Here is how China's intelligence network outpaces the West. Photo / Getty Images
The collapse of the trial of two suspected Chinese spies has thrown a spotlight on Beijing’s spooks. But what are their espionage capabilities? And how do they work?
The first thing to know about Chinese intelligence, Mike Feinberg, a former FBI agent who spent years hunting Chinese spies inside the United States, said is that it operates across the “full spectrum” of imaginable activities.
“There’s really no limit to what the Chinese intelligence services will do,” Feinberg said. “And look, let me be very clear. Western services are doing this too. The CIA, MI6, Australian SIS, CSIS in Canada, we’re all trying to embed spies in each other’s nations. That’s what nations do.
“The difference is China is really going after ordinary citizens for their political activities in a way that the Five Eyes intelligence services generally do not,” he said, referring to the intelligence-sharing network of America, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
“China is also enabling corporate espionage in a way that Western intelligence agencies for the most part refrain from doing. And that’s simply because the Western agencies don’t have state-owned enterprises that they need to help.”
China has three main intelligence agencies. The largest, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), covers foreign intelligence-gathering and some domestic security: in Western terms, it is loosely equivalent to MI6 or the CIA.
The Ministry of Public Security is, like MI5 or the FBI, largely internally focused – although it does run some overseas operations, particularly involving repression of Chinese dissidents and other regime critics living abroad.
Then there is the Intelligence Bureau of the Joint Staff Department – the military intelligence branch, which runs its own espionage operations – and the United Front Work Department (UFWD), which concentrates on influence-building operations. For example, the UFWD has been accused of trying to sway elections in Canada and to develop links with British MPs.
Like all spy agencies, their budgets and size are secret. But together, these four agencies are thought to comprise the largest intelligence machine on the planet.
Some estimates put China’s spy force at 600,000. Russia’s FSB, for comparison, has been put at 200,000, but the vast majority are in its border guards service, not intelligence. The CIA was revealed to have 21,575 employees when a secret budget was leaked in 2013. And MI6 had 3644 in 2022, according to the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee report of that year.
“The challenge of the security threat posed by China is fundamentally one of scale,” Nigel Inkster, a former deputy head of MI6, told the Telegraph last year.
For a long time, however, Western intelligence agencies were preoccupied with the idea that China did not run conventional espionage operations in Cold War-style but relied on students, businessmen, members of the diaspora and private companies.
Hence scandals such as the one involving Yang Tengbo, the businessman accused of trying to access the British establishment by befriending Prince Andrew, or Christine Lee, the solicitor whom MI5 publicly accused of trying to win over MPs for the UFWD.
This threat certainly endures. But over the past 15 years, Feinberg said, “what’s become apparent in a series of high-profile investigations throughout all the Five Eyes countries is that while they do rely on informal networks, they also have a very robust system of formal intelligence officers”.
Those professional spy operations should not be underestimated. Between 2010 and 2012, China’s intelligence agencies wound up the CIA’s entire network inside China, imprisoning or killing more than two dozen people.
The CIA has never officially commented on that disaster, which was described as one of America’s worst-ever security breaches when first reported in the New York Times in 2017. What is not disputed is that the Chinese probably either succeeded in hacking a supposedly secure CIA communications network, or managed to infiltrate a mole into a high level of the CIA.
Turncoats are key. Between 2017 and 2018, the FBI caught three CIA officers – Jerry Chun Shing Lee, Kevin Mallory and Ron Rockwell Hansen – who had been spying or attempting to spy for the MSS. In 2020, the agency detained Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, an FBI officer who had been passing secrets to the Shanghai branch of the MSS.
No evidence has been made public linking those men to the loss of the CIA network in 2010, although some former CIA officers say they are convinced a mole was responsible.
Even if they were not behind that, their recruitment was, from the Chinese point of view, an undeniable conventional espionage success story.
The Chinese way of spying does have a couple of peculiar weaknesses, however. The first, one former Western official said, is that Chinese intelligence services have a poor record of looking after agents who get caught.
That sets them apart from the US, British and Russian agencies, who make a point of getting their people back as a way of encouraging loyalty and persuading potential recruits and assets that the risks of co-operation are worthwhile.
This attitude led to the spy swaps of the Cold War. Sergei Skripal, the GRU officer who spied for Britain and was swapped in 2010, was one beneficiary of that system until the Russians broke the rules and tried to murder him in exile. Viktor Bout, the convicted Russian arms dealer, and Vadim Krasikov, the FSB man who murdered a dissident in Berlin, are among those the Kremlin brought home after stints in jail.
But Beijing’s more utilitarian attitude presents obvious opportunities for rival services.
The other oddity is an obsessive appetite for information, however useless it may be.
While British, US or Russian spies might devote their precious resources on high-value targets – recruiting a mole in an enemy intelligence service, for example, or trying to find out as much as possible about a particular military or technical secret – China’s spooks seem determined to vacuum up every scrap of information they can find.
In a way, that might be a blessing, suggests one former Western official. If your adversary is wasting time hacking data he could have found with a Google search, it means he is not putting those resources into targets that matter.
The intelligence allegedly provided by Christopher Berry and Christopher Cash, a former parliamentary researcher, would probably have fallen into the could-have-been-a-Google-search category. Both men have always denied the accusations.
The MSS would have had “zero” interest in the information provided, one former Western official guessed.
The point was probably to normalise the idea of such a transactional relationship, so that if and when they rose to a more useful position in 10, 20 or 30 years, an exploitable relationship had already been established.
It would put Berry and Cash in the same boat as Glenn Duffie Shriver, an American who was approached by the MSS with an apparently innocuous request while working in Shanghai in the 2000s. He was eventually arrested after applying to join the CIA, at his handlers’ suggestion.
“It’s a fundamental political reality,” Feinberg said. “If you have an authoritarian Government that doesn’t have to worry about re-election cycles or public approval ratings, they can afford to be more patient than Governments which do.”
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