Because the U.S. deployed its B-2 Spirit bombers to vaporize Iran’s underground nuclear websites in a high-stakes precision strike, a chilling echo stirred half a world away.
On a barren airstrip in western China, a ghostly struggle machine—eerily related in form and scale to the B-2—rolled into view. It wasn’t simply mimicry. It was theft, practically twenty years within the making—facilitated by an excellent Indian-American engineer who as soon as held the Pentagon’s deepest secrets and techniques within the palm of his hand.
On Might 14, 2025, new satellite tv for pc imagery captured by The Battle Zone revealed a flying-wing stealth plane parked at a categorised check facility close to Malan, Xinjiang—one in every of China’s most secretive military-industrial websites. With its large 52-meter wingspan, tailless design, and signature bat-wing silhouette, the plane seemed unmistakably like America’s B-2 Spirit stealth bomber.
The timing raised eyebrows—but it surely’s the backstory that turns this right into a geopolitical thriller.
Almost twenty years earlier, in 2005, FBI brokers raided a lavish $3.5 million cliffside villa in Haiku, Maui. Their goal: Noshir Gowadia, a Mumbai-born propulsion engineer who had performed a key position in designing the B-2’s ultra-secret exhaust system—a marvel of engineering that allowed the bomber to evade radar and infrared detection alike.
Generally known as “Blueberry Milkshake” inside Northrop’s vaults, Gowadia was greater than a cog within the machine; he was one in every of its inventors.
What brokers present in his dwelling would later shake the U.S. intelligence neighborhood: lots of of paperwork marked categorised, detailed schematics of stealth nozzles, and electronic mail information tying him to Chinese language authorities operatives.
Gowadia had taken a number of clandestine journeys to Chengdu and Shenzhen—cities deeply embedded in China’s military-industrial community—the place he introduced Chinese language officers with powerpoints explaining how one can make cruise missiles disappear from radar and infrared sensors. In return, he was paid over $110,000, routed via offshore accounts and Swiss banks.
On the time, U.S. prosecutors warned that Gowadia’s leaks might kind the blueprint for a next-generation Chinese language stealth weapon. They had been proper.
The plane noticed in Xinjiang this Might is believed to be a high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) stealth drone—probably a testbed for applied sciences meant for the long-rumored H-20 bomber, China’s reply to the B-2. Malan’s newly constructed hangars and hardened shelters, its proximity to nuclear infrastructure, and the craft’s presence all recommend that is no prototype. That is the beginning of operational deployment.
Although China first unveiled the H-20 undertaking in 2016, it remained vaporware—talked about in briefings, teased in CGI, however by no means seen. That modified this month. The drone’s dimensions—practically matching the B-2’s 52.4-meter wingspan—and its flying-wing design, with no vertical stabilizers and minimal warmth signature, scream “stolen playbook.”
And that playbook got here from a person who as soon as stated, “The complete geometry [of the B-2 exhaust] got here from me.”
Now serving a 32-year sentence within the supermax jail at Florence, Colorado, Gowadia confessed in his closing assertion to the FBI: “What I did was espionage and treason… I shared navy secrets and techniques with the PRC.”
Beijing didn’t simply reverse-engineer scrap metallic from downed NATO jets. It reverse-engineered belief—exploiting ego, cash, and a grudge.
As B-2s thundered via Iranian skies and Chinese language ghosts stir in Xinjiang, the brand new Chilly Battle isn’t simply being fought in airspace. It’s enjoying out throughout many years, with blueprints stolen in silence and struggle machines born from betrayal.
