While Mikhail earned his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at Lomonosov Moscow State University, Yuri Gordienko had gone on to become a pilot in the Russian Air Force, flying Sukhoi Su-25 ground attack aircraft. Yuri’s love of flying kept him in the Air Force, where he was called to duty during the Second Chechen War.
Yuri Gordienko was on a combat mission when a shoulder fired infrared missile shot down his plane on May 29, 2002. Yuri was fortunate; he survived a low altitude ejection, something that was far from certain given the poorly maintained aircraft of the Russian military at the time. But his good fortune had lasted only the time it took for his parachute to float him down to earth. He was taken prisoner by Chechen guerillas under the command of Dokka Umerov, the Islamic warlord and ally of al Qaeda.
Yuri’s family had no information about his fate until the afternoon of June 8 when a videotape was delivered to the studios of NTV in Moscow. Mikhail and his family learned that night, along with the rest of Russia, that Yuri Gordienko had been executed two days earlier. The video was aired on TV, Mikhail only seeing it later that evening after receiving phone calls from family and friends. The beaten body of Yuri Gordienko was barely alive as he knelt down facing the camera. His head was bowed and his eyes closed as three men stood behind him wearing camouflage combat jackets. His wrists were bound behind his back. But what burned into Mikhail’s mind was the thick black beards of each man, the white Jihadist scarves wrapped around their foreheads and the pure evil in their eyes. The video was stopped as the man in the middle pulled Yuri’s head back with his left hand while he began to raise a long-bladed knife in his right hand. There was no need for the news commentator to say what happened next, but the details still were reported with the faux intonation of concern and pity that was belied by the station’s desire for ratings.
Mikhail went through the full range of emotion that night, from disbelief when his friends first called him, to the shedding of tears, to a feeling of rage and anger that he had never before known. It was the last emotion that lingered. And as he looked into the mirror of this Shanghai hotel room, his hatred of the Muslim killers of his brother was as intense as it had been that summer night in 2002. That hatred made what he was about to do very easy. He would probably have done this for free. At least that is what he told himself. But he was still more than happy to make a profit in this transaction.
Five minutes later, a knock on the door of room 901 penetrated the thoughts of Amit Margolis. He put down his newspaper and opened the door to his erstwhile business partner, now his official partner in espionage. “Good to see you, Mikhail,” said Amit as he reached out to grab the travel bag in the Russian’s left hand. Amit’s Russian was fluent, even if his accent was indeterminate.
Gordienko offered the bag and quickly walked into the suite, suddenly self conscious about being in the hall. Once the door closed behind him, he relaxed enough to talk. “How are you, Mike?” The Russian knew Margolis only as Mike Jenkins, a Canadian businessman.
Margolis placed the bag on the floor and walked across the room to a desk that jutted out from the wall. He sat down as the Russian executive settled in the seat across from him. “Good, good. I am very happy to see you. I assume everything went well this morning?”
“Yes, I have the ICs,” replied the Russian. Gordienko placed an aluminum briefcase on the desk and opened it. Inside were 128 integrated circuit chips, each in a sealed pink electrostatic discharge shielding poly bag, forming a flexible Faraday cage.
“Wait,” said Amit. He reached down to grab hold of his own aluminum briefcase that was sitting on the floor next to the wall. He lifted it up and placed it on the desk next to Gordienko’s briefcase. He opened up the case and removed two wrist bracelets attached to each other by a thin wire. Gordienko immediately recognized the anti-static devices commonly used to protect sensitive electronics. Attached to the center of the connecting wire was another wire about twenty feet in length that had a large alligator clip at the end.
Margolis stood up, walked into the bathroom and attached the clip to the copper pipe under the sink. He returned to his seat and each man wrapped one of the Velcro-secured bracelets around his wrist. The men were now grounded, helping to ensure that their bodies would not build-up an excess number of electrons to be suddenly discharged into the delicate integrated circuit chips they were about to handle.
Margolis reached into his open case and lifted up one pink poly bag with a single integrated circuit chip in it. “I have one hundred and twenty of these, per the terms of your contract,” he said. The bag that contained the chip was identical to the sealed bags in Mikhail’s case.
“There’s a problem.”
“What?”
“Well, they… um,” Mikhail said, looking into his case, “gave me a hundred twenty-eight.” The Russian looked at Margolis and shrugged his shoulders. “The eight extra were bonus.”
“No problem. Just take my one-twenty.”
“I can’t do that. They gave me an invoice that says they delivered a hundred twenty-eight ICs. They already emailed the invoice to accounting.”
Amit Margolis thought for a moment. “I guess we will swap out one twenty and you can keep eight originals.”
“I can’t think of anything else. Let’s do it.”
The pair spent the next fifteen minutes carefully substituting 120 legitimate ball grid array chips with perfect forgeries manufactured by Citadel Semiconductors in Migdal Haemek, Israel — complete with the logo of SMIC on the military grade gold/tin alloy packaging lids that sealed the circuits from the elements.
Half way through the process, Gordienko spoke. “How did you pull off the thing with the prototype chips?”
“What, adding the two chips?”
“Yes.”
“Not very hard. Intercepting a FedEx package and adding our two chips was no problem. We needed our chips tested alongside the Chinese chips.”
“What about the email?”
“What email?”
“SMIC sent an email to our engineers saying they shipped five chips. They copied me and just about everyone else.”
“Oh, that.” Amit just shrugged his shoulders. “IT nerds. Nothing I understand really.”
Gordienko shook his head in amazement. “Do you like what you do? Being a spy? James Bond?”
Amit replied with a harsh look at his friend. He wanted him to know that the question was out of bounds. The Russian returned the look, unwilling to retract his query. Finally Amit stated flatly, “It’s a job, Mikhail. Just a job.”
When they were done, 120 of the original chips were now in Amit’s case and all of the fake Citadel chips plus six originals were in the metallic briefcase of Mikhail Gordienko.
Mikhail left two original SMIC chips on the desk and lifted both of them up between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand to show them to Amit. “You don’t know why I left these out, do you?”
Amit did not know. He simply gazed at the Russian with a quizzical look that clearly answered the question.
The Russian smiled and shook his head. “Tsk, tsk. You see Mike, this is the type of detail that gives you away. It’s a good thing you and I are partners.” Margolis was thinking exactly the same thing. “These will be our ‘randomly’ selected sacrificial chips. We pick one chip at random per hundred to take apart and put under the microscope. My engineers will scan the circuits to ensure that they are exactly as designed. It is a key part of our certification standards. Of course, the chips are destroyed in the process.”