CIA ups China spy drive with Mandarin videos for disillusioned officials

Nevin Al Sukari - Sana'a - The move comes after the CIA in October launched a drive to recruit new informants in China, Iran and North Korea by posting instructions online on how to securely contact the agency, following what it said was successful efforts to enlist Russians. — Reuters pic

WASHINGTON, May 2 — The CIA yesterday rolled out two Chinese-language videos aimed at enticing officials in China to leak secrets to the US, the latest public effort by the intelligence agency to ramp up human intelligence gathering on Washington’s strategic rival.

The move comes after the CIA in October launched a drive to recruit new informants in China, Iran and North Korea by posting instructions online on how to securely contact the agency, following what it said was successful efforts to enlist Russians.

The CIA is confident that the videos are penetrating China’s “Great Firewall” internet restrictions and reaching the intended audience.

“If it weren’t working, we wouldn’t be making more videos,” a CIA official told Reuters, adding that China was the agency’s foremost intelligence priority in a “truly generational competition” between the US and China.

The two short videos posted to the CIA’s social media accounts depict fictional scenes in which a senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official and a more junior government worker with access to classified information become disillusioned with China’s system and approach the CIA.

The videos appear aimed at tapping into possible discontent in the Chinese government and senior echelons of the CCP, as Beijing has purged top officials and military leaders, some considered close allies of President Xi Jinping himself.

“As I rise within the party, I watch those above me being discarded like worn-out shoes, but now I realise that my fate was just as precarious as theirs,” the narrator says in Mandarin Chinese in one of the videos as the camera shows empty seats around a lavish dinner table.

“My family’s fate cannot rest in their hands,” the man says before the video depicts him contacting the CIA using a tablet computer. It ends with the CIA logo and dark web contact details for the agency.

The CIA official said that the US was not just interested in counterintelligence, but was also seeking information on advanced science, military and cyber technology, valuable economic data, and China’s foreign policy secrets.

China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the videos, but it has previously accused the US of waging a systematic disinformation campaign against China, and said any attempts to drive a wedge between the Chinese people and the CCP would fail.

US intelligence agencies said in March that China remains the top military and cyber threat to the US, noting that China has the ability to hit the United States with conventional weapons, compromise US infrastructure through cyberattacks and target its assets in space, and that Beijing seeks to displace the US as the top AI power by 2030.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe said no adversary had ever posed a more formidable challenge to the US than the CCP.

“It is intent on dominating the world economically, militarily, and technologically,” he said in a statement. “Our agency must continue responding to this threat with urgency, creativity, and grit, and these videos are just one of the ways we are doing this.” — Reuters