The world of intelligence is a jungle. Allies, friends and partners keep an eye on each other. Adversaries do all they can to track the intentions and capabilities of their rivals, penetrate each other’s national security and political systems, and mount covert operations to shape desired outcomes. And so, if the world’s second most powerful nation is using the centuries-old technique of a surveillance balloon, albeit in a far more technically sophisticated avatar, to track the most powerful nation that
The world of intelligence is a jungle. Allies, friends and partners keep an eye on each other. Adversaries do all they can to track the intentions and capabilities of their rivals, penetrate each other’s national security and political systems, and mount covert operations to shape desired outcomes. And so, if the world’s second most powerful nation is using the centuries-old technique of a surveillance balloon, albeit in a far more technically sophisticated avatar, to track the most powerful nation that it seeks to displace, it is not news for those inhabiting the world of secrets.
But it is news if you get caught.
The discovery of the Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon as it traversed continental American territory hit public consciousness in the United States (US) hard. Perhaps the imagery of the balloon, on all news networks and social media, did it. Years after the US intelligence community woke up to the threat posed by Chinese espionage, America’s politicians and citizens now appear sufficiently alarmed. President Joe Biden’s decision to instruct the military to shoot down the balloon — the military has since shot down three other unidentified aerial objects, the provenance of which are not known — was met with universal applause.
But first, a caveat.
While the US has denied that it has any high-altitude surveillance balloons over Chinese airspace, there is no doubt that there is a vast American surveillance apparatus at work in China and tracking China around the world. The US intelligence community had a budget of $89.8 billion in 2022. It comprises 18 agencies. In 2021, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) set up a special China mission centre to strengthen its collective work “on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government”. And with both the national security and national defence strategy explicitly terming China as the main challenge, America cannot but be pooling its formidable strengths to track and weaken China.
But the Americans didn’t get caught. The Chinese did. And so, it is instructive to trace Beijing’s institutional intelligence apparatus and recent actions.
In June 1983, the sixth National People’s Congress of the Chinese Communist Party approved the establishment of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) “to protect the security of the state and strengthen China’s counterespionage work”. In November 2015, China’s president Xi Jinping converted the second department of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Staff Department, also called 2PLA, as the intelligence bureau of the PLA joint staff department. Xi also created the Strategic Support Force (SSF), making it the home of all technical and tactical reconnaissance work along with electronic and information warfare elements. The MSS, the intelligence bureau and SSF, along with the ministry of public security, various state enterprises, and front organisations, constitute the kernel of the Chinese security State.
Over the past decade, China has engaged in far more audacious, and successful, operations against the US.
Between 2010 and 2012, it was the Americans who got caught. China, through a combination of a mole inside the CIA and breaking a sloppy communication system, cracked open a high-level network of American assets in the Chinese government. It then began a brutal exercise in executing these sources. The New York Times, in 2017, pegged the number of those executed to at least a dozen; an investigative report in Foreign Policy magazine subsequently put the number at over 30. One source was shot in the courtyard of his office building in a message to others. But besides the human cost, it left American intelligence efforts in China crippled.
In 2015, the US acknowledged that China had hacked into the security files of the US Office of Personnel Management, accessing over 21 million records. But don’t go by the numbers. This meant that China had access to the security files of every retired, current and prospective American federal employee, including military personnel — the files included their personal details, family backgrounds, psychological information, financial status, sexual orientation, addresses, pay and employment history, and insurance details.
The scale of the operation was such that it prompted the then director of national intelligence, James Clapper, to say, “You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did. If we had the opportunity to do that, I don’t think we would hesitate for a minute.”
In 2015, China’s hackers stole the personal data of 80 million customers of Anthem and associated health insurance companies. In 2017, China hacked Equifax, one of the largest consumer credit reporting agencies, and accessed sensitive personal information of 150 million Americans.
But beyond personal information of American citizens, China has, over the years, accessed America’s intellectual property. In her excellent book, Spies, Lies and Algorithms, Amy Zegart writes about how China stole trillions of dollars of intellectual property, including terabytes of data and schematics for the F-35 and F-22 stealth fighter jet programmes. “Targeting industries at the forefront of innovation and commerce, China’s intellectual property theft strikes at the heart of economic power. It was considered so serious, Gen. Keith Alexander, once the nation’s top cyberwarrior, called it ‘the greatest transfer of wealth in history’.” In 2020, in a remarkably candid speech, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Christopher Wray said that there had been an increase by 1,300% in economic espionage cases with a link to China in the preceding decade, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was opening a China-related counter-intelligence case every 10 hours, and half of FBI’s 5,000 counter-intelligence cases were related to China.
It has taken a balloon, but the American Main Street has finally woken up to the Chinese Deep State.
The views expressed are personal
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