Chris Brook

Yu was a Product Engineer and ten-year veteran of U.S. automaker Ford Motor Company who admitted to copying around 4,000 confidential Ford documents to an external hard drive and passing them to Beijing Automotive Company with whom he hadtaken a job. The design documents have been valued at around $50 million.

The granddaddy of all moles, Robert Hanssen was a career FBI officer who spent decades spying for the Soviet Union, including the GRU – the Soviet military intelligence unit- and the KGB. Hanssen worked his way up in the FBI and was charged with a variety of jobs related to intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence for the FBI, selling what he knew to the Russians for more than $1 million in cash and diamonds between 1979 and 1999. That information included the identities of Soviets in Russia spying on behalf of the CIA, Soviets in the U.S.

Lopez was the head of General Motors’ Global Purchasing division when he defected for GM competitor VW to head that company’s purchasing operation in 1993. According to a lawsuit filed by GM, Lopez and other company executives brought with them more than two million pages of top-secret GM documents, which they had culled in the months leading up to their departure. The documents included business plans, automobile designs and factory blueprints. By 1996, VW had opened its first factory that, GM claims, was built using the pilfered plans.

Klein and Amar Lalvani were two top executives at the Starwood hotel chain when they were recruited by Starwood’s chief competitor, Hilton, to help it start a new line of “lifestyle” hotels to compete with Starwood’s popular “W” hotels. According to a lawsuit filed by Starwood, the two executives are alleged to have absconded with over 100,000 confidential Starwood documents on their way out the door.

Meng was a 44 year-old software engineer living in Cupertino, California when, in 2008, he became the first person sentenced for a violation of the U.S.’s Economic Epionage Act of 1996. Meng had worked as an engineer for Quantum3D, a defense contractor that makes visual simulation software used for military training and other purposes. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Meng engaged in widespread spying on behalf of The People’s Republic of China between 2002 and 2006: obtaining the source code for software known as Mantis, used by the U.S.

Min worked at Delaware based chemicals giant DuPont for over a decade before he surreptitiously took a job at DuPont competitor, Victrex. Over a four month period after accepting that offer, and before informing DuPont of his decision, Min systematically copied thousands of pages of confidential DuPont design documents to a laptop. DuPont became aware of Min’s theft only after the employee gave notice.

Bradley Manning’s is the face that launched a (hundred) thousand leaks. The 22 year-old intelligence analyst for the U.S. Army’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division was stationed in Iraq when, allegedly, he downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified documents and video from SIPRnet, the military’s classified intelligence network.