DD: For Airloss: FBI cracks down on China's elusive army of amateur spies
By Francis Harris in Washington
(Filed: 11/08/2005)
The FBI is deploying hundreds of new agents across America to crack down on spying by a small army of Chinese agents who are stealing information designed to kick-start high-tech military and business programmes.
The new counter-intelligence strategy reflects growing alarm at the damage being done by spies hidden among the 700,000 Chinese visitors entering the US each year.
"China is the biggest [espionage] threat to the US today," David Szady, the assistant director of the FBI's counter-intelligence division, told the Wall Street Journal.
Officers said the campaign to close down China's wide-ranging espionage effort was now one of the major intelligence priorities after the struggle against terrorism.
But while the espionage effort resembles that against the threat from communist Russia, it has been made far more difficult by the sheer number of Chinese nationals in the US and by linguistic and cultural differences that help insulate Chinese agents from detection.
One of the biggest problems confronting American counter-intelligence officers is the diffuse nature of the threat; espionage is generally carried out by amateur agents working for Chinese intelligence and for the country's burgeoning business sector.
T Van Magers, the FBI official in charge of the agency's Chinese programme until 2002, said: "The persons who collect intelligence are often not traditionally trained spies." Many are simply told to send back to China anything they deem to be of interest, he told the television channel PBS, largely neutralising the old Cold War technique of tracking a foreign espionage agent to uncover an operation.
The FBI estimates that more than 3,000 "front companies" have been established by Chinese nationals in the US specifically to purloin military and economic secrets illegally.
"They can work on so many levels that China may prove more difficult to contain than the Russian threat," said Mr Szady, a veteran of the FBI's shadow war with the KGB.
According to Mr Magers, the system used by Chinese spies is sophisticated and effective. Beijing appears to be willing to "send a lot of sources out to get small bits of information, and then to reassemble it back in China".
The new emphasis on China is driven in part by a fear that the US may have over-emphasised the threat from terrorists at the expense of monitoring a possible threat from a fast-developing China.
Congressmen reacted angrily recently when a state-owned Chinese firm attempted to buy the American oil company Unocal, forcing a Chinese retreat.
The defence department has also sounded the alarm over the build up of Chinese military capabilities, especially the proliferation of "carrier killing" technologies such as cruise missiles. These would present a severe threat to any American attempt to come to the aid of Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.
The Weekly Standard, the influential neo-conservative journal, recently suggested that America's stance towards China was too soft.
China had failed to use its leverage with North Korea to end Pyongyang's nuclear programme; refused to abide by human rights and refugee conventions it had signed; had a poor record on missile non-proliferation; had been browbeating Japan; had been obstructionist on policies with Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Burma; and had threatened to use military force in Taiwan.
American needed to toughen up, it suggested.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
