Tim Walz's Chinese Secrets: A Counterintelligence Update

Tim Walz’s alleged China secrets are coming out right before the election – is it a scorned lover or a Beijing spy operation?

Det. Gregory: Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
Sherlock Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
Det. Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time.
Sherlock Holmes: That was the curious incident.

“The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1892

That brief exchange between Sherlock Holmes and a Scotland Yard detective, regarding the theft of a champion racehorse and the dog that failed to bark because the dog knew the horse thief, is one of the best-known anecdotes from the entire Holmes canon. It appears relevant to a salacious story that’s appeared shortly before America’s election in just a few days.

Counterintelligence is fundamentally about asking questions. Questions that others may find bothersome. For the past nine years, since Donald Trump entered presidential politics, liberals and the mainstream media have shown intense interest in unmasking potential ties between Russia and Republicans, especially former President Trump. Nearly all of this has been speculative and uninformed, while much is simply bizarre. Moreover, they demonstrate zero interest in espionage involving countries besides Russia, or espionage targets not involving the GOP. Amateur counterintelligence has become a threat to democracy.

Counterintelligence cases can turn on small details, sometimes so small that normies miss them altogether. In one Cold War counterespionage “cold case” I worked, after we got access to KGB files from inside the collapsed Soviet Union, I identified a long-forgotten mole based on the specific seating arrangements in a particular Intelligence Community office before I was born. Details matter.

Which brings us to Tim Walz. The Minnesota governor, chosen by Vice President Kamala Harris as her running mate, is something of an odd duck. My particular concern is his ties to Communist China. This cannot be decoupled from the Democrats’ broader problem of penetration by Chinese intelligence and Beijing’s influence operations. Top Secret Umbra has investigated this murky matter in considerable detail. The United States appears to be headed down the disturbing road of the People’s Republic of China gaining significant influence in our politics, first local, then state level, now federal. We’re in danger of becoming Canada, where PRC influence over politics, despite decades of warnings from counterintelligence professionals, has become too big to fix. The signs are everywhere. Just this week, yet another Democratic Congressmember has been unmasked as an apparent Chinese agent. The response by the Democrats and their media wing is silence, as usual.

The same has happened with Gov. Walz. It’s not in dispute that Walz has a deep affection for China, cemented during his numerous visits to the PRC over a decade-and-a-half until 2003, not long before he entered politics. These sojourns were ostensibly for academic exchange purposes, although we know few details, and Walz isn’t sharing them. He’s not a reliable narrator in any case. He recently conceded (“I’m a knucklehead at times”) that he’d lied to numerous people over the years by claiming that he was in China during the Tiananmen Square massacre in early June 1989, although he was provably in Nebraska at the time.

Lying, particularly when you don’t need to, sets off counterintelligence alarms. I’ve shared some of my espionage-related concerns about Walz over at the Washington Examiner, where I run pieces that are shorter and less detailed than the analysis I offer at this newsletter. First, I dissected the nature of Walz’s ties to the PRC and their counterintelligence implications, given his 30 (or perhaps “only” 15: Walz implausibly claims not to recall) trips to China between 1989 and 2003. Next, I asked whether Walz, during his 24 years serving in the National Guard, complied with legally-mandated requirements to report foreign travel for holders of security clearances (which someone of Walz’s rank, as a senior NCO, surely possessed). This week I added analysis of whether Walz reported his Chinese personal relationships to National Guard security personnel, as he was legally required to. The Democrats and their media wing have ignored these issues altogether.

This is a concern because a Chinese woman who claims to have been Tim Walz’s lover more than three decades ago has come forward with an interesting tale to tell. Calling herself “Jenna Wang,” she spilled the beans to the Daily Mail, asserting that she had a romantic fling with Tim Walz during the summer of 1989, during his first sojourn to the PRC, and it continued at long distance until 1992, when Walz returned to China and ended their affair.

So what? Western men, especially young ones, travel abroad all the time, romancing foreign women. This case has wrinkles, however, including that Wang’s father was a senior official of the Chinese Communist Party who, she claims, disapproved of her sleeping with a Westerner. Hence, their affair was conducted on the down-low, as she demanded. Interestingly, she asserts that Walz regularly smuggled Western consumer goods into the PRC from Hong Kong and Macau, a crime in CCP eyes, while she states that she knew her paramour was a military man.

To state the obvious to anyone versed in real-world espionage, a rising young American with military connections, who was smitten with all things Chinese, would have presented a tempting recruiting target for the Ministry of State Security, Beijing’s powerful secret police, in 1989 (or now). Inside China, the MSS presence is ubiquitous, and that service has the manpower to “cover” a target with physical and technical surveillance with ease. At the end of the 1980s, China was little more than a decade past the Mao era, and the PRC was a repressive surveillance state.

None of this means that Walz was coopted by the MSS, nor even approached, yet that must be deemed possible, especially since Wang was connected to the CCP (her statements about Walz’s smuggling and military affiliation are perhaps hints). Any Westerner who got caught smuggling might be offered to cooperate with the MSS or face time in China’s dismal prisons.

In Walz’s defense, Wang comes across as scorned woman with an agenda. Her dislike of her former lover is palpable in her comments to the Daily Mail. Neither does the DM’s account provide any proof of this alleged romance. Wang claims that she last saw Walz in the summer of 1992, when they broke up, which she admits made her angry. Their last communications of any kind, she asserts, involved friendly Facebook messaging in 2009. By then, Wang had abandoned China, where her party boss father died in 1999, in favor of a new life in Europe.

There’s no hard evidence that the purported Walz-Wang romance occurred. We have her word for it, plus a few photos Wang supplied which the DM published. There’s no screenshot of the claimed 2009 Facebook chat, neither do the anodyne photos Wang provided from the 1989-92 period establish much of a relationship between Walz and Wang, much less any romance. Wang claims she and her lover exchanged letters for almost three years, but none are shown.

That said, the DM’s photographs raise questions. One does in particular. This is a group photo with two Westerners, male and female, surrounded by a gaggle of Chinese teenagers, presumably students. Many of the students are smiling, even joking, in a fashion that’s less common in China when a photo is taken than it is among Westerners. The DM caption explains: “[Walz] is pictured above in China when he returned with his now-wife Gwen in a photo taken by a mutual friend of Wang.”

When was this photograph taken? First off, the Western man looks a lot like Tim Walz in that era, while the female resembles a young Gwen Whipple (later Walz). Their official story about how they got together is that they were teaching in the same high school in Alliance, Nebraska, where Tim and Gwen were in regular contact (he taught geography while she taught English), even sharing adjoining classrooms. Eventually, love blossomed. In the standard account, told many times, their first date was the movie Falling Down, an unconventional choice. Since that violent downer flick premiered at the end of February 1993, we can place that first date sometime in the late winter of 1993 (or maybe the spring, since it perhaps took longer for new movies to reach rural Nebraska).

The next firm date in the Tim-Gwen romance is June 4, 1994, their wedding day – also, the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre: another unconventional choice. Speaking of unconventional choices, right after their wedding, Tim and Gwen made their honeymoon in China, taking 47 Nebraska students with them. This was the beginning of the Walz’s side-business of leading student junkets to China every summer, sometimes more than one group per season. Their early marriage was essentially centered on China, particularly since their first child, daughter Hope, wasn’t born until 2001. If Gwen was any less enamored with China than her husband, that’s not obvious, since I don’t think most midwestern brides pine for a dream honeymoon in Communist China.

So, when was that group photograph taken? Logic dictates that it cannot have been taken before 1993, by which point Tim and Gwen were an item (we presumably can rule out that this photo was taken during Tim’s 1992 visit to the PRC, since he was breaking up with his Chinese girlfriend then, plus who takes a woman to China before your first date?). Perhaps it was taken in 1994, during their honeymoon (if so, why did Tim’s Chinese ex get a copy unless she was semi-stalking him?). We don’t know.

There are hints. First, Tim and (presumably) Gwen are seen close together: his hand is visibly around her waist, at least implying they’re a couple. The students mostly seem happy, even giggly. Several of them are wearing acid-washed denim jackets which look brand new. Were these smuggled gifts from the generous American teacher? These were the sorts of Western consumer items that Wang claims Tim was sneaking into the PRC.

Overall, the vibe of this photograph is considerably more 1989 than 1993 or later. The fashions on display – the hair, the glasses, the clothes – fairly scream “late 80s” (speaking as someone who experienced that era). Plus, Tim looks different from how he looked in 1994. At the start of that year, local media reported on the coming Walz honeymoon in China. Here Walz has gained weight and has less hair than he appears in the group photograph.

However, Tim in the group photo looks a lot more like how he appeared when he returned from his inaugural 1989 trip to China: younger, thinner, with fuller hair. This raises some obvious questions. If the group photo is from 1989, the official Tim-Gwen storyline is off by several years. Unless, of course, the Western woman he’s holding tight isn’t Gwen Whipple. Which brings other questions into play.

It cannot be excluded that this is a fake or doctored photo. China’s MSS certainly has that capability. But I asked a couple Intelligence Community imagery analysis experts, folks who see quality fakes every day, and both felt the group photo appears bona fide – though, like any seasoned spooks, they couldn’t rule out a fake altogether – and probably was taken in the late 1980s.

If that’s not Gwen with Tim’s arm around her, who was it then? If that is Gwen, has the Walz couple been lying to everyone about their relationship’s origins? Why would two midwestern schoolteachers lie about how and when they met? On the surface, none of this makes much sense.

Applying counterintelligence vision, what if the MSS is sending a message to Tim Walz, who may be elected our vice president in a few days: We know what you did that romance-filled summer, in our country, on our turf. Intelligence services, especially in autocracies, like to play with their quarry by releasing information – some true, some false, some perhaps a blend – to remind foreigners that it has kompromat on them. What if “Jenna Wang” is telling us some things which are true, but only in part, to embarrass Walz and his family?

We’ve been down this road before, recently. During our 2016 election campaign, Russian intelligence ran a series of spy operations against both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, including the notorious Steele Dossier, which was an amalgam of boring fact and salacious fiction. Informed voices, such as mine, told you back in 2017, not long after it broke in the media, that the dossier was a Kremlin provocation:

The idea that the Steele Dossier represents an exercise in Chekist provokatsiya gets more plausible the more you look at it. It’s very much in the habits of Russian intelligence to disseminate a great deal of accurate information, sometimes muddied, in the service of a greater lie. The KGB’s successors are highly adept at assembling disinformation that results in more questions than answers for Western investigators. There’s no doubt that the dossier created enormous political churn in Washington—including murky assertions that haven’t been resolved yet and perhaps never will be.

The dossier was Vladimir Putin’s way of making Americans hate each other more while reminding Trump that Russian intelligence was aware of the Republican candidate’s questionable dealings with Russians. It was never taken seriously as corroborated information by experts on Russian intelligence. As British spy author Ben Macintyre explained the view of his country’s intelligence services regarding the dossier in 2017:

Veterans of SIS [i.e. MI6] think, yes, kompromat was done on [Trump] … They end up, the theory goes, with this compromising bit of material and then they begin to release parts of it. They set up an ex-MI6 guy, Chris Steele, who is a patsy, effectively, and they feed him some stuff that’s true, and some stuff that isn’t true, and some stuff that is demonstrably wrong … Which means that Trump can then stand up and deny it, while knowing that the essence of it is true. And then he has a stone in his shoe for the rest of his administration. It’s important to remember that Putin is a KGB-trained officer, and he thinks in the traditional KGB way.

Is Chinese intelligence repeating a similar operation with Tim Walz now? The KGB trained the MSS, after all. The spy-influence operation centered on the Steele Dossier paid enormous dividends for Moscow, enflaming America’s already heated partisan divisions, at low cost or risk to Russia. Since Walz may soon be “one heartbeat away” from occupying the Resolute Desk, the “Jenna Wang” revelation which appears shortly before our election, an alluring amalgam of fact and fantasy, heightens our political divide while reminding Minnesota’s governor that any Chinese secrets he possesses are known to Beijing.

As for the dog that isn’t barking, the stunning thing about this salacious story is the complete silence of the Harris-Walz campaign. To date, Walz and his staff have offered no public explanation for the Wang assertions, zero statements, nothing about their truth or falsehood. It would be easy to state that Wang’s claims are nonsense, that Minnesota’s governor has no Chinese secrets to hide. That they are staying mum as social media runs wild with speculation about Walz’s secret Chinese lover indicates two things. First, Democrats know that their media wing will ignore and suppress this story, as they have so many others which look unflattering to top Democrats. Second, the longer Walz remains silent, the more likely that Wang’s claims are true, at least in part. Democrats think they can hide the truth from the public, but the Communists in Beijing already know, and will release it whenever they want.