WASHINGTON: As China’s spy balloon drifted across the continental US in February, US intelligence agencies learned that Chinese President Xi Jinping had become enraged with senior Chinese military generals. The spy agencies had been trying to understand what Xi knew as the balloon, originally aimed at US military bases in Guam and Hawaii, was blown off course. Xi was not opposed to risky spying operations, but US intel agencies concluded that the People’s Liberation Army had kept Xi in the dark until the balloon was over the US.
US officials would not discuss how spy agencies gleaned this information. But they discovered that when Xi learned of the balloon’s trajectory and realised it was derailing planned talks with secretary of state Antony Blinken, he berated generals for failing to tell him that the balloon had gone astray. The episode threw a spotlight on the spy-versus-spy contest between the US and China.
The balloon crisis, a small part of a much larger Chinese espionage effort, reflects a brazen new aggressiveness by Beijing in gathering intelligence on the US as well as Washington’s growing capabilities to collect its own information on China. The main efforts on both sides are aimed at answering the two most difficult questions: What are the intentions of leaders in the rival nation? And what military and technological capabilities do they command? The spy conflict with China is even more expansive than the one that played out between the Americans and the Soviets during the Cold War, said FBI director Christopher Wray.
The US government sees its lead in AI as a way to help offset China’s strength in numbers, while the Chinese hope the technology will help them counter US military power, including by pinpointing US submarines and establishing domination of space, US officials say. US officials are also more concerned than ever at Chinese agencies’ efforts to gather intelligence through personal contacts. They say China’s main intelligence agency, the ministry of state security, aims to place agents or recruit assets across the US government, as well as in technology and the defence industry. Chinese agents use social media sites – LinkedIn, in particular – to lure potential recruits. Responding to that threat, federal agencies have quietly opened or expanded their in-house spy catching operations. No issue in US-China ties has loomed larger than Taiwan. In the absence of real intelligence, US and Chinese officials are focused on gathering information on each other’s military capabilities. The US, for instance, has stepped up its aerial surveillance of China military bases.