I'm pretty sure the Chinese government would be capable of planting two or three sleepers in Apple's software division if they decided to.
I'm not interested in conjecture. Like I said, the stuff of movies.
The valley is a pretty incestuous place and people with specific skills are pretty small in number. It doesn’t seem wacky that someone with nation state budget wouldn’t have a network of influence to get someone hired somewhere.
People do it for their friends all of the time.
To that end, I’m amazed it took that long for the FBI to take down the network in the article. The more people who are read in to criminal activity, the risk exponentially increases, as anybody who has been on either end of investigative leverage can tell you. I’m stunned one person in the early days of this scam, particularly when it started involving colorful people, didn’t flip as a bargaining tool for other things they were into.
As tomnipotent said, it’d make a cool movie.
Whatever their plans are, there is some number N of employees who could subvert those plans. It is legitimate to wonder how big that number is, and to note that there is no way for anyone outside of Apple to know.