Ex-Navy sailor pleads guilty in alleged plot to attack Great Lakes Naval Station, downtown Chicago

NORTH CHICAGO, Ill. (WLS) -- A former Navy sailor pleaded guilty in federal court to plotting to attack the Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois.

Xuanyu Harry Pang, 38, of North Chicago, pleaded guilty to conspiring and attempting to willfully injure and destroy national defense material, national defense premises, and national defense utilities, with the intent to injure, interfere with, and obstruct the national defense of the United States, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

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Pang, a naturalized citizen originally from China, is said to have surveilled Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago as a new recruit, as well as Michigan Avenue, Chicago-area train stations and more as part of a terror plot.

The potential catastrophe at Naval Station Great Lakes, as well as the plotted attacks on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, were thwarted by the FBI in 2022 when Pang was arrested.

The case was just unsealed today after Pang agreed to plead guilty.

After reviewing the case, ABC7 Chief Legal Analyst Gil Soffer said, "This is a conspiracy to not just do harm locally, but to commit what looks to be, you know, serious acts of terrorism and multiple acts of terrorism."

According to court records, Pang, through another unnamed person in Colombia who is only identified as "Individual A", met a confidential FBI source in 2022 who claimed to be affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ("IRGC") Quds Force.

The source informed Pang that he wanted to commit a terror attack in the Chicago area to avenge the death of Qasem Soleimani, a commander of the IRGC Quds Force who was killed by the U.S. military in 2020.

Eventually, the source connected Pang with a covert FBI employee who was posing as an affiliate of the Quds Force.

Pang, the unnamed "Individual A" and the covert FBI employee all communicated through encrypted messages about possible targets for the attack while Pang was stationed at the Naval Station Great Lakes, court records show.

Pang personally met with the undercover FBI employee three times in the fall of 2022, with Pang showing the employee photos and videos on his phone from inside the Naval Station, as well as along Michigan Avenue at one of the meetings, as possible places to attack.

Pang was recorded during one of those meetings showing the FBI agent images of Michigan Avenue and saying, "You guys are looking for max damage, right?"

Soffer said Pang's motivation behind plotting the terror attack isn't clear in the court records.

"It's not obvious, from what we can see publicly, how [Pang] became radicalized," Soffer said. "We do see that he was doing it, at least in part, for the money. That's the oldest inducement ever for betraying one's country."

Court documents show Pang planned to obtain radioactive polonium and provided a cell phone he believed could be used as a detonator in what may have been a plan to create a dirty bomb.

Pang also obtained military uniforms for potential attackers to use to get onto the Great Lakes Naval Station base, investigators said.

In one recorded exchange through an encrypted messaging app that was included in the charging documents, Pang requested to be paid in Bitcoin because, "It is simply not safe for me or you to be carrying that much cash around. This is Chicago, people gets (sic) robbed every day."

Pang also said he would travel to Wisconsin to buy automatic weapons.

"The government built this case in the classic way. They used an undercover informant, of course, unbeknownst to the defendant," Soffer said.

"But what we see here, though, is, in a way, more acts and more specific harmful acts that were taken by the defendant toward the conspiracy than we might typically see," Soffer explained. "It's not just phone calls with an informant. It's providing a phone he thought would be a detonator. It's providing uniforms so that people could come onto the base surreptitiously and wreak havoc."

The ABC7 I-Team contacted Pang's attorney but did not hear back.

Pang is being held without bond and is scheduled to be sentenced on May 27, 2025.

The conviction is punishable by a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison, and Pang is also facing a term of supervised release for the remainder of his life.