By Sophie Curtis

3:34PM BST 19 Jul 2013

Ex-CIA chief accuses Huawei of industrial espionage

Michael Hayden claims to have seen 'hard evidence' of backdoors in Huawei's networking equipment

The former head of the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States claims that he has seen hard evidence that communications company Huawei has engaged in espionage on behalf of the Chinese government.

In an extraordinary interview with the Australian Financial Reviewnewspaper, General Michael Hayden alleged that Huawei has shared “intimate and extensive knowledge of the foreign telecommunications systems” with the Chinese state.

He claimed to have reviewed a briefing paper from Huawei two or three years ago, when the company was trying to establish a footprint in the United States. While acknowledging that the paper said “all the right things,” Hayden still refused to endorse the company's presence in the US.

“God did not make enough briefing slides on Huawei to convince me that having them involved in our critical communications infrastructure was going to be okay. This is not blind prejudice on my part. This was my considered view based on a four-decade career as an intelligence officer,” he said.

He went on to say that the burden of proof is on Huawei to prove that its networking equipment does not contain any insidious hardware implants or backdoors that would feed information back to the Chinese state.

“Based upon the House Intelligence Committee’s open hearings in America last year, Huawei was well short of providing any comforting testimony that would make me begin to question the intuitive premise that Huawei presents serious national security risks on a first-principles basis,” he said.

Hayden is a director of Motorola Solutions, which provides voice and data communications products and systems to the US government. Huawei and Motorola have previously engaged in intellectual property disputes.

Huawei's global cybersecurity officer, John Suffolk, described the comments made by Hayden as “tired, unsubstantiated, defamatory remarks” and said they distract from real-world concerns related to espionage, which demand serious discussion globally.

The news comes in the wake of the UK government’s announcementthat it will conduct a review of Huawei’s Cyber Security Evaluation Centre in Oxfordshire, in accordance with the recommendations of a report by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) into foreign involvement in the UK’s critical national infrastructure.

The ISC’s report criticised the government’s processes of considering national security issues at the time that BT and Huawei started working together nearly ten years ago, describing them as “insufficiently robust”.

However, it noted that Huawei’s links to the Chinese state are perceived and did not offer evidence to substantiate these allegations. It also noted Huawei’s denial of links with the Chinese state, and the fact that the company is owned by its employees.

"Our work with Huawei and their UK customers gives us confidence that the networks in the UK that use Huawei equipment are operated to a high standard of security and integrity," said the govenment in its response.