Forty Chinese officers, a retired NYPD sergeant, two Navy sailors-turned-spies, and two minders of a secret Chinese police station in New York. These cases, and others, feed an ever-growing list of FBI investigations as the agency zeroes in on combating Chinese espionage operations, an arena it has branded its “top counterintelligence priority.”
“Our adversaries’ targets are our nation’s core economic assets—our information and ideas, our innovation, our research and development, our technology,” an FBI spokesperson told The Epoch Times.
“No country poses a broader, more severe threat to those assets than China.”
To put the scale into perspective, FBI Director Christopher Wray said in 2020 that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “deep and wide and persistent” ability to influence American sectors prompts the agency to open a China-related probe about every 10 hours.
Casey Fleming, CEO of the BlackOps Partners Corporation, said the CCP will do “anything to weaken our society.”
China’s goal, he said, is to “win a war without fighting.”
Mr. Fleming’s company advises businesses on cybersecurity and corporate counterintelligence strategies.
“The level of the Chinese Communist Party’s espionage and influence and subversion is beyond most people’s comprehension,” he told The Epoch Times.
‘A Line in the Sand’
The FBI’s focus on Chinese threats has marked a shift in decades of U.S. policy, and something that only picked up in about the past five years, observed Mr. Fleming.
In late 2018, the DOJ launched the China Initiative as part of a new strategic priority to counter Chinese national security threats. Led by the department’s national security division, the initiative brought in a dramatic upsurge in prosecutions targeting Beijing’s state-sanctioned theft of trade secrets with a focus on Chinese hackers, spies, and those who allegedly stole intellectual property from their U.S. employers for China’s benefit.
In February of 2018, Mr. Wray, who was then half a year into his job, testified in a Senate committee hearing on Chinese espionage that Beijing represents a “whole-of-society” threat.
“When we open investigations into economic espionage, time and time again, they keep leading back to China,” he told lawmakers.
By Eva Fu
