Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China (2 page)

China, its modernization devastated by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, coveted those shortcuts. It had ample motive to spy. And the United States, particularly the nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, became its prime target.

Another priority of Chinese intelligence has been to penetrate US counterintelligence. Spy agencies work constantly to uncover and disrupt one another's operations. Today, Chinese intelligence also targets a broad range of US military technology, from the Navy's most sophisticated weapons systems to the Air Force's stealth bomber.

Given American preoccupations with Russia, the first thing that must be understood about China is that its spycraft differs in crucial ways from that of the Russians. Some of the techniques—including "honey traps," the use of attractive women to lure targets, and sophisticated electronics—are the same. But the differences are at least as telling as the similarities.

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The secret headquarters of the Ministry of State Security is located in Xiyuan, the West Garden section of Beijing, near the Summer Palace. Unsuspecting crowds of foreign and Chinese tourists visit the palace daily, not realizing that they are passing China's spy headquarters.

The MSS—the Guojia Anquan Bu—is China's equivalent of the CIA. Many of its officers live in the headquarters complex in an apartment building called Chien Men, which means "front door."
Its location, too, is supposed to be secret, but the neighbors know that the spies live there.

For thirteen years, starting in 1985, China's top spy, the head of the MSS, was Jia Chunwang, an English-speaking Beijing native with a degree in physics. Jia, who was popular among Communist Party members, was chosen in 1998 as China's procurator-general, a post similar to that of the US attorney general. His successor as MSS director was Xu Yongyue, a party hack from Henan Province. Xu opposed corruption in the MSS but also cracked down on Tiananmen Square demonstrators and other dissidents. In 2007 Xu's deputy, Geng Huichang, fifty-six, a bespectacled native of Hebei Province in northern China, moved up to become MSS chief
as part of a government shakeup by President Hu Jintao, who sought to consolidate his power by naming five political allies as ministers.

The spy agency is organized into a dozen bureaus. The first bureau operates for the most part inside China, but it also recruits people who are heading overseas for study, business, or vacation. The second bureau manages the spies, sending intelligence officers abroad under diplomatic cover in Chinese embassies or under commercial cover, including officers posing as journalists. The third bureau runs operations in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao. In the latter two locations, the MSS spies are assigned to a group code-named Winter Chrysanthemum, which is tasked with gathering intelligence on Taiwanese organizations and foreigners. A second group, code-named Autumn Orchid, has overlapping responsibilities in the two locations but concentrates on collecting intelligence about the media, political and commercial figures, and the universities.

The fourth bureau, the technology bureau, is in charge of wiretapping and communications, as well as photography. The fifth bureau is internal, responsible for domestic intelligence. The sixth bureau runs counterintelligence. The seventh bureau writes intelligence reports; the eighth is in charge of research; and the ninth runs countersurveillance and works to prevent defections by spies and students. The tenth bureau collects scientific and technical intelligence. The eleventh bureau runs the MSS computers and is charged with protecting the agency from foreign computer hackers. Finally, a foreign affairs bureau cooperates with friendly foreign intelligence services.

MSS spies are trained in the agency's own university, the Institute of International Relations in Beijing. The institute is a huge think tank with more than five hundred researchers. It provides the Chinese leadership with major English-language newspapers, summaries of political and economic trends, and documents issued by foreign governments. It is divided into ten offices covering the geographic areas of the world, as well as sections for international relations and the global economy.

Although the institute teaches foreign languages and geopolitics, it does not teach other courses in espionage tradecraft. For that, students are reportedly sent for specialized training at the Institute of Cadre Management, a school for spies in Suzhou, a city of ancient pagodas and beautiful bridges in the Yangtze River delta, near Shanghai. For up to a year, the recruits learn firearms, martial arts, driving, communications, and surveillance skills.

The size and budget of the MSS are secret, as is true of most of the world's spy agencies. But in September 1996, at a conference of the MSS and other Chinese intelligence agencies, called Strengthening Intelligence Work, China's vice premier, Zou Jiahua, alluded to the number of MSS agents around the world. In an address delivered to the conference, "Salute to Comrades on the Special Duties Front," Zou spoke of the "tens of thousands of nameless heroes who cherish and loyally serve their motherland [and] are quietly fighting in their special posts abroad."
If his figure is at all accurate, it would mean that the MSS literally has tens of thousands of agents around the world.

The MSS is not the only Chinese intelligence arm that spies on other countries, including the United States. The Military Intelligence Department (MID) of the People's Liberation Army also conducts espionage abroad. It is the MSS, however, that runs most of the intelligence operations against the US target.

The MSS is only the latest intelligence apparatus of a nation that is hardly a newcomer to espionage operations. China has been in the spy business for some twenty-five hundred years. Around 400
B.C.,
Sun Tzu, the general and military strategist, is credited with writing the classic treatise
Ping-fa,
or
The Art of War.
In a chapter entitled "Employment of Secret Agents," Sun Tzu describes five kinds of spies that are remarkably close to those still plying their trade in the twenty-first century.

Sun Tzu's typology includes "agents in place" (he calls them native, or inside, agents), double agents, deception agents, expendable agents (who may be killed if their role in passing false information is discovered), and penetration agents. A clever spymaster, Sun Tzu writes, may employ all five types simultaneously, much like a fisherman who uses a casting net, pulling in his catch by a single cord connected to the other strands.

Mao Zedong and the other modern Chinese leaders of Communist China borrowed from
Ping-fa
many of the tactics they used to fight the Japanese and then the Chinese Nationalists. Sun Tzu emphasized that it was supremely important to know the enemy's forces, to have accurate advance intelligence. "Know the enemy and know yourself,"
he wrote, "and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat."

In the twentieth century, Kang Sheng was the sinister and powerful spymaster
who helped Mao Zedong gain and maintain his power. Born into the family of a wealthy landowner in Shandong Province, Kang joined the Communist Party at age twenty-five and was trained in Moscow in intelligence and security. He became a key member of Mao's inner circle, and by 1937, the evidence suggests, he had become chief of intelligence. A thin man with thick, round glasses and a pencil mustache, Kang was feared, and with good reason, since he was both powerful and ruthless. Kang supported Mao in the chaotic Cultural Revolution but died in 1975 before its backers, the so-called Gang of Four, were arrested and tried.

Kang Sheng, Jia Chunwang, and their fellow spymasters have developed a uniquely Chinese approach to spycraft, and to the penetration of America's crucial military and espionage secrets. The point is best illustrated by an anecdote that has long circulated inside the counterintelligence division of the FBI about a concept known as "a thousand grains of sand."
Paul Moore, the former senior China analyst for the bureau, has often used the story to illustrate the belief that the Chinese gather intelligence differently from the Russians and other countries.

As Moore tells it, "If a beach was an espionage target, the Russians would send in a sub, frogmen would steal ashore in the dark of night and with great secrecy collect several buckets of sand and take them back to Moscow.

"The US would target the beach with satellites and produce reams of data.

"The Chinese would send in a thousand tourists, each assigned to collect a single grain of sand. When they returned, they would be asked to shake out their towels. And they would end up knowing more about the sand than anyone else."

There is an element of truth to the tale. Unlike China, Russia and the United States employ many of the same traditional methods to spy. Even their headquarters are the mirror image of each other. During the Soviet era, Lubianka, the KGB's headquarters and infamous prison cells in Moscow's Dzerzhinsky Square, was well known, but the KGB's foreign spies were housed in a modern complex in Yasenevo,
in a wooded area off the Moscow ring road. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the KGB's foreign espionage arm became the SVR, and the SVR headquarters remained in Yasenevo.

The buildings bear a remarkable resemblance to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Like the CIA, the Russian spies are out in the woods, away from the capital. Its officers call their headquarters the
les,
meaning "the forest," or "the Russian Langley."

The two countries use similar espionage tradecraft. For example, the Soviets, and now the Russians, typically assign most of their intelligence officers to embassies around the world under diplomatic cover. The CIA does the same.

Like the CIA, Russian intelligence officers under embassy cover attempt to recruit agents, individuals in the host country who have access to military, intelligence, or diplomatic secrets. Usually, the agents are paid for their services. They may betray their country for a variety of reasons; for money, because they feel their talents are undervalued, for ideological or other reasons, or a combination of motives.

When an agent is recruited, the intelligence officer, or IO, faces the problem of how to communicate with the agent. In the wiretap age, telephone and e-mail are hardly secure modes of contact. So various methods have been developed to allow spies and their handlers to communicate undetected.

One method used by both the Russians and the CIA is the dead drop, a hiding place in a hollow tree, under a rock, or in a wall, for example. The agent places documents, microfilms, or a computer disk or digital memory card in the dead drop, which is later "cleared" by the intelligence officer. The dead drop is also used by the IO to relay instructions to the spy. Often when a drop is cleared, a signal is left, a piece of tape or a chalk mark on a telephone pole, for example.

China does not use dead drops. Its spies do not spend their time putting chalk marks on mailboxes, as the CIA's Aldrich Ames did to signal the KGB that a drop in which he had hidden documents was ready to be unloaded. China's intelligence officers under diplomatic cover are rarely caught spying, for a simple reason—they normally do not recruit and run agents.

"China has a different approach to intelligence,"
said Paul Moore, who has spent a lot of time studying the difference between Chinese espionage tradecraft and that of other countries. "There is also the question of what China is not doing," he explained. "For example, China normally does not pay money for intelligence. The Russians pay money, everybody pays money, but as a rule the Chinese don't.

"The typical Chinese way is, you help the Chinese, they help you to develop an export business to sell cheap salad bowls to Kmart. Ordinarily China doesn't give money in return for information.

"We are looking for intelligence relationships," Moore said, "but the problem we ran into is that China doesn't really develop intelligence relationships with people. China develops general relationships with people that may have an intelligence dimension."

Instead of recruiting agents, the MSS often relies on informal contacts to collect intelligence. It co-opts some of the thousands of students, tourists, business travelers, trade delegations, and scientists who visit the United States every year. It also rolls out the red carpet for American scientists visiting China, hoping to nudge them into revealing secrets.

According to Moore, the Chinese employ a technique against visitors that is carefully designed to leave them exhausted and weaken their defenses. "It's been common enough for the Chinese to arrange a grueling day of tourism for visitors, followed by an evening cocktail reception," he said. Fortified by a drink or two, the visitor might be approached "by a graduate student seeking research assistance, repeating a question that the visitor had previously been unwilling to answer when asked by a senior Chinese colleague.

"In other words, China doesn't so much try to steal secrets as to try to induce foreign visitors to give them away by manipulating them into certain situations." The visitor, Moore adds, may be pitched with statements such as, "Scientific information should recognize no political boundaries."

In Moore's view, "the principle that the Chinese apply is simple: people will almost never commit espionage, but they will often enough be indiscreet if they can be put in the right circumstances. The root problem is people making mistakes, rather than people committing espionage."

That in turn creates a hurdle for US counterintelligence. "The problem for American investigators and prosecutors is not to determine whether someone under investigation has provided information to China, but to prove somehow that he told the Chinese three things when he was authorized to discuss only two."

John F. Lewis Jr. was assistant director of the FBI in charge of the national security division, and worked in counterintelligence for nearly three decades. In dealing with Chinese operations, he said, "You may be talking about a different kind of espionage,
where scientists get together and there may not even be an exchange of documents. An exchange of ideas and ways to solve problems. There is the heart of the problem. With unfettered travel back and forth to mainland China, in many cases scientists may not even be aware of what the hell is happening."