How China and Russia Spy on Us By Matthew Brazil
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/09/01/how-china-and-russia-spy-on-us/#slide-1
Do China and Russia share a common set of opponents in world affairs? One might immediately think, yes, they do: the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies.
But an even more persistent danger for the world’s great authoritarians is the free flow of ideas. In their ambition to seize the territories of unwilling neighbors formerly governed without harsh restrictions on information, and in their gradual but relentless drive to control expression and religion, Beijing and Moscow show that they have little tolerance for criticism and no room to allow uncontrolled debate. These are the threats to state power that most trouble Zhongnanhai and the Kremlin.
Beijing and Moscow depend on controlling their own domestic narratives to maintain what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls “harmony.” This is why China’s Propaganda Department disciplines print media and why its National Radio and Television Administration controls broadcast outlets. With news on the Chinese mainland under strict control, Hong Kong is the penultimate frontier (the last major one being Taiwan) in Beijing’s drive to exert dominance over Chinese minds.
In Hong Kong, a territory once known for its free press, the CCP wages a continuing campaign against independent voices, such as the now-defunct Apple Daily. Its next targets may be the establishmentarian but stubbornly independent South China Morning Post and the scrappy Hong Kong Free Press — read them while you can.
Contrast this depressing picture with Russia’s. Vladimir Putin exerts direct and personal control over newspapers and broadcasters, as he “appoints editors and general directors, either officially or unofficially,” as the journalist Nataliya Rostova put it in 2015.
Both Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin enjoy a measure of approval (the former more than the latter) but lean on the crutch of media control to present a one-sided picture to their domestic audiences, pursuing different means to the same end: maximum control of ideas in society. This variance is reflected in how they conceive and execute interference and influence operations abroad.
“Putin is trying to play up a weak hand by misbehaving in ways that demand attention, while China has a much different agenda. But the common factors are that both want to protect themselves from external threats, particularly ideological ones,” says Nigel Inkster, the former head of operations and intelligence at Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. His latest book, published in March, is The Great Decoupling: China, America, and the Struggle for Technological Supremacy.
Controlling the Internet is key. According to Inkster,
Russia began that conversation in the 1990s at the United Nations by complaining about the threats of “information weapons” — by which they meant the use of narratives that challenge the state’s propaganda. That’s also what’s behind China’s idea of “cyber sovereignty.” . . . China is more top-down focused, but Russia is playing catchup: a free internet was always the reality in Russia and they’re retrofitting systems to try and control it.
But from the beginning of the Internet age, China was perfecting its “Great Firewall.”
In a publication from 2018, Peter Mattis, now of the National Democratic Institute, compared Beijing and Moscow this way:
Russia derives its interference and influence operations from a highly personalist leadership and a position of national decline. . . . It seeks to lower other states to its level by weakening them internally. By contrast, China develops and implements its operations via a Leninist party apparatus and a position of growing strength.
Russia, whose economy is reduced to being Europe’s gas station, exerts international influence by dragging down its opponents: Think of the election-interference operations against the U.S. in 2016, for starters. Its declining demographic trends and poor economy are barriers to regaining the power of the Soviet yesteryear. By contrast, as China climbs toward great-power status, it seeks to shape a functional, Sino-centric regional and global order that will make the world safe for its authoritarian ideas and methods. Though also troubled by unfavorable demographic trends from its now-defunct one-child policy, China has at least another decade before it will face the consequences of having an aging population.
Their relative phases — Beijing waxing, Moscow waning — also shape some of the ways that each power pursues foreign intelligence and conducts covert action. But the similarities are as important as the differences.
China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS, 国家安全部, Guojia Anquan Bu) was formed in 1983 to handle the influx of foreigners streaming into post-Mao China at the beginning of its “reform and opening” period. China’s law-enforcement sister agency is the Ministry of Public Security (MPS, 公安部, Gongan Bu), which is roughly a combination of local and state police, plus the FBI. Both Chinese ministries trace their origins back to 1927, when Zhou Enlai founded the first Chinese Communist intelligence and covert-action agency at the beginning of the revolution, as Mattis and I explained in Chinese Communist Espionage.
Today, the MSS combines domestic spy-catching and foreign intelligence with a mix of people you might easily imagine: cyber-savvy hackers, suave and multilingual “diplomats,” and law-enforcement heavies who excel as intimidating and repetitive interrogators, to name a few. On the military side are the People’s Liberation Army Intelligence Bureau, which spies overseas, and the Strategic Support Force, which engages in signal intelligence and data collection and hacking.
Russia’s SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedky, literally “Foreign Intelligence Service”) is one reincarnation of that vast organ of state security previously known as the KGB, with roots in the Russian Revolution. But the SVR is only the foreign-intelligence slice of the pie. Its cousins are the Federal Security Service, or FSB (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti), and the GRU (Glavnoe Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie, the “Main Intelligence Directorate” of the Russian military). While the SVR and the FSB were formerly directorates in the KGB, the GRU has been in existence since the Russian Revolution. They are the most aggressive and reckless of the Russian services but have vast experience. For example, during the early 20th century, the GRU had hundreds of agent networks on the ground across China wherever the Imperial Japanese Army had a presence. Perhaps their most famous officer was Richard Sorge, who operated in China and Japan — where he was caught and executed in 1944. More recently, the GRU is known for the Salisbury poisonings in the U.K., when two of its operatives entered Britain and irresponsibly used Novichok, the highly toxic chemical weapon, in a failed attempt to assassinate Sergei Skripal, a former military intelligence officer who had spied for London.
The security services of China and Russia have some common concerns: neutralizing opponents of the state at home and among émigrés and others abroad; conducting espionage to obtain state secrets of foreign nations; spying for advanced-technology and industrial trade secrets; and conducting political-influence operations.
They also share a notable trait lacking among Washington’s agencies: the ability to wait decades for a payoff. As Yuri Shvets, a former Russian intelligence officer, told Jeff Stein of SpyTalk:
The KGB is very patient. It can work a case for years. Americans want results yesterday or [at a] maximum today; as a result, they have none. They don’t get that if you round up nine pregnant women, the baby would not be born within a month. Each process must ripen.
There are differences, too. In traditional espionage, Russia has fewer émigrés to exploit than China, but it has one of the world’s most sophisticated human-intelligence efforts. From the Cambridge Five and “Agent Sonya” to Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, the Russian services have excelled at winning high-level recruitments and building networks. China is catching up in the art of convincing Americans and other foreigners to betray their country, but it is sometimes less sophisticated in tradecraft, showing an uneven level of professionalism. For example, an MSS officer under diplomatic cover at the PRC Consulate, San Francisco, was allegedly the controller of Christine Fang, accused of cultivating up-and-coming Democratic politicians. The officer and Fang met in public, seemingly an amateur-level mistake.
In another contrast, there are “Moscow rules” according to which spies learn to avoid the wall-to-wall, 24/7 surveillance of foreign diplomats in Russia, but it’s hard for Western spies to fly under the radar in Beijing, Inkster recently told me. “Being conspicuous was less of a concern” for a Caucasian in Russia. “In China that level of confidence was difficult to achieve” because foreigners stand out. Or as an American officer with long experience in China put it, every foreigner in China “leaves a wake in his path,” like a boat on water. They are invariably noticed.
As for how the two authoritarian powers treat the spies and traitors that they catch, the result is basically the same: Both nations have a history of executing convicted spies in their custody, though the Russians may have cut back on that practice since Yeltsin’s time. Russia is, however, much more ruthless with émigré turncoats, as its long record of clandestine poisonings shows.
Retired Western intelligence officers disagree about China’s record of conducting assassinations overseas since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 — though unofficial pro-Beijing websites boast about it. China’s revolutionary history is rife with examples, starting with the “dog-beating squads” of the late 1920s and early ’30s, one of the earliest organs within CCP Intelligence, that conducted assassinations of particularly troublesome officials of the Chinese Nationalist central government and of former Communists who defected to them. Their successors conduct renditions from the nations and territories of China’s periphery, famously and most recently against booksellers in Hong Kong who, in Beijing’s view, trafficked in politically dangerous publications on forbidden subjects such as the sources of Xi Jinping’s personal wealth.
What about further afield? Michael Auslin, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, compared Chinese and Russian special operations by saying, “We know that Russia always placed a premium on special activities abroad. However, China uses influence to bring people back.”
In the U.S., the FBI arrested five alleged MSS agents in October for attempting, on American soil, to coerce regime opponents and persons they accuse of corruption to return to China. The agents reportedly harassed and surveilled a New Jersey resident, telling him that if he returned to China and served a ten-year prison sentence, his family still in China would be left alone.
FBI director Christopher Wray: “Simply put: It’s outrageous that China thinks it can come to our shores, conduct illegal operations, and bend people here in the United States to their will.”
It’s unclear when China will conduct its first long-distance rendition from Europe or the United States — if it has not already done so.
In cyber operations, Moscow’s focus appears to be political, while Beijing stresses acquiring technology useful in the latest five-year plan or for the military. But this is a matter of emphasis: Both do both. In another contrast, China has a stronger demand for technology because of its more advanced economy and superior planning, and it utilizes what it acquires with greater efficiency.
However, when all is said and done, no matter the similarities and differences, both Beijing and Moscow have proven their ability to infiltrate agents into the American, British, and allied security services. As CIA veteran Jack Devine wrote in his newly published book, Spymaster’s Prism, “given the significant expansion of people working in the national security sphere since 2001, it is almost a certainty” that there are spies inside U.S. agencies and among the many contractors now conducting classified work.
This is just a fact of life that we must deal with, underlining the need to improve our counterintelligence posture, not least by sharpening language and area-studies capabilities in our government agencies, especially in the FBI, but also in the private sector, where protecting trade secrets is vital to the American economy. The more the voting public in democratic countries understands this, the greater the chance that we will elect leaders who will nurture, and not corrupt or dismantle, accountable intelligence and counterintelligence agencies and legitimate representative government to better protect our way of life.
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