A spy balloon drifting across the continental US threw the spotlight on the expanding and highly secretive spy-versus-spy contest between the United States and China.
As China’s spy balloon drifted across the continental United States in February, US intelligence agencies learnt that Chinese President Xi Jinping had become enraged with senior Chinese military generals.
The episode threw a spotlight on the expanding and highly secretive spy-versus-spy contest between the United States and China. The balloon crisis, a small part of a much larger Chinese espionage effort, reflects a brazen new aggressiveness by Beijing in gathering intelligence on the United States as well as Washington’s growing capabilities to collect its own information on China.
The CIA and the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency have set up new centres focused on spying on China. US officials have honed their capabilities to intercept electronic communications, including using spy planes off China’s coast. In late February, weeks after he cancelled an important trip to Beijing over the balloon episode, Blinken confronted China’s top diplomat with a US intelligence assessment that Beijing was considering giving weapons to Russia. That disclosure raised tensions, but it also might be keeping China from sending the arms, US officials say. And when Blinken finally went to Beijing in June, he raised the issue of Chinese intelligence activities in Cuba.
Chinese agents use social media sites – LinkedIn, in particular – to lure potential recruits. Any time an American takes a publicly disclosed intelligence job, they can expect a barrage of outreach from Chinese citizens on social media, according to current and former officials. But critics say some of the US government’s counterintelligence efforts are racially biased and paranoid, amounting to a new Red Scare – a charge at least partly supported by the cases the Justice Department has had to drop and by its shutdown of the Trump-era China Initiative program.
China even has artificial intelligence software that can recognise faces and detect the gait of an American spy, meaning traditional disguises are not enough to avoid detection, according to a former intelligence official. American operatives now must spend days rather than hours taking routes to spot any tailing Chinese agents before meeting a source or exchanging messages, former intelligence officials say.
US officials also determined that commanders on the Central Military Commission that Xi chairs were unaware of this particular flight until it was tipping into crisis, and they vented their frustration at the generals overseeing the surveillance program. China has also poured resources into determining the thinking of top American officials. A Justice Department indictment unsealed in July suggests Chinese businesspeople tied to the government were trying to recruit James Woolsey, a former CIA director who was in the running to be a Trump administration national security cabinet official right after the 2016 election.
“They look for senior planning and intentions,” he said. “What is the secretary of state really thinking? What is he really doing? What are the operations the CIA is really running against you?”No issue in US-China relations has loomed larger than Taiwan. It is the flashpoint likeliest to lead to war, analysts say. Xi has said China must take control of Taiwan, a de facto independent island, and has ordered his military to be capable of doing so by 2027.
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