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By Edward Wong, Julian E. Barnes, Muyi Xiao and Chris Buckley
Edward Wong and Julian E. Barnes report on international relations and national security from Washington. Muyi Xiao covers China as part of the Visual Investigations team. Chris Buckley is the lead correspondent in China.
Chinese spies were looking for more. In meetings during the pandemic with Chinese tech entrepreneurs, they complained that surveillance cameras tracking foreign diplomats, military officials, and intelligence officials throughout Beijing’s embassy district were not meeting their needs.
The spies asked a synthetic intelligence program to immediately create files on each and every user of interest in the domain and analyze their behaviors. They proposed feeding AI. program with data from databases and dozens of cameras that would come with license plates of cars, mobile phones. phone data, contacts, and more.
AI-generated profiles would allow Chinese spies to target and identify their networks and vulnerabilities, according to internal assembly notes received via The New York Times.
The spies’ interest in the technology, disclosed here for the first time, reveals some of the vast ambitions of the Ministry of State Security, China’s main intelligence agency. In recent years, it has built itself up through wider recruitment, including of American citizens. The agency has also sharpened itself through better training, a bigger budget and the use of advanced technologies to try to fulfill the goal of Xi Jinping, China’s leader, for the nation to rival the United States as the world’s pre-eminent economic and military power.
The Chinese agency, known as M. S. S. , which was once teeming with agents whose main source of data gossip at embassy dinners, now clashes with the Central Intelligence Agency when it comes to collection and subterfuge around the world.
Now, Chinese agents in Beijing have what they’ve been asking for: AI. A formula that tracks American and other spies, said American officials and a user with knowledge of the agreement, who shared the data on the condition that the Times not disclose it. At the same time, China’s spending on the CIA has doubled since the start of the Biden administration, the United States has dramatically stepped up its spying on Chinese corporations and their technological advances.
This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former American officials, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, and a review of internal Chinese corporate documents and public M.S.S. documents.
The competition between U. S. and Chinese spy agencies dates back to the days of the KGB vs. KGB conflict. CIA. At that time, the Soviets built a company capable of stealing America’s best-kept secrets and conducting covert operations, while also producing formidable political leaders, including Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia.
But there is a noticeable difference. As a result of China’s economic boom and trade policies, M. S. S. It will use emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence to challenge U. S. spy chiefs in tactics the Soviets couldn’t. And those technologies are the first prizes of Chinese and U. S. espionage efforts.
“For China in particular, exploiting other people’s generational or industrial secrets is a popular shortcut fostered through the government,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank. “The urgency and intensity of technological espionage has increased dramatically. “
The M. S. S. has stepped up its intelligence gathering on U. S. corporations that are developing technologies for military and civilian use, while the CIA, unlike a few years ago, is devoting resources to gathering knowledge on Chinese corporations that are developing artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and other similar tools. .
Although the U. S. intelligence network has a long history of gathering economic intelligence, collecting detailed data on advertising technological advances outside defense corporations was once the kind of espionage the U. S. avoided.
But information about China’s development of emerging technologies is now considered as important as divining its conventional military might or the machinations of its leaders.
David Cohen, the company’s deputy director, said President Biden and the CIA were investing and reorganizing to meet the challenge of raising Chinese advances. The company has introduced a project center in China and a generational intelligence center.
“We’ve been counting tanks and understanding the capability of missiles for longer than we have been as sharply focused on the capability of semiconductors or A.I. algorithms or biotech equipment,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview.
But some policymakers say privately that the efforts are still sufficient and that Chinese corporations and military are unexpected to the U. S. government with their advances.
In China, the prestige of the Ministry of State Security has grown under Xi’s leadership, who values ambitious intelligence moves and a strong security state.
In October 2022, the Communist Party promoted ministerial leader Chen Wenqing to the post of the party’s most sensible security official and a member of the 24-member Politburo, the first intelligence leader in decades in the body. His replacement, Chen Yixin, a veteran Xi aide who has enhanced the public symbol of the M. S. S. Il, has also been given a broad mandate, including leading the crackdown on U. S. and foreign corporations investigating Chinese corporations, in addition to their ties to the military and their human rights abuses.
The branch has the CIA’s day-to-day jobs overseas and the FBI’s domestic mandate, combined with an authoritarian side. it is guilty of conducting intelligence-gathering and overseas operations, as well as restricting foreign influence in China and suppressing so-called subversive activities. Their project is overtly political: to protect the Communist Party from all perceived threats.
The current minister, Mr. Chen, has emphasized his loyalty to Mr. In June, he told officials to “wholeheartedly embrace” Mr. Xi’s “core” prestige.
Under Chen’s leadership, the branch is a social network to spread messages about threats. “US obstruction, containment and multifaceted repression will only make China more battle-hardened and self-reliant,” he said in a new WeChat account.
In August, the ministry made separate announcements claiming to have arrested two Chinese nationals spying for the CIA, one recruited through a U. S. agent in Japan and the other in Italy. In October, the ministry and Chinese state television announced a case in which a researcher at a defense industry institute recruited through a U. S. agent while he was a visiting scholar at a U. S. university. He then transferred copies of secret documents to Americans after returning to China, before being arrested in 2021.
The classified ads that the CIA had done rebuild a network in China that Chinese counterintelligence agents had decimated more than a decade ago.
The C.I.A. does not say whether people detained overseas on espionage charges are spies for the United States. But at least some of the Chinese citizens detained were working for the United States, according to people briefed on American intelligence reports. There is no evidence, however, that the M.S.S. has cracked the network, they said, and the Italy case is more than a year old.
The M. S. S. party is taking its own competitive steps abroad, adding to the recruitment of a far-right Belgian and the harassment of critics of the Chinese-born party. An agent hired a local personal investigator to physically attack a Chinese-American congressional candidate on Long Island, according to a Justice Department indictment. Another guy is accused of helping to create an organization in New York that attracted dissidents.
The central government in Beijing created the Ministry of State Security in 1983, in a reorganization of security units. For decades, the company has struggled to curry favor with leaders. Its Chinese rival, the People’s Liberation Army’s intelligence service, had more resources and greater skills, especially in cyber espionage.
The Ministry of State Security has improved its tactics, secured larger budgets, and even developed its business expertise. Some M. S. S. officials who allegedly present themselves undercover as businessmen were sent to private-sector offices for training, said Peter Mattis, a former CIA official, analyst and co-author of a book on Chinese espionage.
Chinese agents also expanded their foreign recruitment targets, including among U.S. citizens.
U. S. intelligence agencies were alarmed to discover that the Shanghai M. S. S. He had recruited an American student in China, Glenn Duffie Shriver, and led him to apply for the CIA. and the Decomposition of the State. Shriver was sentenced in 2011 to 4 years in prison. “It’s a vital signal to improve publicity techniques by the MSS, targeting non-Chinese Americans for the first time and trying to penetrate the U. S. intelligence community,” said John Culver, a former U. S. intelligence analyst.
The case had far-reaching consequences. This made U. S. counterintelligence agents more suspicious of U. S. task applicants who had studied in China or had contacts there, and turned their attention to the provincial offices of the M. S. S.
The offices are their own fiefdoms, founded out of the agency’s national headquarters, which is located in the secretive Xiyuan compound, northwest of Beijing. Under Xi’s leadership, they have become more competitive in their operations, with some specializing in recruiting and managing informants in the United States.
In Jiangsu province, next to Shanghai, there are other targets for collecting American secrets, namely defense technology, American officials said.
Its officials recruited Ji Chaoqun sometime before he left for the United States in 2013 to study engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, according to the Justice Department and court documents. The manager, Xu Yanjun, asked him to provide the names of at least nine other people in the U. S. They were asked by the U. S. intelligence company to investigate them to recruit aerospace and satellite technologies.
Mr. Ji eventually joined the U. S. Army Reserve. He was born in the U. S. , where he sought a security clearance so he could eventually apply to work at the CIA, FBI, or NASA. He was arrested in Chicago in 2018 and sentenced this year to 8 years in prison. Mr. Xu, his teacher, arrested in Brussels in 2018, as part of a similar operation led by the FBI, became M. S. S. ‘s first agent. to be extradited to the United States.
Unlike Russian agents, M. S. S. case agents sometimes avoid working undercover in the United States, who prefer to direct agents or assets from abroad and recruit online, adding jobs with no obvious connection to China, U. S. officials said.
Around 2018, a Singaporean agent of the M. S. S. “He created a fake consulting company that used the same call as a U. S. primary consulting company and posted job classified ads online with that company’s call,” said Michael C. Casey, director of the National Center of Counterintelligence and Security.
The M. S. S. hires directly from universities, especially for key positions, according to a review of more than 30 agency online assignment postings. In recent years, it has sought out generation experts, adding hackers, according to two other people with knowledge of the recruitment efforts.
Beijing’s biggest fear is that the United States and its allies will deprive China of technological know-how important for economic and military growth. Xi takes the risk of taking the risk.
Mr. Chen, the minister of state security, wrote in an article in September that “core technologies” remained under the control of other nations, and that reaching “technological self-reliance” was an urgent task.
Chinese government experts unabashedly appreciate the U. S. spy agencies’ collection functions and technology. Chinese intelligence magazines publish studies examining U. S. operations. A recent study by the U. S. National Security Service through the Chinese Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, the principal M. S. S. After a thorough evaluation of the applicable U. S. methods, China deserves to decide what works and dispense with what doesn’t. “
The M.S.S. has also been elevating experts on the United States. Early this year, one such analyst, Yuan Peng, president of the main research institute, appeared under a new name, Yuan Yikun, as a vice minister of the ministry itself. Earlier in his career, Mr. Yuan often mixed with American scholars, some of whom saw him as a coolheaded observer of Washington.
While he was president of the think tank, Yuan has a proponent of Yuan’s radical concept of “comprehensive national security. “Xi, who portrays the United States as the biggest risk to China’s rise.
“Biden said ‘America is back,’ but global is not the same as it used to be, and if it can’t keep pace with the big global changes, then this world in conversion will inevitably slip out of American control,” Biden said. Wrote. Yuan in an assessment of the foreign strategy published in early 2022. ” Judging by the U. S. grand strategy that will exist decades from now, its biggest mistake may be in selecting China as its enemy. “
One from William J. Burns, the C. I. A. director, to create the China Mission Center. The idea is to ensure that stations around the world, not just in Asia, focus on gathering intelligence on China.
Burns took the step after a strategic review led by Michael Collins, a career intelligence officer. Under Burns’ leadership, Collins has been named Chief Strategy Officer, with a mandate to support the agency’s work in China.
The Chinese challenge demands that the U. S. “be prudent in critical areas such as biotechnology and semiconductors,” said Collins, who now heads the National Intelligence Council, a structure that groups spy agencies. “We have to be better. “
To better understand Chinese-led technologies, the CIA has begun asking U. S. leaders and academics for ideas on what Chinese companies are looking to develop. Universities and corporations, contacted through Chinese investors and researchers, are familiar with such express technologies, U. S. officials said.
But officials said it was important to bring in people with deeper knowledge of China’s commercial and technological ambitions. For now the spy agencies are struggling to get information to policymakers as quickly as they want it.
Last year, a Canadian company, TechInsights, revealed that China’s leading chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, had developed a seven-nanometer chip. The U. S. government was unaware of the breakthrough and was surprised that the Chinese company had taken the step so quickly, said Jimmy Goodrich, a Chinese-generation professional who advises RAND Corporation.
“The intelligence network is simply not institutionally organized to be able to perceive the problems of China’s industry and generation,” he said. “It’s hard to do. And more importantly, you actually have to think like a Wall Street analyst, a market researcher, speaking to everyone the chain of origin.
(A U. S. official said U. S. intelligence agencies had assessed that the company had at least the capability to produce the smallest chip before the Canadian report. )
Part of this is that U. S. intelligence agencies favor satellite data, interception programs, and human spies. A senior U. S. official said analysts were overlooking valuable data from unclassified resources in China.
“The American intelligence network can do incredible things on specific targets,” said Mattis, the former CIA director. But it can be difficult to perceive China’s technological prowess. “
Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent who has worked for The Times for more than 24 years from New York, Baghdad, Beijing and Washington. He is part of a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists for covering the Iraq war. Learn more about Edward Wong
Julian E. Barnes covers U. S. intelligence agencies and foreign security issues for The Times. He has been writing about security issues for more than two decades. Learn more about Julian E. Barnes
Muyi Xiao is a journalist with the Visual Investigations team, which combines classic journalism with complex virtual forensic analysis. She has been covering China for a decade. More information about Muyi Xiao
Chris Buckley, the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues. More about Chris Buckley
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