Be
subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every
kind of business. - Sun
Tzu in Art of War, Chapter
XIII
One March 25, Chinese-born engineer
Chi Mak was sentenced to over 24 years in prison
by a Californian court for plotting to obtain
American naval submarine technology and illegally
exporting it to China. The case offered a rare
peek into the new multipolar world espionage
system that is more complex than that of the
bipolar Cold War-era.
While spying is
reputed to be the world's second-oldest
profession, existing from time immemorial, its
peculiar shapes and patterns are provided by the
changing configurations of global power. Routine
intelligence gathering by agents of one state in
another state occurs both in wartime and
peacetime, but the states that invest the most and
reap the maximum from spying
have
always been great powers.
The ideal spy is
one who is a citizen or resident of the target
country, has access to its sensitive decision
making portals, and/or is part of its government
or industrial machinery. By virtue of their deep
pockets, great powers tend to scoop up the bulk of
such perfect candidates and leave the dregs to the
wannabes.
The quality foreign agents'
market is thus an "oligopsony" that responds to
the choices of a small number of great power
buyers. In this imperfectly competitive market
where the big buyers set the rules, the
techniques, pay scales and risks that define the
trade are decided essentially by the preferences
and counter-espionage tactics of the great powers.
It is in this context that incidents like
the conviction of Chi Mak in California assume
significance. China's choice of utilizing persons
of Chinese origin residing in the United States,
though not unique, is a sustained preference that
is changing the rules of the market. For
nearly two decades, Beijing has mobilized the
Chinese-American community to penetrate US
military corporations that are working on
government defense contracts. According to the US
Central Intelligence Agency, Beijing recruits
these agents by playing the "shared ancestry" card
as an accompaniment to the usual monetary
remuneration.
US counter-espionage
professionals contend that this is a unique style
patented by China wherein the agents are relative
amateurs such as Chinese students,
businesspersons, visiting scientists as well as
persons of Chinese heritage living in the US. Each
individual may produce only a small iota of data,
but a network of such persons could vacuum up an
extensive amount of sensitive military and
economic information.
Attesting to this
strategy, high-profile arrests of Chinese
intelligence agents in the US are always
characterized as "spy rings" that involved
multiple coordinates. Chi Mak was arrested in 2005
along with four other family members who were
acting as couriers or accomplices at different
points of the information chain that allegedly
traced its way from Los Angeles to China's
Ministry of State Security and the People's
Liberation Army (PLA).
In February, the
duo of Tai Shen Kuo and Yu Xin Kang was arrested
in New Orleans, Louisiana, for purchasing
classified data about US weapons systems being
shipped to Taiwan. While Kuo apparently cultivated
a relationship with a Pentagon official, Kang
acted as a "cut out" or intermediary between Kuo
and a Chinese government official.
Unrelated to Kuo and Kang's case is the
arrest in February 2008 of Dongfan Chung, an
ex-Boeing engineer accused of passing on details
of antenna systems for space shuttles to the
Chinese government. Chung's indictment claims that
he had good relations with Mak's family and had
been advised by his Chinese handlers to pass
information through Mak in the 1980s.
As
in the other cases, Chung was gathering low-grade
intelligence that was not, in itself, of high
value. John Pike, the director of
GlobalSecurity.org, remarked on Chung's arrest to
the Orange County Register, "Chinese do not hit
home runs. Their theory is that if you do enough
of it, eventually it will amount to something."
The concentric circle in which a Chinese
American like Mak, residing in California, teams
up with a fellow Chinese American like Chung, in
Florida, and unknown others indicates that
espionage has truly entered a multipolar era.
Instead of the classical methods used by other
great power intelligence services involving tight
control over a few, deeply planted and valuable
assets, Beijing employs an array of decentralized
networks that thrive on the Chinese diaspora.
That this strategy is not limited to
spying on the US is revealed by allegations of a
former Chinese diplomat, Chen Yonglin, that
Beijing had more than a thousand secret agents
operating in Australia and Canada. Yonglin
emphasized to the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation that the networks "extend to countries
with large Chinese immigrant populations".
If China revolutionized the mass
production and export of low-value added
manufacturing goods, it has also invented a new
brand of high-volume low-unit-value intelligence
collection that might be copied by other emerging
great powers.
In March 2008, Parthasarathy
Sudarshan, an Indian-American owner of an
electronics firm, was found guilty in a US court
of conspiring to illegally export controlled
microprocessors and electronic components to
government entities in India developing ballistic
missiles. Like the Chinese government in cases
involving Chinese-American spies, the Indian
government has firmly denied being connected with
Sudarshan. However, the US Justice Department
cited an unnamed Indian Embassy official in
Washington DC as "co-conspirator A".
The
rise of China and India is indeed eating into the
fading unipolar moment of the US. However, its
implications for the nature of espionage have not
been fully understood. With their soaring profiles
and ambitions, it is certain that China and India
will invest more resources into foreign
intelligence gathering and operations. Unlike the
US and Russia, which do not boast of sizeable
immigrant populations settled in other parts of
the world, China and India have large numbers of
skilled non-residents living abroad. The cultural
and patriotic ties that bind Chinese and Indian
immigrants to their homelands are ripe terrain for
recruitment into the world of espionage.
The eventual dropping of spying charges
against some Chinese Americans like nuclear
scientist Wen Ho Lee has generated cries of racial
profiling and harassment of Asians in the US.
However, the bevy of new cases since Lee confirms
that China is indeed using its immigrants
strategically. If India does the same, then the
very tactics and strategy of espionage will be
altered.
During the Cold War, the
"oligopsony" of great powers that defined the
parameters and best practices of the spying
profession was limited to the US, the USSR and a
handful of European countries. Now, with China
believed to have grown into an aggressive player
in foreign espionage and India possibly catching
up, the field is wider and the profession is
reflecting the changed multipolar world order. The
widening of the scope of intelligence by new power
centers in Asia erodes the superiority of Western
powers that hitherto enjoyed an advantage in
strategic developments due to their comparative
edge in "private information".
At the same
time, new Asian intelligence methods offer lessons
for Western powers which have been criticized
since September 11, 2001, for weak "HUMINT" (human
intelligence). The razzle-dazzle of spy planes and
unmanned aerial drones has proven incapable of
ferreting out the Osama bin Ladens of the world.
If technological gadgets were sufficient
for succeeding in espionage, the US "war on
terror" would not have fared as poorly as at
present. The Asian mantra is that spying yields
its best fruits when it is an art conducted by
thinking humans rather than an assignment left to
programmed machines.
Sreeram Chaulia
is a researcher on international affairs at the
Maxwell School of Citizenship in Syracuse, New
York. He can be contacted at
sreeramchaulia@hotmail.com
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2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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