Chinese intelligence and spying (catch all)

[AdamG]

Academia can usually be relied upon to have a passive disloyalty to the Republic, but Professor Xiaoxing Xi was fairly assertive.

The chairman of Temple University's physics department was charged Thursday in an alleged scheme to provide sensitive U.S. defense technology to entities in China, including its government.

Federal prosecutors allege Xiaoxing Xi, a world-renowned expert in the field of superconductivity, sought prestigious appointments in China in exchange for sharing information on a device invented by a private company in the United States.

Xi, a 47-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in Penn Valley, made his initial appearance in U.S. District Court on Thursday on four counts of wire fraud and was released on a $100,000 bond. He had not retained a lawyer and did not return calls for comment.

http://articles.philly.com/2015-05-2...s-china-device

Hackers apparently based in China have had access to Pennsylvania State University’s engineering school computers for over two years, the university disclosed on Friday after a lengthy analysis by federal and private investigators.

The breach potentially has exposed research pertaining to technology for the U.S. Defense Department.

The university said it would take the affected computer network offline for several days to root out the hackers.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/penn-sta...ked-1431804110

From 2014 -

A prominent Beijing scholar who recently fled to the United States has warned that China was sending "spies" to American universities, and urged US institutions to tread carefully on academic co-operation.

Xia Yeliang is one of the original signatories of Charter 08, a petition for reform whose Nobel Prize-winning lead author Liu Xiaobo is in prison.

Xia, an economist, was fired in October from Peking University. In his first public event since moving to the US last month, Xia said on Thursday he was mindful of the 1950s McCarthy era, when smears of alleged communist sympathies hit the reputations of Americans in government, entertainment and academia.

But Xia, who has been a visiting scholar at several US universities, said he was aware of "real spies" sent by Beijing to the US to carry out surveillance under the guise of academic exchange.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/artic...over-educating

From 2012 -

While overshadowed by espionage against corporations, efforts by foreign countries to penetrate universities have increased in the past five years, Figliuzzi said. The FBI and academia, which have often been at loggerheads, are working together to combat the threat, he said.

Attempts by countries in East Asia, including China, to obtain classified or proprietary information by “academic solicitation,” such as requests to review academic papers or study with professors, jumped eightfold in 2010 from a year earlier, according to a 2011 U.S. Defense Department report. Such approaches from the Middle East doubled, it said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...etected-by-fbi

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to WoTR for an extensive commentary, with links, by a SME and starts with - even after the OPM "hack":

Discussion of China’s intelligence threat often seems over-hyped if not disconnected from reality. Apart from cyber intrusions, little evidence suggests Chinese intelligence deserves the credit for quality that it has received.

Link:http://warontherocks.com/2015/08/a-g...e-operations/?

A month ago the author wrote on the OPM matter:http://warontherocks.com/2015/07/chi...united-states/

[AdamG]

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) foiled the plan and also prevented the two Chinese partners from trying to acquire engines used in other US fighter jets, according to US federal court documents opened last week quoted in a report by Defense News.
The court documents allege that AFM Microelectronics Corporation Vice President Wenxia “Wency” Man, based in San Diego, and Xinsheng Zhang, described in the documents as an official arms dealer for the Beijing government, tried to buy and then export the engines to China.
General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aircraft taxis at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas.
They targeted the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle and the Pratt & Whitney F135 engine used on the F-35 stealth fighter.

Read more: http://sputniknews.com/military/2015...#ixzz3pturPLtI

A woman accused of trying to send an unmanned Hellfire missile-firing drone and jet fighter engines to China via South Florida, pleaded not guilty to federal charges of illegal military weapons brokering Friday in Fort Lauderdale.

Prosecutors say Wenxia Man, aka Wency, 44, was working with a man she called a "technology spy" who procures information from Russia and other nations "so that China can obtain sophisticated technology without having to conduct its own research."

The so-called "technology spy," Xinsheng Zhang, was indicted on related charges in South Florida but authorities said he is in China and has not yet been arrested.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/br...023-story.html

[davidbfpo]

A "breaking" story this weekend by John Schindler, as the USN revealed an officer had been in military custody for eight months, charged with espionage whilst serving in ELINT P-3 Orions. The article is critical of the USN following other incidents (IIRC some have appeared on SWC before):http://observer.com/2016/04/amid-sho...er-be-trusted/

[AdamG]

Was that wrong? Should she have not done that?

A us diplomat who allegedly took tens of thousands of dollars in cash and gifts from chinese intelligence agents was charged on wednesday with lying to investigators over the contacts.
The case was announced days before the first summit between chinese president xi jinping and his us counterpart donald trump in florida next week, but chinese analysts said the prosecution was unlikely to affect the meeting.
The department of justice said candace marie claiborne, 60, knew that the two chinese men she had regular contact with while working for the us state department in china and other countries were from the chinese security services and that the money they gave her was in exchange for us secrets.
She took cash and an iphone for herself, but most of the funds went to an unidentified man half her age with whom she lived in beijing and shanghai.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/artic...ligence-agents

[davidbfpo]

A NYT report that starts with:

The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.

Link:https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/2...espionage.html

[Bill Moore]

A NYT report that starts with:Link:https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/2...espionage.html

Those who rejected the mole theory attributed the losses to sloppy American tradecraft at a time when the Chinese were becoming better at monitoring American espionage activities in the country. Some F.B.I. agents became convinced that C.I.A. handlers in Beijing too often traveled the same routes to the same meeting points, which would have helped China’s vast surveillance network identify the spies in its midst

.

There are a number of possibilities on how the agents were compromised as the article points out. Espionage has always been a hazardous line of work, and it is even more so in the age of transparency. Also an age when we're overly forgiving of those who leak classified information, or in the case of former Secretary of State Clinton and others who maintain classified e-mails on unsecure systems. There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle that are now publically available.

I pulled the above quote from the article to also point out that I believe tradecraft skills probably have eroded over recent years due to the massive human intelligence requirement to support the war on terror. This may have created an erosion in tradecraft skills for at least two reasons. Mass production of case officers, and then conducting operations against relatively unsophisticated opposition (Jihadists). Not all were unsophisticated, but the most of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were, but even there shortcuts resulted in CIA agents getting killed.

Operating against a state actor like China and Russia is a very different and much more challenging challenge. The hard lessons of tradecraft developed over years need to be followed, regardless of how inconvenient they may be.