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FBI Taps Chinese Students for Intelligence NewsMax.comAn anonymous scholar, who has reportedly advised the FBI, tells the New York Times that the agency has been engaged for the last year in “a very strongly renewed effort” to monitor and recruit Chinese students - as part of the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s announced intent “to track all foreign students.” According to the Times’ source, the FBI has been approaching students in nuclear physics, aerodynamics, engineering (missiles or space satellite), nanotechnology, and other studies related to supercomputers and encryption. Part of the modus operandi of the Bureau reportedly is to establish ties with such students via organized meetings with Chinese groups on some campuses, ostensibly seeking to recruit translators. The FBI official involved in recruiting students told the Times that those being sought may or may not already be working for the Chinese government or military. The purpose of the program is to use the student recruits to learn specifics about how the Chinese government is working to obtain technologies useful to the Chinese military in the United States. The official told the Times that the Chinese, for example, would recruit a student to “get on the university system and e-mail us everything about widgets.” An Old Story None of this comes as a surprise to Paul D. Moore, director and lecturer for Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, who has long warned government officials and his students alike about China’s unique style of casual espionage. Moore likes to use the example of Gao Zhan, the American university lecturer who was imprisoned for a time in China before being released as a goodwill gesture to a visiting Secretary of State Colin Powell: “Gao Zhan … collected intelligence for spy agencies in Taiwan, causing a serious threat to China’s national security,” China’s state-run Xinhua news agency quoted her drumhead tribunal as saying. The trial and conviction, last year, of the American University employee and U.S. citizen took but four hours, and, according to her lawyers, the only evidence the Chinese prosecutors produced in her case was that she had photocopied articles from Chinese government publications about relations between China and Taiwan.
Many China watchers were left shaking their heads at how and why the apparently benign house wife and mother got in such a fix – but not Moore, a retired veteran FBI Chinese counterintelligence analyst, who understands completely the mindset that spun Gao’s into the maelstrom of weird science that defines “spying” to the inscrutable oriental.
“American scholars are being arrested, tried and convicted of espionage for the simple reason that their work meets China’s definition of what a spy is, what a spy does and what information a spy collects,” according to Moore.
The simple acquisition of public information may meet the definition of espionage, says Moore. “China has a much lower threshold for deciding what is classified.”
It is this very uniqueness of the Chinese approach to spying that ensnared Gao. No Smoking Guns
“China does not normally pay an agent for information, request that the agent provide classified documents, use intelligence officers to elicit information from the agent or engage in clandestine activity like ‘dead drops’ in the United States,” Moore explained. Moore adds that when tracking Chinese espionage in the U.S. there are rarely any “smoking guns” - the usual suspects of unexplained bank deposits and videotapes of a suspect leaving items in a hollow rock in the park. What Moore has been reciting for years as his mantra is now apparently the cornerstone of the new FBI counter-intelligence effort on campuses. A senior FBI official told the Times that the program was focused on students and scholars because they were singled out by the Chinese government to collect information – especially in nuclear physics and disciplines that could be used to enhance their own military communications and missile tracking. The official said the FBI was trying to identify people with access to the directives of the Chinese government who “can tell us where they’re focusing their efforts.” He added that the FBI field offices were also looking for people who “if they go home [to China], or when they go home, would be in a position to assist us.”
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