A look at the history of Chinese espionage in the United States

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CN—

The alleged Chinese surveillance balloon that violated US airspace this week has fueled a diplomatic crisis with the postponement of Secretary of State Antony Blinkens’ planned trip to Beijing.

But the two countries have been spying on each other for a long time.

The United States has sought to gather its own intelligence on the Chinese government, using methods that include flying surveillance planes over disputed islands claimed by Beijing, human sources and signal intercepts.

Still, US officials have sought to distinguish US actions from what they say is the most brazen espionage carried out by the Chinese government.

US officials say Beijing is using all the tools at its disposal to gain a strategic advantage over the United States, its main geopolitical rival. But Chinese officials are saying a similar thing that Beijing has in the past repeatedly accused the United States of spying.

China denies that the balloon currently over the United States is involved in any type of espionage, saying it is a civilian airship used for research purposes, mainly meteorological, that has been hijacked.

Here’s what we know about how China spies on the United States:

While the alleged Chinese balloon spotted in the skies over several US states this week caused an outcry from Republicans and Democrats, it’s not the first time this kind of activity has been seen.

A U.S. official said Friday there have been similar incidents over Hawaii and Guam in recent years, while another official said Thursday: Instances of this activity have been observed in recent years. years, including before this administration.

US officials said the flight path of the latest balloon, first spotted over Montana on Thursday, could potentially take it over a number of sensitive sites. They say they are taking steps to protect against foreign intelligence gathering.

What is less clear is why Chinese spies would want to use a balloon rather than a satellite to gather information.

The use of balloons as spy platforms dates back to the early days of the Cold War. Since then, the United States has used hundreds of them to monitor adversaries, said Peter Layton, a fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia and a former officer in the Royal Australian Air Force.

But with the advent of modern satellite technology allowing the collection of overflight intelligence data from space, the use of surveillance balloons had gone out of style.

Or at least until now.

Recent advances in the miniaturization of electronics mean that floating intelligence platforms could make a comeback into the modern spy toolbox.

Balloon payloads can now weigh less, and balloons can therefore be smaller, cheaper and easier to launch than satellites, Layton said.

Outside Malmstrom Air Force Base in central Montana, spread across 13,800 square miles of open plains, more than 100 intercontinental ballistic missiles lie ready, buried deep underground in missile silos. These Minuteman III rockets are capable of delivering nuclear warheads at least 6,000 miles away and are part of US Strategic Command, which oversees the country’s nuclear and missile arsenal.

Nestled among these silos are clusters of cell towers operated by a small rural mobile operator. According to documents filed by the Federal Communications Commission, these cell towers use Chinese technology that security experts in recent years have said could allow China to gather intelligence while potentially launching network attacks in areas. surrounding this sensitive military installation and others.

Huawei, the Chinese company that makes the technology for the tower, is being shunned by major US mobile carriers and the federal government over national security concerns.

Yet its technology is widely deployed by a number of small, federally-subsidized wireless carriers who buy cheaper Chinese-made hardware to put atop their cellphone towers. In some cases, these cellular networks provide exclusive coverage to rural areas near US military bases, CNN previously reported.

In 2018, the heads of major US intelligence agencies, including the FBI and CIA, warned Americans against using Huawei devices and products. Security experts say deploying its technology so close to the national ICBM arsenal could pose a far greater threat.

In 2017, the Chinese government proposed spending $100 million to build an ornate Chinese garden at the National Arboretum in Washington, DC. Complete with temples, pavilions and a 70ft white pagoda, the project has delighted local officials, who hoped it would attract thousands of tourists each year.

But when US counterintelligence officials started digging into the details, they found plenty of red flags. The pagoda, they noted, would have been strategically placed on one of Washington’s highest points, just two miles from the US Capitol, a perfect location for signals intelligence gathering, multiple sources told CNN the last year.

Chinese authorities wanted to build the pagoda with materials shipped to the United States in diplomatic pouches, which US customs officials are barred from examining, the sources said.

Federal officials quietly killed the project before construction began.

The canceled garden is just one of the projects that has caught the attention of the FBI and other federal agencies during what US security officials have called a dramatic escalation in Chinese spying on the ground. American over the past decade.

Since 2017, federal officials have investigated Chinese land purchases near critical infrastructure, shut down a regional consulate seen by the US government as a hotbed of Chinese spies, and blocked what they saw as efforts to install listening devices near sensitive military and government installations.

Some of the things the FBI uncovered involved Chinese-made Huawei equipment atop cellphone towers near US military bases in the rural Midwest.

According to multiple sources, the FBI determined that the equipment was capable of capturing and disrupting highly restricted Defense Department communications, including those used by US Strategic Command, which oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons.

CNN also reported that Beijing relies on expatriate Chinese scientists, businesspeople and even students in the United States, according to current and former US intelligence officials, lawmakers and several experts.

There have been a number of high profile arrests. In January, a former Chicago graduate student was sentenced to eight years in prison for spying on the Chinese government by gathering information on engineers and scientists in the United States.

Ji Chaoqun, a Chinese national who came to the United States to study electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2013 and later enlisted in the US Army Reserves, was arrested in 2018 .

The 31-year-old was convicted last September of unlawfully acting as an agent of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and making a material false statement to the US military.

According to the Justice Department, Ji was tasked with providing an intelligence officer with biographical information about people who might be recruited as Chinese spies. The individuals included Chinese nationals who worked as engineers and scientists in the United States, some of whom worked for American defense contractors.

The spying was part of an effort by Chinese intelligence services to gain access to advanced aerospace and satellite technologies being developed by American companies, the Justice Department said.

Ji was working under Xu Yanjun, deputy division director at the MMS’s Jiangsu provincial branch, according to the DOJ statement.

Xu, a career intelligence officer, was sentenced last year to 20 years in prison for conspiring to steal trade secrets from several US aircraft and aerospace companies. Xu was also the first Chinese spy extradited to the United States for trial, having been detained in Belgium in 2018 following an FBI investigation.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Secretary of State Antony Blinkens’ first name.

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