The FBI Warns of Increasingly Aggressive Chinese Espionage in America.
The FBI Director is talking about an unprecedented level, bolder and more dangerous than ever.
The White Pagoda was to stand at the center of a Chinese National Garden in the vast park of the National Arboretum in Washington, surrounded by traditional Chinese pavilions with gracefully curved roofs, round doors opening onto rock gardens, and poetic names such as “Touch of Clouds,” “Gentle Ripple,” or “Happy Rain.”
Approved by the U.S. Congress in 2008, when relations between China and the United States were still cordial, the project was presented in 2011 by Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to then-Chinese President Hu Jintao. Construction was set to begin in the summer of 2017.
China was so anxious to complete the construction that it even offered to pay the entire budget, estimated at $100 million. And also to import the construction materials directly through the diplomatic bag, exempt from any customs control. The Chinese National Garden in Washington, D.C., never saw the light of day.
In 2017, the FBI quietly pulled the plug on the project, believing that this 70 feet high pagoda built on one of the high points of the federal capital was also an ideal location for communications intercepts, just a few miles from the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon.
U.S. federal agents also recommended at the time that Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, distance themselves from Wendi Deng, the Chinese ex-wife of Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media mogul. A close friend of the couple, Deng was very active in promoting the Chinese National Garden. She is also strongly suspected of having close relations with the Chinese intelligence services.
The White Pagoda was only one project among others in the vast enterprise of penetrating Chinese espionage on the territory and in American institutions. Since then, Beijing's efforts have not ceased, quite the contrary. The Americans have continued to uncover new cases.
Chinese spying in America is more dangerous than ever for the FBI director
In early 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that Chinese espionage in the United States had reached “an unprecedented level, bolder and more dangerous than ever.” Describing Chinese intelligence as the main threat to American economic security, he also emphasized the wide variety of its activities.
These go far beyond intelligence gathering and clandestine action to encompass a wide range of areas, including the private sector: business, research, and academia. “The greatest long-term threat to our nation's information and intellectual property, and our economic vitality, is the threat posed by China's economic espionage,” Wray warned.
The intertwining of legal economic activities and intelligence makes Chinese espionage particularly complex to thwart, especially for American companies unaccustomed to such practices.
For example, when Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE signed contracts with several small private American telephone operators to build hundreds of antennas in the Great Plains and Midwest, the FBI discovered that these relays were also installed near several strategic American military bases. And also very close to nuclear missile silos scattered in the countryside of these rural states of the central United States.
According to CNN, which broke the story in July 2022, the FBI determined that the equipment was capable of not only picking up but also disrupting Pentagon communications, including those used by the U.S. Strategic Air Command, which oversees nuclear weapons. Since then, other cases have arisen where the economic partnership is almost as difficult to distinguish from intelligence operations.
America is concerned about the 75,000 hectares of land owned by China on its soil
Last year, the purchase of 120 hectares of farmland in North Dakota by Fufeng USA, the American subsidiary of a Chinese agribusiness group, was initially welcomed by local authorities, who saw the construction of a grain plant and the creation of 1,000 jobs. But the project's proximity to the Grand Forks military air base, from which Global Hawk drones, one of the U.S. defense industry's most sensitive technologies, operate, has since made the operation a little more suspicious.
U.S. national security officials are now questioning the ultimate purpose of China's numerous farmland purchases in the United States. U.S. authorities estimated in 2019 that Communist China's holdings on U.S. soil totaled more than 75,000 hectares, worth $1.9 billion.
Federal institutions are also targeted. In August 2022, a U.S. Senate report revealed that the Chinese government had conducted a decade-long campaign of espionage and influence targeting the U.S. Federal Reserve, which is responsible for monetary policy. Chinese agents tried to induce U.S. officials to reveal sensitive information about economic policy decisions, sometimes using threats.
“China's targeting of Federal Reserve officials rarely appears to be aimed at fostering legitimate collaboration,” the report explained, “but rather at malicious, undisclosed, and illegal information transfers intended to harm the United States.”
No American institution appears to be safe from Chinese operations. Companies, laboratories, universities, researchers, legislators, and the general public are targets for Chinese intelligence, which seeks to expand its influence while countering decisions that could be unfavorable to it. The range of its actions is vast: human intelligence, cyber intrusions, transfer, or outright plundering of technology.
The tensions between the United States and China, reminiscent of those at the beginning of the Cold War, have changed Washington's perception of Chinese espionage. Instead of an economic nuisance, Beijing's clandestine activities are now seen as a major strategic challenge by the United States.
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