by David Wise
The MSS is only the latest intelligence apparatus of a nation that is hardly a newcomer to espionage operations. China has been in the spy business for some twenty-five hundred years. Around 400 B.C., Sun Tzu, the general and military strategist, is credited with writing the classic treatise Ping-fa, or The Art of War. In a chapter entitled "Employment of Secret Agents," Sun Tzu describes five kinds of spies that are remarkably close to those still plying their trade in the twenty-first century.
Sun Tzu's typology includes "agents in place" (he calls them native, or inside, agents), double agents, deception agents, expendable agents (who may be killed if their role in passing false information is discovered), and penetration agents. A clever spymaster, Sun Tzu writes, may employ all five types simultaneously, much like a fisherman who uses a casting net, pulling in his catch by a single cord connected to the other strands.
Mao Zedong and the other modern Chinese leaders of Communist China borrowed from Ping-fa many of the tactics they used to fight the Japanese and then the Chinese Nationalists. Sun Tzu emphasized that it was supremely important to know the enemy's forces, to have accurate advance intelligence. "Know the enemy and know yourself," he wrote, "and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat."
In the twentieth century, Kang Sheng was the sinister and powerful spymaster who helped Mao Zedong gain and maintain his power. Born into the family of a wealthy landowner in Shandong Province, Kang joined the Communist Party at age twenty-five and was trained in Moscow in intelligence and security. He became a key member of Mao's inner circle, and by 1937, the evidence suggests, he had become chief of intelligence. A thin man with thick, round glasses and a pencil mustache, Kang was feared, and with good reason, since he was both powerful and ruthless. Kang supported Mao in the chaotic Cultural Revolution but died in 1975 before its backers, the so-called Gang of Four, were arrested and tried.
Kang Sheng, Jia Chunwang, and their fellow spymasters have developed a uniquely Chinese approach to spycraft, and to the penetration of America's crucial military and espionage secrets. The point is best illustrated by an anecdote that has long circulated inside the counterintelligence division of the FBI about a concept known as "a thousand grains of sand." Paul Moore, the former senior China analyst for the bureau, has often used the story to illustrate the belief that the Chinese gather intelligence differently from the Russians and other countries.
As Moore tells it, "If a beach was an espionage target, the Russians would send in a sub, frogmen would steal ashore in the dark of night and with great secrecy collect several buckets of sand and take them back to Moscow.
"The US would target the beach with satellites and produce reams of data.
"The Chinese would send in a thousand tourists, each assigned to collect a single grain of sand. When they returned, they would be asked to shake out their towels. And they would end up knowing more about the sand than anyone else."
There is an element of truth to the tale. Unlike China, Russia and the United States employ many of the same traditional methods to spy. Even their headquarters are the mirror image of each other. During the Soviet era, Lubianka, the KGB's headquarters and infamous prison cells in Moscow's Dzerzhinsky Square, was well known, but the KGB's foreign spies were housed in a modern complex in Yasenevo, in a wooded area off the Moscow ring road. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the KGB's foreign espionage arm became the SVR, and the SVR headquarters remained in Yasenevo.
The buildings bear a remarkable resemblance to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Like the CIA, the Russian spies are out in the woods, away from the capital. Its officers call their headquarters the les, meaning "the forest," or "the Russian Langley."
The two countries use similar espionage tradecraft. For example, the Soviets, and now the Russians, typically assign most of their intelligence officers to embassies around the world under diplomatic cover. The CIA does the same.
Like the CIA, Russian intelligence officers under embassy cover attempt to recruit agents, individuals in the host country who have access to military, intelligence, or diplomatic secrets. Usually, the agents are paid for their services. They may betray their country for a variety of reasons; for money, because they feel their talents are undervalued, for ideological or other reasons, or a combination of motives.
When an agent is recruited, the intelligence officer, or IO, faces the problem of how to communicate with the agent. In the wiretap age, telephone and e-mail are hardly secure modes of contact. So various methods have been developed to allow spies and their handlers to communicate undetected.
One method used by both the Russians and the CIA is the dead drop, a hiding place in a hollow tree, under a rock, or in a wall, for example. The agent places documents, microfilms, or a computer disk or digital memory card in the dead drop, which is later "cleared" by the intelligence officer. The dead drop is also used by the IO to relay instructions to the spy. Often when a drop is cleared, a signal is left, a piece of tape or a chalk mark on a telephone pole, for example.
China does not use dead drops. Its spies do not spend their time putting chalk marks on mailboxes, as the CIA's Aldrich Ames did to signal the KGB that a drop in which he had hidden documents was ready to be unloaded. China's intelligence officers under diplomatic cover are rarely caught spying, for a simple reason—they normally do not recruit and run agents.
"China has a different approach to intelligence," said Paul Moore, who has spent a lot of time studying the difference between Chinese espionage tradecraft and that of other countries. "There is also the question of what China is not doing," he explained. "For example, China normally does not pay money for intelligence. The Russians pay money, everybody pays money, but as a rule the Chinese don't.
"The typical Chinese way is, you help the Chinese, they help you to develop an export business to sell cheap salad bowls to Kmart. Ordinarily China doesn't give money in return for information.
"We are looking for intelligence relationships," Moore said, "but the problem we ran into is that China doesn't really develop intelligence relationships with people. China develops general relationships with people that may have an intelligence dimension."
Instead of recruiting agents, the MSS often relies on informal contacts to collect intelligence. It co-opts some of the thousands of students, tourists, business travelers, trade delegations, and scientists who visit the United States every year. It also rolls out the red carpet for American scientists visiting China, hoping to nudge them into revealing secrets.
According to Moore, the Chinese employ a technique against visitors that is carefully designed to leave them exhausted and weaken their defenses. "It's been common enough for the Chinese to arrange a grueling day of tourism for visitors, followed by an evening cocktail reception," he said. Fortified by a drink or two, the visitor might be approached "by a graduate student seeking research assistance, repeating a question that the visitor had previously been unwilling to answer when asked by a senior Chinese colleague.
"In other words, China doesn't so much try to steal secrets as to try to induce foreign visitors to give them away by manipulating them into certain situations." The visitor, Moore adds, may be pitched with statements such as, "Scientific information should recognize no political boundaries."
In Moore's view, "the principle that the Chinese apply is simple: people will almost never commit espionage, but they will often enough be indiscreet if they can be put in the right circumstances. The root problem is people making mistakes, rather than people committing espionage."
That in turn creates a hurdle for US counterintelligence. "The problem for American investigators and prosecutors is not to determine whether someone under investigation has provided information to China, but to prove somehow that he told the Chinese three things when he was authorized to discuss only two."
John F. Lewis Jr. was assistant director of the FBI in charge of the national security division, and worked in counterintelligence for nearly three decades. In dealing with Chi
nese operations, he said, "You may be talking about a different kind of espionage, where scientists get together and there may not even be an exchange of documents. An exchange of ideas and ways to solve problems. There is the heart of the problem. With unfettered travel back and forth to mainland China, in many cases scientists may not even be aware of what the hell is happening."
Nicholas Eftimiades, a China analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the congressional Joint Economic Committee that it is easy to tell the difference between a Chinese intelligence officer and a co-opted scientist—intelligence officers sent abroad generally lack technical knowledge, and the scientists co-opted by the MSS usually have no training in clandestine work. "For example, at a trade show in Paris, French military investigators observed members of a Chinese scientific delegation discreetly dipping their ties in a photo processing solution made by the German firm Agfa. The goal of this clumsy act of espionage was presumably to obtain specimens of the solution for later analysis."
The DIA analyst testified that foreign visitors in China are subject to the "aggressive use of technical surveillance measures." Many of the better hotels that cater to foreigners are equipped with bugs and cameras to record their activities. "Surveillance of foreigners in these and other Chinese hotels is carried out by the MSS's technical operations department," he said. "According to Chinese prostitutes who frequent the Jianguo Hotel, the guest rooms used by foreign businessmen there also contain microphones."
Spying is often described as the world's second oldest profession. And China, like many other countries, has used sex for purposes of espionage or blackmail.
By far the most bizarre example of the use of sex by Chinese intelligence is the case of Bernard Boursicot, a French diplomat in China who for twenty years carried on a love affair with Shi Peipu, a famous singer at the Beijing Opera, where female roles are often played by men. There was one little problem with the woman Boursicot considered the love of his life: she was a man.
Boursicot was arrested in Paris in 1983 and tried with Shi, who had moved there and was living with him. The diplomat testified that an officer of Chinese intelligence, whom he knew only as "Kang," had approached him in Beijing and said he would be allowed to continue the affair only if he provided information from the French embassy. He did, giving 150 documents to Shi, who passed them to Kang.
At his trial, when the judge asked how Boursicot, a Frenchman, after all, could have been fooled for twenty years, he testified, "I was shattered to learn that he is a man." Their sexual encounters, he explained further, had been fast and always in the dark. "He was very shy," Boursicot said. "I thought it was a Chinese custom."
Boursicot and Shi Peipu were sentenced to six years in prison. In 1987 President François Mitterrand pardoned Shi, but not Boursicot. The following year their affair became the basis for a hit Broadway play, M. Butterfly, by David Hwang, with a musical nod to Giacomo Puccini. In 1993 it became a film starring Jeremy Irons.
Diplomats who stray make easy targets, but Chinese intelligence operations are rarely that predictable. Because of the way China spies, it is harder for US counterintelligence to discover evidence of espionage. "If they don't pay money that means there's no money trail to follow," Paul Moore points out. "Bank accounts don't help you. If a case moves into a criminal investigation, how are you going to prove it to a jury?
"China is not interested in working with people motivated by revenge. We [the United States] love revenge as a motivating factor. Historically, the number one reason people betray the US is money, and the second reason is revenge. It is not normal Chinese practice to deal with people who have psychological or emotional problems, people who are misfits, or lonely."
Whenever a mole is discovered inside US intelligence, the counterintelligence experts try to determine what factors led to the betrayal and might have been detected in advance. Aldrich Ames, the CIA Soviet counterintelligence officer, had a severe drinking problem. So did Edward Lee Howard, the CIA officer who fled to Moscow in 1985 after betraying the agency's secrets to the KGB.
But looking for employees inside American intelligence who have a severe drinking problem or some other personal aberration would in all likelihood not help to uncover a Chinese mole inside the CIA, the FBI, or the national weapons labs. Because China would normally prefer not to deal with them.
Moore elaborated on the point. "To protect our country we have all the CI [counterintelligence] units in the government, and the security guys, the polygraph operators, and they ask about drinking and money, and talk to neighbors for background information. All the security guys are looking for vulnerabilities. If the Chinese are not looking for people with vulnerabilities, when we screen out people with vulnerabilities we don't find the people they are using."
For twenty years, Moore was the FBI's chief China analyst, toiling away in the bureau's CI-3B unit at headquarters. He developed a set of two dozen rules that he believed could apply to Chinese intelligence cases. Three are of particular importance.
First, China does not, in most instances, offer money in exchange for information.
Second, China does not accept typical walk-in cases, because of the possibility that "volunteers" are being dangled as bait by an opposition intelligence service. By contrast, some of the KGB's biggest coups came from walk-ins, not only Ames but John A. Walker Jr., a former Navy chief warrant officer who, with his son, brother, and a friend, sold the Navy's codes and spied for the Soviets for eighteen years.*
Moore's third rule is that China "collects information from good people, people who don't have financial problems, don't have emotional problems, who are not motivated by revenge, not unsuccessful in their lives. Not someone who is lonely, needs a friend, needs a woman.
"China is looking to get good people to do bad things. How do you recruit a good person? You get a good person to do this by convincing him it would be good to help China. China is a poor country, they say, and somebody has to help them modernize, improve their defense system. We need people to help us a little bit. The idea is to convince someone that what he is actually doing is good. You don't talk about the fact that he would be betraying a trust. They say, 'We think you have an affirmative obligation to help China modernize.'
"The metaphor is sex: you are trying to woo a woman and get her to go to bed. At least in my time, if you said would you go upstairs and have sex, the answer was usually no. But getting a kiss, the answer might be different. You would try to build from that kiss onward to greater things. That's what's going on here, seduction. The targets are being led astray in small increments. You have little bits of espionage."
According to Nicholas Eftimiades, China's economic espionage follows a three-pronged pattern. First, persons are recruited in China and asked to acquire specific technological information when they travel abroad. Second, some American technology companies "are purchased outright by Chinese state-run firms." And third, high-tech equipment is purchased by front companies, often operating out of Hong Kong.
One survey prepared for government agencies, the Intelligence Threat Handbook, estimates that China has more than 2,600 diplomatic and commercial officials in the United States, of whom a "substantial percentage" are "actively involved in collecting intelligence." More than 127,000 students from the People's Republic of China attend schools in the United States, "and many of these students have been tasked to collect information by the Chinese government," the handbook asserts. In addition, "over 25,000 Chinese visit the United States each year as members of official delegations."
American technology continues to be a major focus of Chinese espionage in the United States. A great many cases of espionage or technology transfer to China are centered in California, with its large defense and aerospace industries, and the computer-technology companies centered in Silicon Valley. All are tempting targets for Beijing.
California also has by far the nation's largest ethnic Chinese population, a total of 1.2 million people, by the latest Census Bure
au survey released in 2010. That in turn creates a delicate problem for FBI counterintelligence agents investigating possible espionage cases in California that involve ethnic Chinese. Without question, the vast majority of the 3 million people of Chinese background in the United States are loyal Americans.* It is a fact of life, however, that China often tries to enlist ethnic Chinese in its intelligence efforts.
A joint CIA/FBI report to Congress in 1999 touched on the sensitive issue. "Because most Chinese share a common cultural and historical background, Chinese leaders refer to all individuals of Chinese ancestry as 'overseas' Chinese. When approaching an individual of Chinese origin, the Chinese intelligence services attempt to secure his or her cooperation by playing on this shared ancestry."
Bruce Carlson, a Chinese counterintelligence specialist who headed the China section of the FBI from 2006 to 2008, makes a distinction between immigrants and later generations. "It's true that China targets ethnic Chinese," he said. "When immigrants first come here they have 'one foot in each boat,' or so China thinks. They may be more approachable by the PRC. It's easier to appeal to the motherland with immigrants. But it's much harder to appeal to the motherland with the second generation, and with those who do not speak Chinese. They are no more likely to commit espionage than any other American."
Paul Moore said that Chinese intelligence has been successful in persuading some people to "help China modernize." According to Moore, "It turns out in agent cases where China developed someone to provide information, 98 percent were ethnic Chinese, 2 percent were not. Even the 2 percent felt an obligation to help China modernize. Normally these were people who had studied Chinese, traveled to China, or bought into Chinese culture.
"Chinese agent cases, where they recruit an agent, are mostly ethnic. Are we looking for the Chinese espionage gene? Everybody realizes that's ridiculous. The Chinese are running in their mainstream ops a program that collects intelligence but is not really an intelligence program. They want to develop relations with people who think they have an obligation to help China modernize. And who will make a little contribution. This is their sales pitch. And it turns out it will only resonate with people who have Chinese ancestry. It won't resonate with the McGillicuddys because the McGillicuddys don't give a shit about helping China modernize. What's really going on here is a marketing campaign, to sell China. It doesn't work very well, the answer usually is no. It's about as successful as telemarketing. This is a campaign which is not very efficient.