Garrett M. Graff at Wired magazine offers a piece on how
Chinese intelligence officers recruit spies.
Beware of Chinese spies offering laptops, women, or
educational stipends—and especially watch out for odd LinkedIn requests.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department unsealed new charges
against 10 Chinese intelligence officers and hackers who it says perpetrated a
years-long scheme to steal trade secrets from aerospace companies. The case
continues an impressive tempo from the Justice Department, as it continues to
try curb China's massive, wide-ranging, and long-running espionage campaign. In
fact, it's the third time since September alone that the US government has
charged Chinese intelligence officers and spies, including one of its biggest
coups in years: The extradition earlier this month of an alleged Chinese
intelligence officer, caught in Europe, who will face a US courtroom.
That arrest marks the first time the US
has prosecuted an officer of China's Ministry of State Security. The feds
believe that the suspect, Yanjun Xu, spent years cultivating a person he
thought was a potential asset inside GE Aviation, which makes closely held jet
engine technology.
While historic, the GE Aviation case hardly stands as an
outlier. Chinese espionage against the US has emerged over the past two decades
as perhaps the most widespread, damaging, and pernicious national
security threat facing the country—compromising trade secrets, American jobs,
and human lives.
Even as popular culture and public attention has focused in
the past decade on a few high-profile cases against Russian intelligence operations,
China’s spying efforts have yielded a more steady stream of incidents. Over the
last 15 years, dozens of people—including Americans, Chinese nationals, and
Europeans—have been arrested, charged, or convicted of economic or military
espionage for China. In just the 28-month period that a notorious Russian spy ring unraveled around 2010, US
officials charged and prosecuted more than 40 Chinese espionage cases,
according to a Justice Department compilation.
….Sifting through more than a
dozen of the major cases that have targeted Westerners, though, provides an
illuminating window into how China recruits its spies. The recruitment follows
a well-known five-step espionage road map: Spotting, assessing, developing,
recruiting, and, finally, what professionals call “handling.”
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