How Daniel Duggan went from 'top gun' pilot to 'high-risk inmate' (2024)

Facing up to 65 years in a US prison, this Australian pilot says he's an innocent pawn in the contest between the world's superpowers.

Daniel Duggan's hands are pressed against the glass partition inside the dock of a tiny Sydney courtroom.

On the other side of the enclosure, his wife and kids are in tears, trying to touch their hands to his. He's mouthing "I love you" but you can't hear the words. Within moments, he's ushered out — back to the cells.

Nearly two years have passed since the 55-year-old former US Marine was arrested in a supermarket car park in regional New South Wales.

A Sydney magistrate has just ruled that Duggan is eligible for surrender to the United States. If extradited and found guilty of the crimes of which he's accused, he could face a 65-year sentence in a US prison.

The accusations are shocking.

US prosecutors claim Duggan was part of a years-long conspiracy to illegally train Chinese military pilots how to land and take off from an aircraft carrier. And that he laundered the money that he earned doing this.

He's already been incarcerated in NSW for more than 600 days without any Australian charges.

In that time, he hasn't had any chance to defend himself in court against the allegations he faces. The US doesn't need to prove the merits of its case in Australia — they just have to prove he's eligible for extradition.

The question of whether he's guilty or innocent will not be decided in Australia.

This is why Duggan decided to speak to the ABC's Background Briefing. He knows anything he says could be used against him if he's extradited to the US. But he wants to tell his side of the story.

This is the most complete public explanation he has ever given about this case, and it raises critical new questions about how it has been handled, and the basis of the accusations against him.

Background Briefing has also been able to obtain a copy of the US prosecutor's affidavit against Duggan, which reveals new details about the evidence against him.

The husband and father-of-six, who became an Australian citizen in 2012, says he is innocent on all charges. He believes he is a victim of a geopolitical game between two of the world's most powerful nations — the US and China.

The final decision about whether Daniel Duggan will be extradited to the United States now rests with federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus.

But what were the events that led to this self-proclaimed "Top Gun" being arrested in broad daylight?

Classification: 'Extreme high-risk restricted inmate'

Speaking down a crackly phone line from a maximum-security prison, Duggan recounts his first night behind bars — it was the first time in his life he'd ever set foot inside a jail.

"There's no running water, and there's a lot of the other people that are in these dry cells, going through withdrawals off of drugs or alcohol. They're mentally unstable, right?

"The man in the cell next to me is defecating all over himself. Then he's taking it and rubbing it all over the walls. And himself.

"That was my introduction to maximum-security prison in Australia."

Duggan says for the next 62 days, while the Australian government awaited details of the US case, he had no idea why he'd been arrested.

"All I knew was that the United States wanted to extradite me," he says.

Though he was born in Massachusetts, Duggan hadn't lived in the United States for more than two decades at the time of his arrest.

"I was classified as an extreme-high-risk restricted inmate," he recalls. "Something that's normally reserved for people who are accused of terrorism."

He was also placed on an order that meant he was isolated from all other inmates.

A few days before Christmas 2022, more than 60 days after Daniel Duggan was jailed, the extradition request arrived from Washington.

It revealed Duggan had been secretly indicted by a grand jury in the US almost five years earlier.

He was accused of being part of a conspiracy to unlawfully export defence services, alongside eight alleged co-conspirators. It is also alleged that he twice violated American arms control laws when teaching at a South African flying school in 2012.

This flying school is called the Test Flying Academy of South Africa, or TFASA.

TFASA specialises in training test pilots, elite aviators whose job it is to push planes to their absolute limits and evaluate their performance under duress.

Duggan describes the school as one of the best of its kind in the world.

"It was like the Harvard Law School of test pilot schools," he says.

"The type of training that is given at those schools is highly specialised. It's dangerous. It's expensive."

The school was created in 2003 specifically to cater to China's booming aviation sector, which needed thousands more pilots than the country could train. TFASA even launched a flying school in partnership with one of China's biggest defence companies, AVIC.

US prosecutors allege the conspiracy began in 2009 when senior figures from the flight school and a Chinese businessman began to organise aircraft carrier landing training.

The indictment says this involved several alleged co-conspirators importing an old US Navy training plane called a T2 Buckeye for this training.

There's no evidence to suggest Duggan was involved with importing the plane.

'Harvard for test pilots'

In 2010, Duggan was running an adventure tourism business called Top Gun Tasmania, where he took clients on joy rides in old military jets over the picturesque island state.

Around this time, an intriguing offer landed in his lap. The chief operating officer of TFASA, a decorated veteran named Keith Hartley, wanted Duggan to come and teach at the flight school.

"Keith Hartley is considered one of the top living test pilots in the world," Duggan explains.

"He was chief test pilot of British Aerospace [BAE], he was a Royal Air Force test pilot, top of his field, highly regarded.

"He specifically brought a lot of credibility to TFASA."

A famous photo of Hartley, taken back in 1988, shows him testing a jet called a Tornado.

He is flying faster than 900 kilometres per hour with the canopy down and wearing no oxygen mask.

Duggan's response to TFASA's offer was emphatic.

"I was honoured to be asked to help them."

The key allegations against Daniel Duggan centre around his time at TFASA in 2012. US prosecutors claim he was involved in illegally training Chinese military pilots how to land and take off from an aircraft carrier.

The US argues he was an American citizen at the time he taught at TFASA, and needed to get approval from the US government to train any foreign military.

But Daniel says he was told the students were civilians by both Keith Hartley and the manager of TFASA's China program, a man named Keith Dennison.

"I took the word of TFASA that these pilots were Chinese test pilots, student Chinese test pilots. They weren't military," Daniel says.

He doesn't deny part of what was being taught to these Chinese pilots was a technique initially developed to land on aircraft carriers. But he says there were not actual carriers involved, and the technique has many valid applications outside of military context.

"What is being taught is technique to control an aircraft and, and slow flight and up and up and close to aerodynamic stall," he says. "It's approach and landing technique. And in the military, it was referred to what they call field carrier landing practice."

"It's a flight technique developed for approach and landing to aircraft carrier. That doesn't mean that the pilots are being taught to land and take off from aircraft carriers.

"To say that we were or TFASA or I was involved with teaching people how to land on an aircraft carrier is false."

He uses the analogy of aerobatics: "Aerobatics are canned air combat manoeuvres that were developed in the military, you know, back in World War I and World War II."

"So when someone's teaching someone aerobatics now, it doesn't mean that's teaching them how to do air combat — they're teaching them a flight technique that was developed for air combat," he says.

Duggan's pilot log book shows that he did three stints in South Africa in 2012, in March, April and November. In that time, he did a session "reactivating" his prior rating on the T2 Buckeye and flew just over 16 hours in the plane.

He says that he was mostly at TFASA to certify the school's own trainers.

According to his log book, while at TFASA in 2012 he largely flew a British plane called a BAC Strikemaster, which isn't used for aircraft carrier landings.

"My involvement in the entire test pilot course itself was very, very minimal, very minimal," he says.

TFASA told Background Briefing that Daniel Duggan undertook only one training course at the school in November and December 2012.

It said the school paid him before that to prepare for the course, including getting his South African pilot's license.

According to TFASA, its students came from the Chinese Flight Test Establishment and the syllabus in the course that Duggan was part of delivering was "totally unclassified". The school said it was unable to provide a copy of the syllabus.

A spokesperson said:

"TFASA has never provided operational training to land on a ship, nor would such training have been possible in South Africa.

"The Field Carrier Landing Practice is a well-known exercise that enables students to gain precision handling experience."

Background Briefing spoke with five expert test pilots, who had worked for major airlines and at international test pilot schools. They said techniques like stall and slow flight were important for test pilots to learn, but none had heard of "Field Carrier Landing Practice" being used in civilian test pilot training.

TFASA denied that the T2 Buckeye was illegally imported. A spokesperson said:

"Recent communications between the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US Air Force Office of Special Investigation and the Society of Experimental Test Pilots indicate that TFASA has broken no laws."

Lawyers for Keith Hartley said that he denies any criminal wrongdoing and maintains that he has always acted lawfully.

Keith Dennison did not reply to the ABC's questions. It is understood he is not one of the alleged co-conspirators listed in Daniel Duggan's indictment.

ASIO enters the frame

After Duggan's stint in South Africa ended, he returned to Australia in late 2012.

Soon after, he says he received a call from someone from Australia's domestic spy agency, ASIO. They arranged to meet in person, at a hotel on Hobart's waterfront.

He remembers that when he arrived there, he was surprised to see there was also an agent from the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) present.

Duggan says at this meeting, ASIO representatives and the NCIS agent knew about his work at TFASA and the fact he was planning to move to China in the near future.

"They didn't raise any concerns," he explains. "They knew about what was going on in South Africa, and they never said it was illegal or anything like that."

In a letter to Australia's intelligence watchdog IGIS, Duggan offered more detail on this meeting.

"I expressed my sentiment that if, for some reason that I was not aware of, such activities were inappropriate to ASIO, that I would not return to either South Africa or China," he wrote.

There was a specific line he said the ASIO representative used, that stayed with him long afterwards: "We don't want to interfere in your business in China — good luck, make money and if you can meet any Chinese generals, we can do business."

He left that meeting with the understanding that ASIO wanted him to be a human intelligence source in China.

After his arrest, Duggan made a complaint about ASIO's conduct to IGIS. An ASIO spokeswoman said the report, which will not be made public, "is unequivocal in its findings that ASIO acted both ethically and within the law at all times regarding Daniel Duggan".

An NCIS spokesperson said they were unable to comment given the legal circ*mstances.

China is 'buzzing'

Daniel Duggan and his family moved to China in 2013 and it is a time in their lives that Daniel's wife Saffrine remembers fondly.

"China was buzzing then," she says.

"We had great trade agreements going on. Lots of friends were going in and out of Beijing, Shanghai. It was a wonderful place."

Duggan describes China at that time as unlike anywhere else in the world: there were so many new airports being built, new airlines coming to market, and incredible demand for pilot training.

"There was just enormous, enormous opportunity in the aviation sector at that time," he says.

He says that he was working as an aviation consultant in China, including for a start-up airline called Joy Air and for flight schools.

New opportunities for friendships arrived too. Through the Beijing expat scene, he met a man named Nick Coyle, the head of the Australia-China Chamber of Commerce at the time.

Coyle was also the partner of Cheng Lei, who would later be tried in secret, and imprisoned in Beijing for three years for "illegally supplying state secrets overseas", before her surprise release last year.

Coyle remembers first meeting Duggan around 2013 at a regular social drinks function the Australian expat community held in Beijing.

"I just found him to be a nice guy, charming guy," he says. "He kind of had that Boston American sort of politeness, along with the Australian directness."

The two bonded over a shared interest in aviation and discussed Duggan's work in China.

"As I understood, it was to do with what they call in aviation 'crew resource management'. He was doing consulting with some airlines in that area," Coyle says.

Duggan even bought a dive bar in Beijing, which he fitted out with kitsch Australiana merchandise and renamed The Flying Kangaroo. The idea was for it to become the go-to spot for international pilots in town on a layover.

"My overall impression was that Daniel wasn't a flashy guy," he says. "He wasn't a man of significant means. I knew he had quite a big family and lots of responsibilities there. He sort of struck me as a guy who was, you know, getting by."

Nick Coyle remembers learning about the charges against Duggan in a state of disbelief.

"I remember at the time going, 'Daniel — really?' That was my instant reaction. If you'd asked me to name my top 10, my top 20 characters who, if it came out at a later point in time, were perhaps up to no good, he wouldn't have been on the list."

To understand why the US has zeroed in on Daniel Duggan, though, you need to know more about the man who brought him to China in the first place.

The international contact

Su Bin is a Chinese businessman and aviation expert. He speaks six languages. He has a blog on the Chinese social media site Weibo, where he writes prolifically on everything from Top Gun: Maverick to aviation theory and the challenges of learning English.

Daniel and Saffrine describe Su Bin as their one-time business agent who "signed off" on them to be able to get work.

"When you go to a country like China, Vietnam, Indonesia even, you need to have people that are there, to be able to get a working visa," Saffrine says.

Duggan says Su Bin assisted many westerners working in China's aviation space.

"He was a business agent for TFASA and that's where I first was introduced to him."

According to the indictment, Su Bin paid to fly Duggan to China on multiple occasions between 2011 and 2012, ostensibly to do "personal development training" and a motivational speech called The Fighter Pilot's Guide to Mission Success.

It was a speech he says he had given at many corporate gigs before. His wife, Saffrine, says this was what brought him to Sydney on the day they first met in 2011.

US prosecutors say Duggan was paid about $180,000 to deliver these speeches.

Su Bin was the founder of an aviation company called Lode Technology. Around the time the Duggans moved to China, it was the Beijing address of Lode Technology that Duggan nominated as his new place of business on his ASIC forms.

In 2014, Su Bin was arrested in Canada. He was accused of helping Chinese army hackers steal hundreds of thousands of documents related to Boeing's C-17 aircraft and the F-35 and F-22 fighter jets.

Extradited to the US in 2016, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 46 months in a US prison.

Both Daniel and Saffrine say they were shocked by the revelations about Su Bin.

"It was a complete surprise," Duggan says. "He had a business with like 90 employees and several offices all over China."

Soon after they learned the news, Duggan says he was told that the Chinese government had put an exit ban on him, meaning he couldn't leave the country.

"What I believe is that [the Chinese government] believed I had something to do with Su Bin. Like somehow I had given some information that could have got him in trouble, which didn't happen," Duggan says.

The citizenship question

In late 2016, Duggan got a certificate from the American embassy in Beijing that said he had relinquished his US citizenship four years earlier.

He says the timing of getting this certificate wasn't nefarious, it was simply a matter of convenience.

"There was no US consulate in Hobart, right?" he says. "So it wasn't a simple thing — you'd either have to go to Canberra or off to Sydney or something like that, and it just wasn't convenient."

Whether Daniel Duggan was an American citizen or not in 2012 is a key question in this case — one the US argues should be decided after he is extradited.

His citizenship matters because the arms control laws he is accused of breaking only apply to "US persons", such as citizens and permanent residents.

Duggan says he was not an American citizen while working at TFASA in 2012, and thus could not have broken this law.

He points to the certificate he received from the US embassy, which says he relinquished his American citizenship on the day he became an Australian citizen: January 26, 2012.

It didn't become explicitly illegal for Australians to train foreign militaries until 2018.

But the American prosecutors are adamant that Duggan was still a citizen until he got that certificate in Beijing in 2016, four years after he worked at TFASA.

Duggan says this is why he's the only one of the seven alleged co-conspirators in his indictment who is currently in jail.

"That's why I've been singled out," he says. "Because I'm the only one the United States is saying was a US citizen."

USA vs Daniel Duggan

Su Bin pleaded guilty in March 2016, and in November of that year, a grand jury was secretly sworn in to indict Daniel Duggan in Washington DC.

An affidavit sworn by US prosecutors, obtained by Background Briefing, reveals new details about the case against Duggan.

It is clear from this document that a large amount of the evidence against him came from Su Bin's devices, likely after the businessman's arrest.

This includes a 17-page assessment of China's naval aviation training program entitled "DSQ Assessment II — MAR 2011". US prosecutors claim Duggan wrote this assessment, citing that "the metadata identified the author as 'Dan Duggan'".

The affidavit claims the assessment contained observations of China's naval pilot trainees and recommendations on how to improve both the pilot's training and the flight simulators for carrier training. It also allegedly included an evaluation of the Su-33 fighter jet and an "ideal overall training program" that ranged from "Primary Flight School" to "Navy Graduate", which included "Weaponry" and "Air Combat".

When Background Briefing put this allegation to Daniel Duggan, he flatly denied any involvement in the creation of the document.

"I know nothing about that," he says.

"They claim that I was the author of it through metadata, right? But that wasn't where that came from.

"Who knows who's manipulated that metadata to see if that is indeed the case? It certainly wasn't authored by me."

Interestingly, the US also alleges that when that document was authored in 2011, Daniel Duggan was in the proximity of one of China's aircraft carriers, the Liaoning.

Duggan describes this as a "complete nonsense allegation."

"They say I'm in Guangzhou, right? Guangzhou is a river city. There are no aircraft carriers in Guangzhou.

"It's like … saying there's an aircraft carrier on the Parramatta River in Penrith or something, you know? So it's just absurd."

According to contemporaneous BBC reporting, the Liaoning was actually in the city of Dalian in March 2011, about 2,000 kilometres away from Guangzhou, when prosecutors claim Duggan was in the carrier's vicinity.

The carrier was still under construction at the time and it didn't begin sea trials until August of that year.

When Background Briefing put detailed questions about this and other aspects in Daniel Duggan's case to the US Department of Justice, it declined to comment, citing a policy on extradition-related matters.

In late 2022, a warrant was issued against TFASA's COO, Keith Hartley, and the Australian Federal Police raided his home in Adelaide Hills.

A magistrate found there was reasonable grounds to suspect Hartley had provided military training to the Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army between 2018 and 2022, several years after the alleged conspiracy the US claims Daniel Duggan was involved in.

In the 18 months since the raid, Hartley has not been charged with any offence.

Through his lawyers, he denied any wrongdoing.

'They want to scare people'

After Daniel Duggan was arrested in Orange nearly two years ago, his family found themselves at the centre of an international scandal.

The British government announced a crackdown on training foreign militaries, and there have since been reports of pilots from Canada, New Zealand and Germany training Chinese military personnel as well.

In Canberra, Defence Minister Richard Marles ordered an investigation into whether Australian veterans were involved, too.

Even ASIO's director-general Mike Burgess weighed into the saga.

"The bottom line is, they are transferring highly sensitive, privileged and classified know-how to foreign governments that do not share our values or respect the rule of law," the ASIO boss told an audience in Canberra.

"These individuals are lackeys, more 'top tools' than 'top guns'.

The last couple of years have taken a serious toll on Daniel's wife Saffrine and his six kids — both emotionally and financially.

The family has poured more than $800,000 into his legal fight. The US was even able to legally restrain Saffrine from selling a property she owns in Australia.

"That money was for our family and of course for Dan's legal defence," she says.

"I am now a single mother and I can only work part-time. We have lots of kids who actually need more attention from me now than ever. They are showing signs of trauma and stress, which breaks my heart."

Saffrine says she believes the US is trying to make an example out of her husband.

"They want to scare people," she says. "To say, we don't want you to have anything to do with China.

"We don't want you to do business in China. And we are putting a warning out to anyone who's even going to think of it. It's as simple as that, and it's not fair."

In June, the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which consists of Australia, the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, put out a bulletin.

It warned of the Chinese government's attempts to recruit Western pilots. Duggan's case was explicitly referenced as an example of a veteran being prosecuted.

This comes after a decade of growing political tension between the two superpowers.

China's military has ballooned — its naval fleet is now the world's largest — and its ambitions in the South China Sea and Taiwan have become more overt.

Meanwhile, the US, through moves like the AUKUS security pact, has sought to offset China's rise.

A decision looms

Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has not yet decided whether to surrender Daniel Duggan to the US for extradition.

He will weigh final submissions from both parties, before making a decision, which could come any day now.

A spokesperson from his department said: "Mr Duggan's matter will be progressed as quickly as possible and with due regard to the requirements of the extradition framework."

Daniel Duggan says he believes he has become a pawn in the great geopolitical conflict of our time.

"If these test pilots were from New Zealand or from Australia or from the United States or from France or Britain or any other country in the world, I'm certain that I wouldn't be in prison at all right now," he says.

"It's solely because this is a political thing — anything to do with China is considered bad now."

As the interview draws to an end, Daniel Duggan becomes less filtered, his tactfulness falls away.

"People inside the Canberra bubble lose touch with reality," he says. "They get so caught up in the whole political game, in the geopolitical game-playing, that they don't even care what's right or wrong, they just love the sport of it.

"Unfortunately, I'm like the ball of this sport that's getting kicked around. But I want to remind them it's not just me, it's my six kids they're kicking. And my wife, who is nothing but a saint…"

Here, his voice breaks, and it takes a few moments for him to compose himself.

There's one last thing he wants to say.

"I'm Australian, you know, and I'm gutted. I'm absolutely gutted to be in an Australian maximum-security prison with no Australian charges. My Australian family of six kids are being traumatised on behalf of a powerful big foreign power…

"I'm Australian, I'm Australian," he implores. "I'm Australian."

Credits

Reporter: Maddison Connaughton, Benjamin Sveen and Wing Kuang

Graphics: Emma Machan

Digital producer & editor: Benjamin Sveen and Judy Adair

Executive Producer: Fanou Filali

Flying Kangaroo photographs courtesy The Beijinger and Jim Boyce, beijingboyce.com