Democrats Have a Serious Chinese Espionage Problem

Beijing’s unprecedented spy-influence offensive against the United States is aided and abetted by leading Democrats who have turned a blind eye for decades

Last week, I delivered some bad news to a group of bright, rising American intelligence officers, followed by some good news. The bad news is that we’ve missed the golden age of Kremlin espionage. In truth, we missed it by a couple generations. Since the mid-1950s, when the hideous nature of Stalinism was revealed, shattering the illusions of legions of Western fellow travelers, few Americans have spied for Moscow for ideological reasons (the handful who do so are customarily nutcases). It’s mostly about cold, hard cash.

However, we’re now experiencing the golden age of Chinese espionage. Indeed, we may just be at the opening stage of this rising SpyWar. What can be stated on the record is that we’re not winning it. For all the perennial strengths of the U.S.-led Five Eyes SIGINT-cyber alliance, CIA’s efforts to collect HUMINT inside that hard-target country can be fairly termed challenging, with mysterious losses of agents inside the People’s Republic of China every few years (“losses” here being a euphemism for “executions”) indicating serious security problems. Moreover, China’s multifaceted espionage threat aimed at the West has no historical precedent, as FBI Director Christopher Wray has made plain to the public as no American counterspy boss ever has, terming Beijing’s spy offensive “a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States.” Our Anglosphere counterintelligence partners are issuing similar joint warnings about the PRC and its powerful spy agencies.

Countering Chinese espionage and illicit influence constitutes the top priority for American counterintelligence – Wray has stated that half of the FBI’s 5,000 active counterintelligence cases involve China, while the Bureau opens a new one every 10 hours, on average – yet this dire reality has made little impression on our politics to date. It’s not difficult to assess why. Our “Big Five” counterintelligence threats are, in order of magnitude, China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, and Israel (the last is discussed in hushed tones even inside SCIFs, given its political sensitivities). Counterintelligence broadly lacks any political constituency in Washington, DC, while the Democrat obsession with Russian espionage and election interference, at least regarding Republicans particularly former President Donald Trump, which appeared suddenly in 2016, has tarred the vital issue of countering hostile espionage with partisan fanaticism and sheer quackery.

Above all, Democrats don’t want to discuss our enormous Chinese espionage problem because so many Democrats, including top elected officials, are mixed up in it. Here’s the point where certain readers who are obsessively interested in speculation about Russian espionage and the GOP, who remain giddy about my extensive reporting on the murky myths and complex realities of Trump and the Kremlin, start to get upset. Don’t: the problem is you. I take a professional approach to counterintelligence, ignoring partisan matters altogether. When FBI Director Wray, America’s top counterintelligence official, states repeatedly in public that the biggest spy-influence problem we face is China, and it’s much bigger than any such challenge the country has ever confronted, I take him at his word, and so should you.