American spies confront a new, formidable China
Investigation by The Wall Street Journal

WORLD  26 December 2023 - 12:35

Beijing’s spycatchers all but blinded the US in China a decade ago when they systematically rounded up a network of Chinese agents working for the CIA. As many as two dozen assets providing information to the US were executed or imprisoned, among them high-ranking Chinese officials.

The CIA is still struggling to rebuild its human espionage capabilities in China, the agency’s top intelligence target, according to interviews with current and former US officials. The gaps leave the US with limited understanding of secret deliberations among Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his inner circle on key security issues such as Taiwan and other topics, the officials said.

“We have no real insight into leadership plans and intentions in China at all,” said a former senior intelligence official who until recently read classified reporting.

Strengthening the human spy network targeted on China is one goal of a titanic, but mostly secret, shift at the CIA and its sister US spy agencies. It comes amid a larger transformation in US security policy away from fighting insurgencies around the world and toward preparing for a possible “great power” conflict with China and Russia.

After two decades of hunting terrorists, the $100 billion-a-year US intelligence community is retraining personnel, redirecting billions in budgets and retooling expensive spy machinery to focus on those potential adversaries.

The pivot hasn’t been simple. Hamas’s surprise October 7 attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have demanded White House attention and intelligence resources, complicating CIA Director William Burns’s drive to ensure China is the top long-term priority. One agency veteran said that handling the two crises, while keeping a sustained focus on Beijing, will test the agency’s agility.

The US, which ceded responsibility for monitoring Palestinian militants to Israel in the years following the September 2001 terrorist attacks and like Israel was blindsided by the Hamas assault, has redirected some intelligence resources to the Israel-Palestinian conflict in recent weeks, officials said. It isn’t publicly known how substantial they are.

The unexpected clash shows how difficult it can be, with finite spying resources, to get the balance right. “The reality is that you don’t have collection resources that you can exploit all over the world,” a former counterterrorism official said.

China, which the Biden administration named as the greatest danger to American security, remains at the top of the CIA’s to-do list, Burns told The Wall Street Journal.

The US government has never publicly acknowledged the loss of its Chinese agents between 2010 and 2012.

Today, US spy satellites closely monitor China’s military deployments and modernization plans, while cyber and eavesdropping tools scoop up vast swaths of Chinese communications. Beyond that, US knowledge of Xi’s plans comes mostly from inference and from parsing his frequent public statements, officials said.

China is a much tougher intelligence target than it was a decade ago, when the agents were lost. Xi’s security-first state employs Orwellian surveillance systems that vastly complicate spy operations inside the country. And US intelligence must track China’s progress in fields as disparate as artificial intelligence and synthetic biology.

The two countries have clashed over American technology restrictions, military maneuvers at sea and in the skies, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China’s weaknesses, notably slowing economic growth and a shrinking population, are another wild card in assessing its future course.

“Unfortunately, China’s goals and objectives are so vast that it really is very difficult to say that we’re doing a great job,” House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Mike Turner said in an interview.

In the early 2000s, CIA analysts began warning frequently about China’s economic growth and military ambitions, former US officials said. Collectively, this stream of classified intelligence reports became known among government insiders as the “Scary China Brief.”

Danny Russel, a former top Obama aide on Asia, said the intelligence was factored into policy discussions and, while valuable, it didn’t predict “that Xi would become the kind of security-obsessed autocrat that he has shown himself to be.”

Xi’s China has aggressively pursued maritime claims in the South China Sea, increasingly harassed Taiwan with military drills and orchestrated repeated cyber hacks to steal secrets and personal data from the US government, healthcare providers, tech giants, defense contractors and others.

China also ramped up its own human espionage, often using social media sites such as LinkedIn to contact and recruit former US intelligence officials. Its successes included Kevin Patrick Mallory, a former CIA officer who had become deeply in debt and sold secrets for cash, including the identities of US intelligence officers due to travel to China. Mallory was convicted in 2018.

In August, the Justice Department revealed the arrest of two US Navy sailors charged with providing military information to China. Both were US naturalized citizens born in China. Wenheng “Thomas” Zhao pleaded guilty to two counts in October. Jinchao “Patrick” Wei pleaded not guilty.

The vast majority of US intelligence on China now comes from electronic snooping—intercepting phone calls, emails and every other form of digital communication, the current and former officials indicated. Such signals intelligence can rarely replace human spies in divining an adversary’s true intentions or weaknesses, officials say.

Recruiting, or even meeting, Chinese agents is more perilous than ever. Beijing’s pervasive surveillance system uses big data analytics to mine feeds from millions of cameras in major cities, combined with armies of human watchers.

“We’ve got to find a way to be able to enhance our ability, with the deployment of new technology by China and other nations, to be able to operate within their countries to gain intelligence,” said Turner, the House Intelligence Committee chairman.

China’s practices extend abroad to third countries, where CIA operatives try to recruit Chinese officials and businessmen. The former senior US official recounted how US intelligence officers in a Latin American country, supposedly operating undercover, were followed by a team of Chinese personnel, who videotaped them as they sat in a restaurant.

In Russia, the CIA has had greater success. It obtained President Vladimir Putin’s secret Ukraine invasion plan, stole and then publicized Kremlin disinformation plots and gave the White House a heads up before Wagner Group chieftain Yevgeny Prigozhin launched his mutiny in June.

China’s Ministry of State Security said in August it had arrested two Chinese nationals spying for the CIA, both of whom had been recruited outside China. If accurate, the revelations illustrate both the continued US spying push and China’s aggressive counterespionage campaign.

Burns, at a July security forum in Aspen, Colo., said the CIA is recruiting well-placed Chinese officials and businesspeople to spy for Washington. “We’ve made progress and we’re working very hard over recent years to ensure that we have a strong human intelligence capability to complement what we can acquire through other methods,” he said.

There are potential openings in China, too, intelligence officials say, in the growing disaffection with Xi’s autocratic leadership and a creaky economy.

“They are a hard target,” one of the intelligence officials said, “not an impossible one.”

Caliber.Az