China’s Intelligence Networks in United
States Include 25,000 Spies
Dissident
reveals up to 18,000 Americans recruited as Chinese agents
Guo
Wengui
BY:
Bill Gertz
July 11, 2017 5:00 am
July 11, 2017 5:00 am
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."
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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
and his wife currently reside 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 30 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.
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