For almost three years starting in the fall of 2015, a 56-year-old Chinese-American tour guide named Xueha "Edward" Peng would periodically carry out a strange errand: Every few months, he'd book a room at a certain designated hotel—first in California and later in Georgia—and leave $10,000 or $20,000 in cash in the room, inside a dresser drawer or taped to the bottom of a desk or TV stand. Later, he'd come back to the room and search out an SD card similarly taped to the underside of a piece of furniture, sometimes in a package like a cigarette box. He'd pick it up, leave, and later board a flight to Beijing, where he'd personally deliver the card full of classified secrets to his handlers at China's Ministry of State Security.
According to court documents, Peng was carrying out a practice intelligence agents and pawns like Peng have used for years, known as a "dead drop." That term of art was helpfully defined by the FBI special agent who would later sign the criminal complaint charging Peng with espionage: "A dead drop is a method of spycraft used to pass items or information between two individuals using a secret location thus not requiring them to meet directly, so as to maintain operational security." Peng agreed to plead guilty to the charges on November 25.
A dead drop, in other words, is a coordinated handoff in which a source leaves a physical object—papers, data, cash, or even secret machine or weapons parts—in an agreed-upon hiding spot. The recipient can then ..
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