When I told
William Evanina, America’s top counterintelligence official, Wright’s story
about the cab driver in Monterey, he replied: “Of course.”
Spy rings
operating out of taxis are relatively unoriginal, he told me, and have long
been an issue around U.S. military and intelligence installations. An FBI and
CIA veteran who is now the director of the National Counterintelligence and
Security Center, Evanina has a suspicious mind—and perhaps one of the country’s
worst Uber ratings. He sees the risk of intelligence collection and hidden
cameras in any hired car, he told me, and if a driver ever tries to make small
talk, he immediately shuts it down.
Knowing
someone’s background can help an intelligence agency build a profile for
potential recruitment. The person might have medical bills piling up, a parent
in debt, a sibling in jail, or an infidelity that exposes him or her to
blackmail. What really worries Evanina is that so much of this information can
now be obtained online, legally and illegally. People can ignore Uber drivers
all they want, but a good hacker or even someone savvy at mining social media
might be able to track down targets’ financial records, their political views,
profiles of their family members, and their upcoming travel plans. “It makes it
so damn easy,” he said.
Security
breaches happen with alarming regularity. Capital One announced in
July that a data breach had exposed about 100 million people in America. During
one of my conversations with Wright, she mused that whatever information the
old man in the taxi might have wanted to glean from her, all that and much more
may have been revealed in the 2015 breach of the U.S. Office of Personnel
Management. In that sophisticated attack, widely believed to have been carried
out by state-sponsored Chinese hackers, an enormous batch of data was stolen,
including detailed information the government collects as part of the process
of approving security clearances. The stolen information contained “probing
questions about an applicant’s personal finances, past substance abuse, and
psychiatric care,” according to Wired, as well as
“everything from lie detector results to notes about whether an applicant
engages in risky sexual behavior.”
Russia, the
U.S. adversary that is often included with China in discussions of “near peer”
conflict, has a modus operandi when it comes to recruiting spies that is
similar to America’s, Evanina said. While some of their intelligence efforts,
such as election interference, are loud and aggressive and seemingly
unconcerned with being discovered, Russians are careful and targeted when
trying to turn a well-placed asset. Russia tends to have veteran intelligence
operatives make contact in person and proceed with care and patience. “Their
worst-case scenario is getting caught,” Evanina told me. “They take pride in
their HUMINT operations. They’re very targeted. They take extra time to
increase the percentage of success. Whereas the Chinese don’t care.” (This
doesn’t mean that the Chinese can’t also be targeted and discreet when needed,
he added.)
“What you
have is an intelligence officer sitting in Beijing,” he said. “And he can send
out 30,000 emails a day. And if he gets 300 replies, that’s a high-yield,
low-risk intelligence operation.” Concerning those who have left government for
the private sector—and who sometimes keep their clearance to continue doing
sensitive government work—it can be hard to know where to draw the line.
Evanina said China will sometimes wait years to target former officials: “Your
Spidey sense goes down.” But “your memory is not erased”—that is, they’ve still
got the information the Chinese want.
Often,
Chinese spies don’t even have to look too hard. Many of those who have left
U.S. intelligence jobs reveal on their LinkedIn profiles which agencies they
worked for and the countries and topics on which they focused. If they still
have a government clearance, they might advertise that too. Buried in the questionnaire
Evanina filled out for his Senate confirmation is a question asking whether he
had any plans for a career after government. “I currently have no plans
subsequent to completing government service,” he wrote. When I asked him about
this, he admitted that this is becoming less common among intelligence
officials his age. (He’s 52.) “All of my friends are leaving like crazy now
because they have kids in college,” he said. “The money is [better]. It’s hard
to say no.”
If a former
intelligence officer lands a job at a prominent government contractor, such as
Booz Allen Hamilton or DynCorp International, he or she can expect to be well
compensated. But others find themselves in less lucrative posts, or try to
strike out on their own. Evanina told me that Chinese intelligence operatives
pose online as Chinese professors, think-tank experts, or executives. They
usually propose a trip to China as a business opportunity. “Especially the ones
who have retired from the CIA, DIA, and are now contractors—they have to make
the bucks,” Evanina said. “And a lot of times that’s in China. And they get
compromised.”
Once a
target is in China, Chinese operatives might try to get the person to start
passing over sensitive information in degrees. The first request could be for
information that doesn’t seem like a big deal. But by then the trap is set.
“When they get that [first] envelope, it’s being photographed. And then they
can blackmail you. And then you’re being sucked in,” Evanina said. “One
document becomes 10 documents becomes 15 documents. And then you have to
rationalize that in your mind: I am not a spy, because they’re forcing me to
do this.”
In the
cases of Mallory, Hansen, and Lee, Evanina said, the lure wasn’t ideology. It
was money. Money was also the lure in two similar cases, in which suspects were
convicted of lesser charges than espionage. Both apparently began their
relationship with Chinese intelligence officers while still employed in
sensitive U.S. government jobs.
In 2016, Kun Shan Chun, a veteran FBI employee who had a
top-secret security clearance, pleaded guilty to acting as an agent of China.
Prosecutors said that while working for the agency in New York
he sent his Chinese handler, “at minimum, information regarding the FBI’s
personnel, structure, technological capabilities, general information regarding
the FBI’s surveillance strategies, and certain categories of surveillance
targets.” And in April, Candace Claiborne, a former State Department
employee, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States. According
to the criminal complaint, Claiborne, who had served in a
number of posts overseas including China, and held a top-secret security
clearance, did not report her contacts with suspected Chinese agents, who
provided her and a co-conspirator with “tens of thousands of dollars in gifts and
benefits,” including New Year’s gifts, international travel and vacations,
fashion-school tuition, rent, and cash payments. In exchange, Claiborne
provided copies of State Department documents and analysis, prosecutors said.
Evanina’s
office in Bethesda, Maryland, features a so-called Wall of Shame, on which hang
the photographs of dozens of convicted American traitors—a testament to the
struggles that have always plagued the U.S. intelligence community. The Cold
War, for example, was marked by disastrous leaks from people such as the CIA
officer Aldrich Ames and the FBI agent Robert Hanssen. Larry Chin, a CIA
translator, was arrested in 1985 on charges of selling classified information
to China over the course of three decades. That came during the so-called Year of the Spy, as the FBI made a series of
high-profile arrests of U.S. government officials spying for the Soviet Union,
Israel, and even Ghana. The Wall of Shame is currently being renovated, and
when it’s unveiled in the fall, it will feature several new faces.
Whenever a
current or former U.S. intelligence officer has been turned, it takes years to
assess the full repercussions. “We have to mitigate that damage for sometimes a
decade,” Evanina said.
Two decades
ago, Chinese intelligence officers were largely seen as relatively amateurish,
even sloppy, a former U.S. intelligence official who spent years focusing on
China told me. Usually, their English was poor. They were clumsy. They used
predictable covers. Chinese military intelligence officers masquerading as
civilians often failed to hide a military bearing and could come across as
almost laughably uptight. Typically their main targets tended to be of Chinese
descent. In recent years, however, Chinese intelligence officers have become
more sophisticated—they can come across as suave, personable, even genteel.
Their manners can be fluid. Their English is usually good. “Now this is the
norm,” the former official said, speaking with me on condition of anonymity due
to security concerns. “They really have learned quite a bit and grown up.”
Rodney
Faraon, a former senior analyst at the CIA, told me that the Mallory and Hansen
cases show just how far China’s espionage services have come. “They’ve
broadened their tactics to go beyond relatively easy targets, from recruiting
among the ethnically Chinese community to a much more diverse set of human
assets,” he said. “In a sense, they’ve become more traditional.”
In his
recently published book, To Catch a Spy: The Art of
Counterintelligence, James Olson, a veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service
and its former chief of counterintelligence, breaks down the basics of China’s
espionage services and how they operate. The Ministry of State Security (MSS),
its main service, focuses on overseas intelligence. The Ministry of Public
Security focuses on domestic intelligence, but also has agents abroad. The
People’s Liberation Army, which focuses on military intelligence, “has defined
its role broadly and has competed with the MSS in a wide range of economic,
political, and technological intelligence collection operations overseas, in
addition to its more traditional military targeting.” Olson adds that “the PLA
has been responsible for the bulk” of China’s cyberespionage, though the MSS
may also be expanding in this realm. Both the MSS and PLA, meanwhile, “make
regular use of diplomatic, commercial, journalistic, and student covers for
their operations in the United States. They aggressively use Chinese travelers
to the US, especially business representatives, academics, scientists,
students, and tourists, to supplement their intelligence collection. US
intelligence experts have been amazed at how voracious the Chinese have been in
their collection activity.”
Olson notes
that China has “always been adept at espionage,” but writes with a kind of awe
at the extent of its efforts today. “If I were to start my CIA career all over
again, I would try to get into our China program, learn Mandarin, and become a
Chinese counterintelligence specialist … Our top priority in US
counterintelligence today—and into the future—must be to stop or to drastically
curtail China’s spying.”
If veteran
American spies are vulnerable to Chinese espionage, U.S. companies may be
faring even worse. In some cases, targeting the private sector and targeting
U.S. national security can mix. A former U.S. security official, who now works
for a prominent American aviation company that is involved in highly sensitive
U.S. government projects, told me that the company had a suspected intelligence
collector linked to China in its midst. “I would say that he’s had tradecraft
training,” this person said, speaking anonymously due to an ongoing
law-enforcement investigation.
The former
security official was hired by the company to monitor such threats, and
initially found the lack of effective prevention measures and training at the
company jarring. “When I walked in and got the briefing here, I thought it was
a joke ... Now we do take some measures to protect against [insider threats],
but in a sense it’s fox in a henhouse,” this person said. “We as an industry
are woefully inadequate at protecting ourselves from a foreign-intelligence
threat.”
In a sense,
going after American spies and government officials is fair game in the
intelligence world. The U.S. does the same against the Chinese. “Intelligence
operations are universal, with every country—other than a few isolated
island-states who are concerned mainly with the danger of approaching
cyclones—engaging in them, to one degree or another,” Loch K. Johnson, a
professor emeritus at the University of Georgia, the author of Spy Watching:
Intelligence Accountability in the United States, and one of America’s
foremost intelligence scholars, told me in an email. He added that while almost
every nation fields capabilities to both collect information about its
adversaries and defend itself against espionage, a much smaller number have
meaningful networks for covert action, which he described as “secret
propaganda; political and economic manipulation; even paramilitary activities.”
Both America and China count themselves among this group.
“The United
States used propaganda, political, and economic ops during the Cold War and
(somewhat less aggressively) since. China returns [the] favor,” Johnson said.
“Both are major powers and have a full complement of intelligence capabilities,
aimed at each other and other significant targets around the world. This means
that the United States (like China in reverse) is constantly trying to learn
what China is doing when it comes to military, economic, political, and cultural
activities, since they may impinge upon U.S. interests in Asia and elsewhere.”
To that end, the U.S. uses signals intelligence, geospatial intelligence, and
HUMINT, Johnson said, “all aided by a diligent searching through the available
(and voluminous) [open-source intelligence] materials for background.”
But he
noted a key difference between the two countries: China’s aggressive approach
to economic espionage. These Chinese efforts are partly what have prompted U.S.
officials and politicians to turn to a newly popular refrain
that China’s not playing by the rules. U.S. officials insist that American
intelligence agencies do not target foreign companies with the aim of helping
domestic ones. (The line between American spying on foreign companies to
advance the country’s economic and strategic interests and whether that spying
helps U.S. companies can be blurry.) “What we do not do, as we have said many
times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets
of foreign companies on behalf of—or give intelligence we collect to—U.S.
companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their
bottom line,” James Clapper, then the director of national intelligence, said in 2013, amid revelations that the NSA had
spied on foreign companies.
Dennis
Wilder, who retired as the CIA’s deputy assistant director for East Asia and
the Pacific in 2016, told me that the Chinese approach to espionage is defined
by the fact that its leaders have long seen America as an existential threat.
“This is a constant theme in Chinese intelligence—that we’re not just out to
steal secrets, we’re not just out to protect ourselves, that the real American
goal is the end of Chinese Communism, just as that was the goal with the Soviet
Union,” he said.
Wilder, who
still travels to the country as the director of an initiative for U.S.-China
dialogue at Georgetown University, told me that Chinese officials regularly
bring up past American covert action such as the CIA’s ill-fated support for
the independence movement in Tibet beginning in the 1950s, and its infiltration
of agents into China via Taiwan. And they still see an American hand in events
such as the protests in Hong Kong today. “So we’re all sitting here scratching
our heads and saying, ‘Do they really believe we’re behind Hong Kong? And the
answer is, yes they do. They really believe that the fundamental American goal
is the destruction and demise of Chinese Communism,” he said. “Now, if you
believe that the other guy is bent on your destruction, then it’s kind of
anything goes. So for the Chinese, stealing, espionage, cyberespionage against
American corporations for the good of the Chinese state, are just part and
parcel of the need for survival against this very formidable enemy.”
China
denies that it is spying against the U.S. on the scale alleged by
American officials. When presented with the details of this story, a
spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., Fang Hong, said via
email that she had no knowledge of the cases involving Mallory, Hansen, Lee,
and others. “China has always fully respected the sovereignty of all countries
and does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries,” she said.
Fang also disparaged U.S. attempts to root out Chinese spies, citing a quote
commonly attributed to a great American writer. U.S. views on Chinese
espionage, she remarked, “remind me of what Mark Twain said: ‘To a man with a
hammer, everything looks like a nail.’”
Fang
continued, “U.S. officials’ accusations against Chinese students and
researchers are groundless. Guided by the zero-sum-game mentality and ill
intentions to contain China, people and institutions in the U.S. have been fabricating
such absurd pretexts as ‘espionage’ as an excuse to harass them and make
groundless allegations.”
She added
that innocent people had been framed in some cases and that “such false
accusations severely undermine China-U.S. people-to-people exchanges, and
scientific and technological cooperation.”
The litany
of cases the DOJ has brought over the past year or so underscores the
comprehensive quality of China’s espionage efforts: a former General Electric engineer charged with theft of trade secrets
related to gas and steam turbines (he has pleaded not guilty); an American and a Chinese citizen
charged with attempting to steal trade secrets related
to plastics (the American has pleaded not guilty and the Chinese defendant, as
of March 2019, had yet to appear in a U.S. court); a state-owned Chinese
chip-making company and a Taiwanese company that makes semiconductors charged
with stealing from an American competitor (the chipmaker has pleaded not guilty); two Chinese hackers charged with targeting intellectual property (China denied the “slanderous” economic espionage charges).
In Senate testimony in July, FBI Director Christopher
Wray said that the agency has “probably about 1,000 plus investigations all
across the country involving attempted theft of U.S. intellectual property …
almost all leading back to China.”
Demers, the
national-security official at the Justice Department, told me that China uses
the same tactics and even some of the same intelligence officers in its
espionage efforts against America’s private sector. “What it shows is how
seriously the Chinese government takes their intellectual-property-theft
efforts, because they’re really using the crown jewels of their intelligence
community and their most sophisticated and well-honed tradecraft,” he said.
Some of the
trade secrets China is accused of stealing seem simply aimed to help a specific
company or industry. Often, however, the distinction between a Chinese company
and the Chinese state is not clear-cut. Chinese law mandates that all
corporations cooperate with the government on national security. This was one concern U.S. officials cited after announcing
indictments against the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei earlier this
year; the Trump administration has banned U.S. companies from doing business
with it. (Huawei has pleaded not guilty to attempted U.S. trade-theft
allegations.)
Demers told
me that China uses economic espionage as a form of “R&D,” or research and
development. “They also have very talented, smart people who are using their
resources in legitimate ways, which is, I think, some of the frustration that
folks have right now—that you could do this differently. You could fight fair,
right? You’re not the 80-pound weakling who has to throw dirt in somebody’s eye
to get ahead.”
The open
business climate between America and China—the sort of climate that did not
exist between America and the Soviet Union during the Cold War—makes addressing
Chinese espionage trickier: China is both a rival and a top trade partner. The
economic and research relationship between the two countries benefits them
both. At the same time, Chinese immigrants and visitors to America risk being
unfairly targeted if U.S. officials fail to find the right balance, which would
cast a chill on legitimate exchange between the two countries while raising the
specter of American overreactions during past struggles, from the Cold War to
the War on Terror. As U.S. officials warn about the Chinese espionage threat
and the U.S. intelligence community reorients to face it, they must be careful
not to undermine the American values—openness, civil liberty, enterprise—that
remain perhaps the country’s greatest advantage over China.
Rodney
Faraon, who worked on the President’s Daily Briefing team at the CIA during the
Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and is now a partner at
Crumpton Group, a business intelligence firm, told me that it will take a major
push not just from America’s intelligence agencies but from the U.S. government
overall to find the right strategy. And despite the Trump administration’s
combative stance on trade negotiations and other issues, this has yet to
happen. “The approach must be whole of government and must involve the private
sector,” Faraon said. “The Chinese use and value intelligence better than we
do, seeing its applicability in nearly every aspect of private and public
life—military, social, commercial. We have been slow to recognize this for
ourselves.”
***Mike
Giglio is a staff writer at The Atlantic, covering intelligence and
national security. He is the author of Shatter the Nations: ISIS and the
War for the Caliphate. He was
previously based in Istanbul as correspondent for BuzzFeed, reporting on the
wars in Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine.