DOJ unseals plea agreement against former sailor who admitted to planning attack on Naval Station Great Lakes

CHICAGO (CN) — The United States Attorney’s Office in Chicago unsealed a plea agreement Thursday in the case of an ex-Navy sailor who pleaded guilty to participating in a plot to attack Naval Station Great Lakes.

The Justice Department said the 38-year-old ex-sailor, Xuanyu Harry Pang, entered his guilty plea last November. However, much of Pang’s federal case remains under court seal.

According to a 2022 FBI affidavit also unsealed Thursday, Pang agreed to help plan an attack in the Chicago area with an individual in Columbia and an FBI informant posing as an Iraqi Kata’ib Hizballah affiliate. Per the affidavit, the FBI informant told Pang they sought revenge for the United States’ 2020 drone strike killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.

The government claims Pang met an undisclosed Columbian individual over Facebook in late 2020 or early 2021. According to the affidavit, the Columbian individual put Pang in contact with the FBI informant after speaking with another FBI asset referenced as an “FBI Online Covert Employee.” This covert online employee purportedly posed as an “Iraqi Shia militant group commander” and told the Columbian individual they needed a U.S. contact to plan an attack to avenge Soleimani’s death.

Per an August 2022 conversation included in the affidavit, the FBI covert online employee told the Columbian individual they had a person who could travel to the U.S.; the covert employee then created a separate online persona posing as the man being sent to the U.S. from Iraq. The Columbian individual put this separate persona in contact with Pang.

Pang and the informant — claiming to be the man sent to the U.S. from Iraq — purportedly arranged a face-to-face meeting outside Chicago’s Ogilvie Train Station in September 2022, with the informant wearing a wire. Two more face-to-face meetings occurred in October 2022 in the Chicago suburb of Lake Bluff, only a few miles from Naval Station Great Lakes in the lakeside suburb of North Chicago.

The government claims the pair discussed several Chicago area targets, including the busy Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago, before they coalesced on a plan to attack the naval base. The government further claimed Pang “took and shared photos and videos of potential attack sites in the Chicago area, including from inside the Naval Station.”

Pang provided the FBI informant with two military uniforms and a cell phone for use in a detonator test, according to the affidavit. Pang also purportedly told the FBI Informant in October 2022 that he planned to go to Wisconsin to acquire automatic Glock pistols for the attack, but never actually did. For his efforts, Pang received $5,000 in cash and suggested that further payments be made in Bitcoin.

At the time, the Justice Department claims, Pang was still residing at Naval Station Great Lakes.

Pang now faces charges of conspiring to destroy U.S. national defense materials, with sentencing scheduled for May. The maximum sentence attached to the charges is 20 years’ incarceration, and his plea agreement outlines an “anticipated advisory sentencing guidelines range” of between 17.5 and the maximum 20 years in prison.

The United States has designated as terrorist organizations both Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, which Soleimani commanded, and the Iraqi Kata’ib Hezballah paramilitary group.

President Donald Trump approved the killing of Soleimani in Iraq in January 2020 during his first term. Iran’s then-foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif condemned the attack, which also killed Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, as “state terrorism” by the United States.

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