Imagine you are the FBI, and you have just arrested a realtor you believe is a Chinese intelligence asset — caught at Los Angeles International Airport on Sunday boarding a flight to Shanghai. One thing you would like to know is: who helped her? In the surveillance trip prosecutors describe — a September 2025 drive from California to a Seattle suburb to secretly film the son of Taiwan’s president — the criminal complaint says she had company, a man identified only as “Individual 1.” Now, CBS News reports, he appears to be Fatai Miao, a Chinese-born California construction entrepreneur. And about two weeks ago he took what prosecutors described in court as a one-way flight to China.
The identification reads like something out of a detective novel, except it is real estate records doing the detective work, which honestly fits. Special Agent Kevin Holt of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Squad wrote in his affidavit that the SUV Zhang and Individual 1 rented on the alleged Seattle trip was tied to a Walnut Avenue address in Arcadia, California — a house “Individual 1” owned and which he sold “on or about September 11, 2025.” Property records show the only house on that street sold on that date belonged to Miao. CBS confirmed his identity through law enforcement sources and interviews with family and neighbors; he is a person of interest in the Zhang investigation, though the Justice Department has not accused him of wrongdoing.
The morning Zhang was arrested, neighbors say about ten FBI agents hit Miao’s empty Irvine home around noon with a battering ram — “five or six SUVs and one big truck,” as his son put it. When a reporter visited on Tuesday, the front-door handle was snapped, the wood beside it splintered, the video doorbell ripped from the wall, and the only sign of life was three pairs of flip-flops on the patio. The son, Jiaqi Miao, said he first thought the FBI’s phone call was a scam — then checked the home’s security camera and saw agents with guns outside. “I was trying to open the door for them using the remote app, but it was too late,” he said. “They already used the door breach thing.”
Jiaqi Miao told CBS News his father has been in China for two weeks caring for his wife, who traveled there for medical care for her back. Zhang had been a friend for over a decade — she once showed him a condo he was thinking of buying — and the family rented her their pool house for a few months about ten years ago. The Seattle trip, the son suspects, happened innocently. His father, he said, does not speak English. “To be honest, I don’t think he’s smart enough to do those things,” Jiaqi said. “He always follows others. For example, he doesn’t understand soccer, but he went to the World Cup because his friend told him it’s a big event.” It is, as legal defenses go, an unusually candid theory of the case: my father cannot be a spy because he lacks the internal motivation to be one. He also noted his father is the only family member who chose U.S. citizenship. “That’s why I think there’s no reason why he would want to work with the Chinese government.”
For what it is worth, the elder Miao is no lightweight — California corporation records list him as CEO of several companies, including real estate, investment and construction entities, and a general contractor license tied to his company registered at the Walnut Avenue address expired only last year. He spoke with his son from China after the raid; he had learned of Zhang’s arrest from a friend, said “everything is fine,” and is looking to hire a lawyer.
Meaning Zhang’s own situation got sharper on Wednesday, when a federal judge ordered her to remain in custody despite an offer to post more than $1.2 million in property as bond. Judge Steve Kim cited “inconsistencies” about how many properties she owns and “where the money is coming from” — she had declared a single property on her arrest paperwork; her attorney, Craig Harbaugh, called that a “misunderstanding.” Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Elbogen called Zhang a “secret agent of a hostile foreign power” and told the court she had money in a Chinese bank account from an “unregistered cryptocurrency exchange” — CBS’s two reports put the deposits at $190,000 and $170,000 respectively — plus “hundreds of thousands of dollars” accessible in China, a Chinese passport agents could not find, and a brother she claims worked for the Chinese government. “She has been lying to her own family about who she is,” Elbogen said, adding that Zhang has traveled to China 12 times since 2014 and internationally 29 times. Harbaugh countered that the only alleged spying dates to September 2025, and that the complaint says her last contact with her handlers was in October 2025.
The alleged mission itself — filming Lai Ting-yu returning home with his wife and child — was laid out in the complaint last week: prosecutors say Zhang met Chinese officials in China in August 2025 to plan it, then flew to Seattle, rented the SUV with Individual 1, and was allegedly caught mid-surveillance on a neighbor’s security camera.
Then there is her résumé. According to the complaint, Zhang attended the University of International Relations in Beijing from 2010 to 2014 — a school run by the Ministry of State Security, China’s intelligence agency, which “recruits heavily” there, per Agent Holt. Two law enforcement sources say she was one of the top students in her class; her Facebook page lists eight friends who are current or former UIR staff or students. Elbogen cited her ability, when living in China, to fast-track government permission to move her residence from Beijing to another city as evidence of official connections. And as CBS previously reported, she traveled to San Francisco in 2023 with the All American Chinese Association to celebrate Xi Jinping’s visit — where pro-China activists attacked pro-democracy protesters, though there is no evidence Zhang was involved in the violence — and appears in a photo beside the group’s leader, Edward Cai, once a vice president of an organization so close to Beijing it had to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Neither Cai nor the group responded to requests for comment.
Her husband, Eric Ding, a realtor at the same Irvine firm, watched Wednesday’s hearing from the gallery; approached on Sunday, he said, “I don’t know anything yet.” Which, on the evidence so far, may be the one claim in this case nobody disputes.