U.S. authorities were sitting on a sensitive secret last fall when Canada detained a top Huawei Technologies Co. executive on charges that her company misled banks about the company's business dealings in Iran.
Two months earlier, the U.S. had arrested another Chinese national on similar suspicions and was holding her at a grim jail in Washington. An employee of an unidentified Chinese technology company, she had been nabbed on vacation in California.
The employee, Liu "Willow" Yang, 29, ultimately pleaded guilty and went back to China. But unlike the legal spectacle in Canada over the extradition and prosecution of Huawei's chief technology officer, the Yang matter remains largely under wraps in the U.S.