He is charged with one count of failing to disclose foreign contacts as part of his regular national security background checks — a crime that could send him to prison for up to five years if convicted.

Moinian, who lives in Mira Mesa, was arrested Friday. While he is being held on the single charge, the FBI and Naval Criminal Investigative Service are continuing to investigate, and more serious charges could follow.

The complaint does not specify which companies Moinian worked for — except to say one had offices in San Diego — or which projects may have been compromised.

According to the complaint, Moinian first connected in 2015 with a Chinese national who posed as a job recruiter on an employment services website — a tactic that both Germany and France have identified as a technique used by Chinese spies. She asked if he was interested in part-time consultancy work; he said yes, but later said his security clearance prohibited it. The woman then suggested they keep in touch.

The following year, the same woman reached out to Moinian again, under a different name, and played up his “rich experiences and skills,” which were needed for consulting on aircraft design, according to the complaint.

Authorities allege Moinian traveled to China and other destinations — including Macau, Bali, and Taiwan — from 2017 to 2019 to meet up with the Chinese contact and her associates.

At times, he used his stepdaughter’s South Korean bank account to receive payments from his contact, then had them wired to the U.S., the complaint states. Other times he smuggled cash payments back to the U.S. — sometimes with help from his wife, she told investigators, according to the complaint.

Moinian and the contact are believed to have communicated via email and encrypted cellphone apps, where Moinian would update her on the progress of his work and they would talk of missing one another, the complaint states.

Investigators say after returning from another overseas meeting with the contact and her associates in 2018 — during which he was paid in cash — Moinian searched online for information on sabotage, espionage, spying and selling military information to a foreign country, the complaint says.

In 2019, he is accused of requesting $20,000 from his contact, telling her it was for a friend in financial distress, the complaint states. Two months later he met with her and others and received a “large cash payment,” authorities allege.

Moinian was regularly required to disclose whether he had close or continuing contact with a foreign national or if he’d been asked to work as a consultant, or considered employment, by a foreign national, within the past seven years as part of his national security clearance. He denied such contact in multiple questionnaires, authorities say.

“This case serves as a stark reminder of the social media exploitation strategies Chinese intelligence agencies will utilize to target, recruit, and maintain contact with valuable foreign assets,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Suzanne Turner said in a statement.

At the time of his arrest, Moinian was preparing to move to South Korea to work for another defense contractor producing a military aircraft for the Korean government, prosecutors said. He’d already given many of his belongings to the international shipping company and had given notice to his landlord that he was vacating in a week.

Moinian made his first appearance Monday in San Diego federal court, where a magistrate judge set bond at $60,000. He may be placed on home detention upon release.

But one aspect of U.S. military operations in Africa remains vastly under-covered and unappreciated: the role of private military and security contractors (PMSC).

Out of Africa

Domestic private security in Africa, which targets criminal activities, is widespread. But there are also a number of large transnational PMSCs who, along with their subsidiaries, guard mining sites, train national militaries and police, and provide security for development or humanitarian agencies. Even international development or UN peacekeeping/peacebuilding operations sometimes contract with PMSCs for various logistical support services.

It is fitting, in an ironic sense, that modern PMSCs should be operating in Africa. After all, Africa gave rise to much of the modern PMSC industry. The pioneer in the field was the South African-based Executive Outcomes (EO), which shut down in 1998 after having fought Jonas Savimbi’s rebel UNITA group in Angola and the murderous Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. Even earlier, mercenary “companies,” such as 5 Commando, fought in the Belgian Congo and elsewhere during the 1960s. Companies such as the Dutch VOC or the British South Africa Company were the tip of the spear for colonial occupation and exploitation,.

PMSCs are the U.S. military’s American Express card: it dare not deploy overseas without them. This is nowhere truer than in Africa. As a recent article in Geopolitics notes:

more than anywhere else in the world the US military presence in Africa is dependent upon PMCs that perform a variety of services, from transporting and housing personnel, to shipping materials and food, to providing medical support, to conducting surveillance… Soldiers operating out of remote facilities require services like food, fuel, beds, laundry, internet access and actionable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data that are provided by a heterogeneous web of contractors ranging from small African trucking firms, to American intelligence companies, to massive multinational corporations.

A contractor-provided plane and crew were crucial to a secret surveillance mission performed in support of France’s Operation Serval in Mali in 2013. That mission involved the deployment of a plane equipped with High Altitude Lidar Operations Experiment (HALOE) technology, developed by the Defense Advanced Research projects Agency (DARPA). HALOE reportedly allows “unprecedented access to high-resolution 3D data” due to its ability to collect information “orders of magnitude faster and from much longer ranges than conventional methods.” By way of comparison, DARPA’s director estimates that the program could map half of Afghanistan in 90 days.

What Contracts Do Best

As the article points out, contractors are particularly useful for maintaining a low profile, particularly when it comes to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). When the U.S. military does this work itself it does so via large drones like Predators and Reapers, which means, large, noticeable, highly visible bases.

Contractors, on the other hand, are highly unobtrusive. That’s something highly desired by African states who wish to keep their relationship with the U.S. government off the radar. As the Geopolitics article noted:

A 2009 State Department cable from Burkina Faso, which was a key site for covert, contractor-based ISR flights over Mali and Mauritania under a programme called Creeksand—especially when flights from Mauritanian bases were temporarily suspended following a coup in 2008—relays a request by the government to move US planes to a different part of the airport in Oagadougou so as to “meet Burkina Faso’s objectives to maintain discretion concerning American presence.” It also states that Burkinese officials appreciate that “U.S. personnel were extremely discreet and did not attract undue attention.”

Similarly, a contractor-based ISR program named Tusker Sand, operating out of Entebbe, Uganda since 2009, has been part of a campaign against the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Contractors are also a key enabler for U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) in Africa, helping them get to where they fight, which isn’t easy given Africa’s vast size. The Geopolitics article said:

This is especially true of SOF teams who conduct operations across a wide swath of the Sahel, Maghreb, Central and East Africa and rely heavily on US-based flight contractors. For instance, a 2013 solicitation for a Trans-Sahara short take-off and landing (STOL) contract to provide casualty evacuation and personnel and cargo airlift for Special Operations Command, Africa (SOCAFRICA) states that contractors will be required to fly both day and night missions from “improved and unimproved airfield landing zones” and that “it is anticipated that the most likely locations for missions… would be to: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia.

Finally, just like in Iraq and Afghanistan, contractors also provide base operations and life-support services to US military sites and operations in Africa. In some cases, these contracts are awarded through established channels such as the U.S. Defense Department’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP).

In other instances ad hoc solicitations or no-bid contracts are used… due to the small size of the base, temporary duration of operations, or difficulty in identifying qualified providers. In June 2015, for instance, the Marine Corps solicited bids to provide base-support services for up to four months for twenty-four soldiers conducting training exercises with the Ugandan military at Camp Singo in Uganda in the fall.The US frequently uses Camp Singo –which is located roughly seventy kilometres northwest of Kampala – for training exercises with Ugandan and other African military contingents, and has even established a small fenced compound with buildings, tents, water tanks and generators. But rather than permanently stationing troops there it rotates them in as desired, relying upon short-term contracts for base and life support. Ad hoc logistics contracting, in other words, facilitates AFRICOM’s stated goal of organising force posture “to maximize operational flexibility and agility.”