An in-depth account of how Chinese intelligence continues to target American students and travelers, and how these tactics have fueled paranoia and hesitation within the CIA, based on testimony from FBI materials and former counterintelligence officials.

This section examines the strategic implications of Chinese intelligence recruitment efforts targeting foreign nationals, particularly young Americans.
Drawing on FBI materials and commentary from former counterintelligence officials, it argues that even failed recruitment cases may yield indirect strategic benefits by fostering institutional mistrust and recruitment hesitancy within opposing intelligence services.
The analysis concludes that while institutional paranoia may exist, the threat environment itself cannot be dismissed as illusory.

2017-04-11
“The recruitment of spies is still ongoing,” he warns students heading to China.
What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Chinese officials in charge of economic and fiscal policy argued that China should avoid deepening its confrontation with the United States, its largest trading partner.
However, intelligence officials and military leaders insisted that China, now a superpower, should adopt a tougher stance toward the United States, and they won the debate.
“The major change in recent years is that all Americans are being targeted more than ever before,” says Wilder.
“Officials from the Ministry of State Security are now far more familiar with the West and have stronger language skills than in the past.
They can easily recruit white students and travelers who come to China.”
In 2011, the FBI released on its website a dramatized video of the Schreiber case titled Game of Pawns.
Although it was produced as a warning to young Americans in China, it can also be seen as a premature declaration of victory by America’s spy hunters.
Harry Brandon, who once led the FBI’s counterintelligence division, says that even though the Schreiber case ended in failure, the Ministry of State Security may still have gained something from it.
“They may have simply been trying to confuse us,” he says.
During the Cold War, CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, who had been deceived by the Soviet KGB, became convinced that the CIA was riddled with double agents and froze the recruitment of Russian personnel.
“The Chinese side probably did not deliberately allow Schreiber to be arrested in order to push the CIA into paranoia,” Brandon says.
However, he adds that China may have seen “some benefit” in making the CIA hesitant to recruit personnel with deep knowledge of China and strong language skills.
According to sources, such suspicions have spread to candidates who have experience in places such as Iran, Russia, Syria, Pakistan, and the former Soviet bloc, or who have family ties to those regions.
The CIA may indeed be suffering from paranoia.
But not everything is an illusion.
At the end of Game of Pawns, Schreiber himself, speaking from prison, makes a telling remark.
“The recruitment of spies is still ongoing,” he warns students heading to China.
“Be careful.
Recruitment is active, and young people are the targets.”