China’s Spy Operation Long in the Making

The Washington Post has great coverage of the latest Chinese spy caught stealing America’s military secrets:

Prosecutors called Chi Mak the “perfect sleeper agent,” though he hardly looked the part. For two decades, the bespectacled Chinese-born engineer lived quietly with his wife in a Los Angeles suburb, buying a house and holding a steady job with a U.S. defense contractor, which rewarded him with promotions and a security clearance. Colleagues remembered him as a hard worker who often took paperwork home at night.

I’ll bet. This was the culmination of a plan hatched back in the ’70s. Since then, China has built quite a network:

The Chinese government, in an enterprise that one senior official likened to an “intellectual vacuum cleaner,” has deployed a diverse network of professional spies, students, scientists and others to systematically collect U.S. know-how, the officials said. Some are trained in modern electronic techniques for snooping on wireless computer transactions. Others, such as Mak, are technical experts who have been in place for years and have blended into their communities.

“Chi Mak acknowledged that he had been placed in the United States more than 20 years earlier, in order to burrow into the defense-industrial establishment to steal secrets,” Joel Brenner, the head of counterintelligence for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in an interview. “It speaks of deep patience,” he said, and is part of a pattern.

Other recent prosecutions illustrate the scale of the problem. Mak, whose sentence capped an 18-month criminal probe, was the second U.S. citizen in the past two weeks to stand before a federal judge after being found guilty on espionage-related charges.

The other person charged was Gregg W. Bergersen, a “weapons systems policy analyst … of Alexandria, Va.”

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. The Christian Science Monitor covered the threat China posed back in 2005:

China also poses a growing intelligence threat to the US, according to current and former US officials cited in a Reuters report earlier this month.

With the Bush administration embroiled in Iraq and the war on terrorism, intelligence experts fear it may be ignoring a determined Chinese strategy to acquire sensitive technology with commercial and military applications through informal spy networks with potentially thousands of operatives. Such efforts could eventually erode US economic and military prominence, officials and analysts said.

“China is stepping up its overt and covert efforts to gather intelligence and technology in the United States, and the activities have boosted Beijing’s plans to rapidly produce advanced-weapons systems, reports The Washington Times in part two of its two-part series on China’s growing threat to US security.

China’s spies use as many as 3,200 front companies — many run by groups linked to the Chinese military — that are set up to covertly obtain information, equipment and technology, US officials say. …
Additionally, the Chinese use hundreds of thousands of Chinese visitors, students and other nonprofessional spies to gather valuable data, most of it considered “open source,” or unclassified information.

Chinese officials deny suggestions of spying.