CIA Website For Chinese Spies – Failing The Test

Years ago, in the Middle East, I attended a national day in a large hotel in the nation’s capital city. The room was filled with diplomats from all the embassies in town. As usual, a large proportion of those present were intelligence officers.

I watched across the room as one of the junior CIA officers working for me approached an Iraqi diplomat, shook his hand, and tried to engage him in conversation. The Iraqi looked like he wanted to sink into the floor and vanish. The diplomat’s colleagues stood across the room and watched. This was when Saddam was still in power. Americans and Iraqis did not chit-chat in public.

The next morning, the CIA officer came to talk to me in Station and reported that he had “made contact” with an Iraqi official at the national day the night before. He thought he had really accomplished something. I told him to close the door and sit down. I asked him if he understood what he had done.

He did not.

I told the junior officer that as far as the Iraqi was concerned, he had “failed the test” and that any chance he ever had at getting this Iraqi to cooperate with us was now gone. “What you told him,” I said, “Was that you understand nothing about the reality in which he lives. You approached him in a public setting. You did so in front of his coworkers. They will now have to report that contact. He will have to report that contact. And, the first question Iraqi intelligence will want answered is – what did you do that made the American think you would welcome contact with him?”

In short, I made clear, the Iraqi in question will likely be back in Baghdad within the week, and he will be lucky if he is not under interrogation in a dark cell shortly thereafter.

I thought of all this recently when I saw that the CIA was now producing slick videos for distribution on the web, encouraging Chinese officials to volunteer to work for American intelligence and to do so by using a website CIA has created online. Our plan for acquiring sources inside the Chinese Communist Party, the People’s Liberation Army, and other priority targets in China is to have them log on to the internet and access a website advertising itself as being run by CIA explicitly for this purpose.

One wonders how long the average CCP official thinks he would have before his door was kicked in if he followed these instructions.

This is not how espionage works. It is not a video game. It is not a theoretical exercise. It is about life and death, and the fate of your family, and dying in a horrible, protracted way if you get it wrong.

You do not convince a man to betray his country, risk the lives of his wife and children, and trust you with his future by telling him to fill out a form online. You do it by establishing a connection, mapping his motivations and vulnerabilities, and ultimately forming a bond with him so strong that he will do the dangerous things you ask of him.

In particular, given our track record with the Chinese, you do not ask a potential asset to trust the security of some website that anyone on the planet can access from anywhere. There has been voluminous reporting in the past about the number of Chinese assets we have lost, because our supposedly secure clandestine communications systems were compromised by the CCP and our assets’ identities revealed. Telling them to believe that “it’s all better now” and that cannot happen again is not going to fly.