alarm bells started ringing when a local police officer suggested that they should stop flying the Tibetan flag outside their building.

The NYPD officer – who was himself Tibetan – was a familiar face: Baimadajie Angwang had dropped by the Tibetan Community of New York and New Jersey several times in early 2019 with offers to help.

But his comment about the flag prompted some raised eyebrows, said Tashi Chomphel, at the time a board member at the centre.

“He said: ‘it’s not good for you, there are people who want to use this centre, maybe from other communities … People who want to donate to you – big businessmen,’ things like that,” Chomphel told the Guardian “He was discouraging.”

Last week, Angwang was charged with being an intelligence asset for China, working secretly with handlers based at the Chinese consulate in New York.

According to court papers, Angwang – a naturalized US citizen originally from Tibet – had worked for Beijing since 2018, as part of its efforts to influence the Tibetan independence movement.

The 33-year-old was ordered to be held without bail at an initial court hearing and faces up to 55 years in prison. His attorney did not respond to requests for comment.

China has described the allegations as “pure fabrication” and a smear against Chinese consulates and personnel in the US.

Angwang’s case highlights the pressures facing Tibetans outside China, many of whom fled severe restrictions on religious freedom, speech and movement in the Himalayan region where Beijing fears allegiance to the exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama could breed separatism. Advocates say there have been more than 150 self-immolations in protest in Tibet since 2009.

The campaign extends beyond China’s borders through the work of the communist party’s United Front Work department, which focuses on exerting influence overseas. Chinese operatives have long been accused of surveilling and intimidating diaspora in Sweden, Switzerland, India as well as the US, by forcing or recruiting Tibetans overseas to spy on members of their own community.

According to court documents, Angwang had been in contact with handlers at the consulate – including one United Front official – since 2014, and “reported on the activities of Chinese citizens in the New York area, spotted and assessed potential intelligence sources within the Tibetan community in New York and elsewhere, and provided PRC officials with access to senior NYPD officials”.

Chomphel said the community centre in Queens offered a natural target. “He wanted to see and report what we were doing – and the best place to find that out is the community centre,” he said.

But suspicious incidents stacked up in the spring of 2019, like when Angwang told another board member that wearing a Free Tibet jacket sent the “wrong message”.

Things came to a head in March, when Angwang was helping the group invite local police officers and firefighters to the community’s celebration of Tibetan New Year, or Losar. Angwang’s wife and child joined him at the event and the trio can be seen posing in a photo with another guest, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The next day, the board received a photo of Angwang’s wife in the same ceremonial dress at an event at the Chinese consulate.

Soon afterwards, Angwang made his comment about the Tibetan flag, and not long after that, the centre’s then president, Sonam Gyephel, told Angwang in a phone call that he had been cut off from the community.

Angwang does not appear to have collected much valuable information, but the US authorities’ decision to announce his arrest has stoked divisions in New York’s Tibetan diaspora.

“We are very worried because our community is very small and if something happens in our community it just grows like a wildfire,” Chomphel said. “People start blaming each other, people start arguing on social media, people start picking on other people, and all this happens because this deceit is sown by people like Angwang – working for the Chinese government.”

Some in the Tibetan community have said that the board should immediately have been suspicious of Angwang because he only knew a few Tibetan words and phrases.

Robert Barnett, a professor and researcher at the University of London, and founder of the modern Tibetan studies program at Columbia University in New York, said such comments reflect tensions between Tibetans from Tibet and those raised elsewhere.

“This person spoke Chinese, so you will get… a kind of racialized, ethnicized generalization that ‘Tibetans who don’t speak Chinese shouldn’t trust Tibetans who do’. So that means it will exacerbate an already very tragic split between those from India or the diaspora and those who have arrived recently from Tibet,” he said.

Angwang told Chomphel and others at the center that he was from the far east of Tibet, which would have explained why he wasn’t as fluent in the culture and language. The fact that he was a police officer – and a staff sergeant in the US army reserve – must also have helped win their confidence.

Court papers said he arrived in the US after successfully seeking asylum, claiming he was tortured by China because he was ethnically Tibetan. His parents and brother, however, still live in China, the papers said.

But Barnett said it was possible Angwang’s family was under pressure and he was trying to prove his value to his handlers.

“Everything about this is not quite as it seems, but everything about this will succeed in increasing distrust and nervousness and doubt and internal division within the community,” said Barnett.

Among the mysteries is why such a seemingly low-level case was made public.

Between June 2018 and March 2020, Angwang spoke with his handlers at least 53 times, according to court papers. But the papers don’t show his handlers giving him orders. They also denied his requests for a 10-year visa to China, a relatively easy favour for the government to grant to an asset.

Barnett also questioned why US intelligence agencies had revealed that they had publicly identified Angwang as a Chinese asset – thus tipping their hand to their Chinese counterparts and revealing that they were monitoring conversations between consular officials and their contacts.

“It’s not a case where the FBI would normally want to blow their methods and knowledge on,” Barnett said.

The story has alreadyprovided rhetorical ammunition for the Trump administration’s anti-China campaign.

Speaking in Wisconsin last week, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, highlighted the case in a speech about the threat the Chinese Communist party posed for local governments in the US.

“The federal government can’t police every bit of this predatory and coercive behavior, and the beauty of our American federal system is that we don’t have to,” Pompeo said. “Protecting American interests requires vigilance, starting with you.”

Additional reporting by Lily Kuo in Beijing