The discovery of U.S. spy networks in China fueled a decade long global war over data between Beijing and Washington.
Around 2013, U.S. intelligence began noticing an alarming pattern: Undercover CIA personnel, flying into countries in Africa and Europe for sensitive work, were being rapidly and successfully identified by Chinese intelligence, according to three former U.S. officials. The surveillance by Chinese operatives began in some cases as soon as the CIA officers had cleared passport control. Sometimes, the surveillance was so overt that U.S. intelligence officials speculated that the Chinese wanted the U.S. side to know they had identified the CIA operatives, disrupting their missions; other times, however, it was much more subtle and only detected through U.S. spy agencies’ own sophisticated technical countersurveillance capabilities.
… At the CIA, these anomalies “alarmed chiefs of station and division leadership,” said the first former intelligence official. Read More
Daily Archives: December 28, 2020
Tech giants are giving China a Vital Edge in Espionage
U.S. officials say private Chinese firms have been enlisted to process stolen data for their country’s spy agencies.
In 2017, as U.S. President Donald Trump began his trade war with China, another battle raged behind the scenes. The simmering, decade long conflict over data between Chinese and U.S. intelligence agencies was heating up, driven both by the ambitions of an increasingly confident Beijing and by the conviction of key players in the new administration in Washington that China was presenting an economic, political, and national security challenge on a scale the United States had not faced for decades—if ever.
Beijing was giving China hawks in the United States plenty of ammunition. Read More
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