China’s Intelligence Networks in United States Include 25,000 Spies
Beijing's spy networks in the United States include up to
25,000 Chinese intelligence officers and more than 15,000 recruited
agents who have stepped up offensive spying activities since 2012,
according to a Chinese dissident with close ties to Beijing's military
and intelligence establishment.
Guo Wengui, a billionaire businessman who broke with the
regime several months ago, said in an interview that he has close ties
to the Ministry of State Security (MSS), the civilian intelligence
service, and the military spy service of the People's Liberation Army
(PLA).
"I know the Chinese spy system very, very well," Guo said,
speaking through an interpreter, in his first American interview. "I
have information about very minute details about how it operates."
Guo said he learned about Chinese spy activities from Ma
Jian, a former MSS vice minister, and Ji Shengde, former PLA military
intelligence chief.
Ma was director of MSS's No. 8 Bureau, in charge of
counterintelligence against foreign targets—including diplomats,
businessmen, and reporters—until he was swept up in a Beijing power
struggle in December 2015. He was expelled from the Communist Party and
imprisoned in January.
Guo said Ma was imprisoned because he had uncovered details
of corruption by China's highest-ranking anti-corruption official, Wang
Qishan.
Ma said in a video made public by the Chinese government
several weeks ago that he worked with Guo in assisting Chinese national
security.
Regarding, Ji, the military spy chief, Guo said he had close
ties to him and turned down requests from Ji to work as a smuggler for
2PLA, as the military spy agency was known.
Ji was implicated in the 1990s scandal involving Chinese
funding of Bill Clinton's presidential re-election campaign. In China,
he was given a suspended death sentence by a military court in 2000 on
charges of bribery and illegal fundraising.
Ji lives in China and his wife currently resides in Los
Angeles, and Guo said he paid money to Ji for 25 years as part of
China's use of businesses to support intelligence activities.
"I know Ma Jian had been working state security system for
over 30 years," he said. "And he was responsible for sending out spies
as well as for counter espionage, also vis a vis the U.S. So, Ma Jian
knows everything about the United States."
Guo is a Chinese real estate investor who fled China in
2015. He currently resides in New York City and since January has become
a target of a major Chinese government campaign to silence him.
In May, two senior Chinese security officials traveled to
the United States as part of a bid to pressure Guo into keeping silent,
and not disclosing secrets about corruption among senior Chinese
officials, as well as details of the intelligence activities.
The two officials, Sun Lijun, vice minister of the Public
Security Ministry, and an aide, Liu Yanpang, also tried to convince
Trump administration officials to forcibly repatriate Guo back to China
amid claims of corruption.
Liu was arrested by the FBI for violating visa rules and his
cell phone and laptop computer were confiscated before the Chinese
official was allowed to leave the United States.
The Chinese officials, during meetings in Washington and New
York and by phone, threatened Guo, his family, and business associates
and said that if he remained silent, the government would release assets
of Guo's that are frozen in China worth an estimated $17 billion.
Over the past several months Guo, who also uses the name
Miles Kwok, began posting lengthy videos on Twitter and YouTube
disclosing what he knows about Chinese corruption and intelligence
activities.
One of the more explosive disclosures during an interview
involve Wang, current head of the Chinese government's anti-corruption
campaign and a member of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo Standing
Committee, the collective dictatorship that rules China.
According to Guo, Wang secretly invested in California real
estate since the late 1980s and has turned $30 million in purchases of
111 properties into an estimated $2 to $3 billion today.
Guo says he plans to detail Wang’s U.S. investments in a
video to be published next week. The residences include homes and
apartments in Washington and Bethesda in the east, and in California in
Los Angeles, San Jose, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, San Carlos, and
San Francisco. The video also shows a series of mansions owned by Wang
family members in Saratoga, Calif. In total the residences cost $12
million and are worth some $30 million today.
Wang, according to Guo, is the official who took over as the
top leader overseeing China's financial sector from Chinese Premier Zhu
Rongji, who stepped down in 2003.
One neighborhood in California of 14 houses owned by Wang or
his relatives has been fitted with special underground silos that are
used to store jewelry and documents, Guo said.
"If the FBI could go in there and get those documents, then they can negotiate with the Chinese government," he said.
Guo said he plans to disclose additional details of alleged
corruption by four other Chinese leaders, including Meng Jianzhu, a
member of the Politburo but not the Standing Committee, and He Guoqiang,
a retired official who was in charge of police and the courts.
"In the future I will report on another two current sitting
members of the Politburo Standing Committee, as well as two previous
members of the Standing Committee," he said.
Regarding a
report in the journal
Foreign Affairs
that the businessman represents a leadership faction in Beijing, Guo
denied the report. He said he began speaking out as part of long-planned
effort to bring democratic reform to China.
"What I want to do is change the whole system. That's what I want," he said.
Guo said Chinese police killed his brother and in 1989, when
China called out troops to put down unarmed pro-democracy protesters in
Beijing's Tiananmen Square, he was jailed for 22 months.
"I've prepared all that time until now," he said. "I want to
change the Chinese government. Absolutely, the Chinese government is
the mafia."
Guo said that Chinese intelligence operations in the United
States sharply increased after the 2012 Communist Party Congress that
brought current leader Xi Jinping to power.
"Before 2012, cumulatively China had around 10,000 to 20,000
agents working in the United States," he said. "These agents had been
sent to work in the United States over a 50 year period of time, and
they were working in a defensive mode."
According to the businessman, defensive intelligence was
mainly focused on learning about the United States. The operations then
shifted in 2012 to "offensive" spying, he said.
"By offensive [operations], I mean to be ready to destroy the U.S. in ways they can," Guo said.
China's budget for intelligence gathering before 2012 was around $600 million annually.
Around 2012, a decision was made by Chinese leaders to
dispatch another 5,000 spies to the United States. "Some of them were
sent as students, some as businessmen, and some as immigrants, but all
together, 5,000," Guo said.
"In addition to that, they developed between 15,000 to
18,000 other spies, and these are not directly sent but these are
developed within the United States."
The recruited agents are not limited to Asians and
Chinese-Americans but include all ethnic groups, including Hispanics,
Blacks, and Caucasians.
"And now the budget is between $3 billion to $4 billion annually, and this is information up to one month ago," he said.
Guo said American counterintelligence agencies face several
problems, mainly a lack of knowledge about Chinese intelligence
agencies.
"You don't know which organizations in China are responsible
for sending these spies, how they are managed, and to what purpose," he
said. "And the U.S. adopts a very legalistic perspective to look at the
question of spying. Yet, for China their methods are not what the
United States understands."
"These spies, when they come to the United States, they
could sleep around, they could put poison in your glass of wine to kill
you; completely unscrupulous," he said.
FBI spokesman Matthew Bertron declined to comment. A Chinese Embassy spokesman did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Chinese intelligence officers sent to the United States are
controlled by the MSS by keeping all their family members and relatives
hostage.
China's intelligence targets included several strategic areas of the United States.
"The first is to obtain military weapons-related technology. This is priority No. 1," Guo said.
Second, Chinese intelligence is engaged in "buying" senior
U.S. officials personally, and a third objective is buying family
members of American political or business elites "with a view to getting
intelligence and to make big business deals in China's favor," he said.
A fourth priority is penetrating the American internet system and critical infrastructure by implanting malicious software.
"And they have successfully penetrated all the major defense
weapons suppliers of the U.S. government," Guo said, adding that "the
scale of their operations is mind boggling."
Guo said Ma, the MSS vice minister, told him that a major
shift by the Chinese was expanding the scope of agent recruitment from
Asians to mainstream ethnic groups.
"This is where the biggest danger lies," he said. "It's
clear the situation is getting more and more dangerous now. The United
States has the best weapons in its arsenal, such as laser weapons, etc.
Yet, the Chinese spy system has penetrated into the bloodstream of
American defense establishment with their viruses and everything else."
"The United States is bleeding and is unaware that sooner or later the United States will run out of blood," Guo said.
Also, the United States is overly reliant on technical
spying while China has an asymmetrical advantage in using its tens of
thousands of human spies.
China also is working to subvert the United States by
working together with rogue regimes, such as those in North Korea and
Iran.
"So in a fight between rogues and a gentleman, the rogues
will always win," he said, "because the gentlemen fight a civilized war.
The rogues do not fight a civilized war."
Guo said he first visited the United States in 1983 when he was 13 and made numerous visits since then.
"I love my nation. I love my country, but I hate the Communist Party," he said.
Guo has not defected to the United States and holds several
foreign passports. His information could provide a windfall of data for
the U.S. government policymakers and intelligence analysts.
For example, on North Korea, Guo said he frequently visited
North Korea and has known every member of the ruling Kim Jong Un family.
"All the trade conducted between North Korea and China has
been conducted by the relatives of the ruling families," he said, noting
that the U.S. insistence in relying on the Chinese government to deal
with North Korea is "madness."
In Hong Kong, the MSS dispatched an additional 3,000
intelligence officers to the former British colony after the May 2013
incident involving former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who fled to
Hong Kong after stealing some 1.7 million secret agency documents.
The MSS agents were dispatched by Ma Jian after the spy
service learned the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong was hosting some 2,600
American agents.
"The office they work for is the Hong Kong Security
Department," Guo said, noting that before that time "it was more hit and
miss approach" to spying.
"They upped that until now they have 10,000 agents operating in Hong Kong alone."
Guo said Americans need to understand that China is not ruled by a normal government.
"You should look at it as a mafia-like organization," he said.
Second, to understand China, Americans need to study the relatives of the ruling elite in China.
"Once you get to know the interests of these powerful
individuals and also the family members, then you get to understand how
the regime operates," he said.
Guo hopes the United States will wake up to the threat posed
by China's communist system and its plans to subvert the U.S.-led
international order.
"If this relationship is not managed well, I think the whole
of humanity will confront major problems," he said. "The current
approach adopted by the American ruling elite is tantamount to suicide."
Guo warned of the dangers of a world dominated by the current anti-democratic Chinese system.
"If we do not have the United States exercising some kind of
control over the world system, the world will turn into a place where
men eat men," he said.
Michelle Van Cleave, former national counterintelligence
executive during the George W. Bush administration, said China has been
preparing for a major escalation of espionage and influence operations
against the Untied States.
"Remember their cyber theft of some 22 million personnel
files from the Office of Personnel Management?" she said. "The Chinese
now have a detailed roster of most if not all American contractors and
government employees who have access to classified information, plus a
roster of their friends, colleagues, or coworkers who may be useful
conduits or potential assets in their own right."
Van Cleave said the OPM data likely will be used by Chinese
intelligence to coerce, blackmail, or recruit new sources for an already
extensive espionage infrastructure.
"Cyber and human espionage go hand in hand—and the Chinese
excel at both," she said. "We urgently need a better understanding of
what they are doing and how they are doing it—and a strategy to stop
them—because China’s intelligence operations in the U.S. are poised to
get much worse."
Former FBI counterspy I.C. Smith said the large number of
MSS officers could be a reasonable estimate if the figure includes
Chinese who work informally for the service such as students, permanent
resident aliens, visitors, and others.
"China is no friend of ours and is never going to be a
responsible member of the world community as long as the CCP is in
power," Smith said.
"It's a reprehensible, morally and criminally corrupt police
state run by a powerful elite whose every waking hour is to figure out
how to capitalize on their positions and remain in power," he said.
