OCTOBER 26, 2010

Chinese Espionage

BY EVAN OSNOS

Now that Russian spies have fallen short of our Hollywood fantasies, Americans have come to view China’s espionage efforts as one of two caricatures: impossibly vast and sophisticated or bumbling and antiquated. A flurry of new evidence suggests that the reality encompasses everything in between.

At the low end is the case of twenty-eight-year-old Glenn Duffie Shriver, a former international-relations student at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, who admitted in federal court last week that “he was befriended by Chinese intelligence officers while studying in Shanghai, agreed to spy for them and was finalizing a job at the C.I.A. when U.S. authorities found out what he was doing,” according to the Detroit Free Press. (h/t Shanghaiist.) Shriver had answered a newspaper ad seeking someone to write an article for a hundred and twenty dollars on U.S.-China relations. Then, he was approached by a pair of guys—Wu and Tang, in court documents—who mapped out a plan in which they would pay Shriver and he would get a job in the U.S. government, and voila!

Alas, for him, it didn’t go smoothly: He tried to get into the State Department Foreign Service, but flunked the exam twice. Then he applied for a job in the C.I.A.’s National Clandestine Service in 2007, at which time the game was up. Even so, his handlers paid him seventy thousand dollars along the way. He has settled on a plea agreement that carries four years in prison. (The Chinese embassy has reacted with umbrage—“Any attempts to defame China with fabricated allegations will prove futile,” a spokesman said—though I’m not clear if the defamation is the suggestion of espionage or the suggestion of such a ham-fisted attempt at it.)

By some accounts, Chinese efforts to snoop for economic purposes are considerably more sophisticated. The Times has written recently about “the new trade in business secrets,” in which employees of Chinese descent are accused of sharing industrial and technology secrets with researchers in China who have a connection to the government. But courts are still figuring out when such cases constitute regular theft of trade secrets and when they rise to the level of espionage by contributing to the work of a foreign government. As the Timesnotes, the Justice Department lost a case involving two California engineers who the government accused of “working with a venture capitalist in China to seek financing for a microchip business from China’s 863 program, which supports development of technologies with military applications.” (The judge disagreed, and, indeed, this is a complex detail because, as I wrote last year, the 863 program is intended to promote not only military technology but civilian good as well. So if an electric-car engineer at G.M. shares designs with a Chinese firm that receives 863-funding, is the engineer guilty of theft or espionage? Perhaps both, but the courts will have to decide.)

In the magazine this week, Seymour Hersh explores how the U.S. has, at various moments, both underestimated and overstated the cyber-security threat posed by China—and how neither mistake should be a source of comfort. In addition to providing a vivid primer on how not to disable your plane when you crash-land in foreign territory, he also quotes James Lewis, a cyber-espionage expert who worked for the Departments of State and Commerce in the Clinton Administration. China “is in full economic attack” inside the United States, Lewis says. “Some of it is economic espionage that we know and understand. Some of it is like the Wild West. Everybody is pirating from everybody else. The U.S.’s problem is what to do about it. I believe we have to begin by thinking about it”—the Chinese cyber threat—“as a trade issue that we have not dealt with.”