A former Intel official was approached to write an article for a publication he never heard of, offered above market rates and told he would get more if he skipped his mandatory security review.
How China Spies
Last year, I received an unsolicited request on LinkedIn from a man I will call Dr. Lee. I had just left government service as the special advisor for North Korea and senior advisor for Korea policy in the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense. I was not then the established columnist and think tank contributor that I am now.
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China’s Espionage: Methods and Goals
My experiences prompted me to read Chinese Espionage: Operations and Tactics by the pioneering Nicholas Eftimiades. The author does yeoman’s work and offers the free world an important service by painstakingly combing through publicly available information on how the PRC operates its vast foreign intelligence apparatus. He creates a monograph that every U.S. business professional and member of Congress should read – as should any person concerned about free markets and fair competition. I read it in one evening. It is only 56 pages, but that is more than enough. Eftimiades is trying to sound an alarm, not win a Man Booker Prize.
Analyzing 595 cases over a 10-year period, and using disparate data including U.S. Department of Justice filings, asset control briefs, import/export applications, and foreign government information, Eftimiades presents a compelling narrative of just how pervasive PRC intelligence is, what are its global goals, and how it has already co-opted private industry to advance its agenda.
We should all intuitively expect well-known organizations such as the PRC Ministry of State Security (MSS), Central Military Commission Joint Staff Intelligence Bureau, and United Front Work Department engage in espionage. But Eftimiades shares more alarming revelations.
For example, the author makes a compelling case that ostensibly private industry in China – not just state-owned enterprises – can task PRC intelligence to collect foreign trade secrets, to advance both the company’s bottom line and the greater economic glory of China. One can see why, because any sensitive or proprietary information collected by the state would also be made available to other industries.
The implications are staggering. The United States and many other advanced republics do not protect private networks, nor do they make intelligence assets available to private corporations. The U.S. government does make specific network security safeguards a condition of working on a sensitive project, but it does not act as an operational arm of those businesses’ bottom line. In the PRC, Eftimiades shows, clandestine state power is made available to businesses for use against private companies and individuals.
Compare this to the well-documented cases of U.S. businesses such as Google not wanting to assist the U.S. military, while at the same time enabling Chinese censorship.
Eftimiades’ research shows that there is a near equal distribution of identified espionage cases between the “four clusters” of PRC espionage: MSS (16%), state-owned enterprises (20%), the PLA (19%), and private corporations (23%). Topic-wise, dual-use and military technology make up around 40% of the targets. The rest are related in some way to intellectual property theft.