This article examines China’s intelligence strategy of recruiting ethnically non-Chinese agents, based on a CIA double-spy case. It also highlights the dangerous parallels with opposition to counter-espionage legislation in Japan.

April 11, 2017.
China’s intelligence operations no longer rely on ethnicity.
They rely on access, trust, and ideology.
The Shriver case revealed that even native-born Americans can be cultivated as operatives.
Counterintelligence failure leads to paranoia, mistrust, and institutional paralysis.
This is not a past incident.
It is an ongoing reality.

2017-04-11

However, as a careful background investigation proceeded, suspicions grew that he was an operative sent from China.
What follows is from the latest issue of the Japanese edition of Newsweek, which I subscribe to regularly.
All readers with discernment who read this article will be convinced that my remarks regarding Renhō strike precisely at the mark.
All emphasis in the text other than the headline, as well as the sections marked with ~, are mine.

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A Chinese Double Agent Lurking Inside the CIA

China’s strategy of recruiting native-born Americans as spies delivers a double punch of paranoia and personnel shortages to the CIA

Jeff Stein (Journalist)

The man appeared to be an ideal candidate for the CIA.
His name was Glenn Duffie Shriver.
A 28-year-old raised in Michigan, he was sociable, athletically gifted, and an outstanding student who, from childhood, had shown a strong interest in international affairs and foreign languages.

That was not all.
He had studied and worked in China and could speak standard Mandarin flawlessly.

However, as a careful background investigation progressed, suspicions intensified that he was an operative sent from China.
When the process reached the stage of an interview using a polygraph (lie detector), the man became visibly shaken and abruptly withdrew his application.

Subsequently, Shriver was arrested for attempting to infiltrate the CIA as an agent acting on behalf of China, and he is now serving a four-year prison sentence.

It is no exaggeration to say that every person in Japan who is now raising objections to laws—already enacted in most countries around the world—that regulate espionage and punish conspiracies to commit crimes against the state such as terrorism, are themselves modern-day Hotsumi Ozaki, that is, individuals engaged in spy activities.

Although this incident occurred seven years ago, according to a source well acquainted with the inner workings of the CIA, the aftershocks of the Shriver case continue to this day.

China’s intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, had traditionally relied almost exclusively on Chinese Americans in such cases.
However, the Shriver affair revealed that China has extended its reach even to native-born white Americans.

At the end of March, a U.S. State Department employee, Candace Marie Claiborne, was arrested on suspicion of having contact with a Chinese spy, receiving compensation in return, and providing false explanations to the FBI.

There is no doubt that the CIA’s “paranoia” regarding China’s espionage offensive—using the expression of a former agency official—will intensify further.

“One or two years ago, there was a situation in which high-level sources that the CIA had placed within Chinese intelligence agencies were successively detained in China,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official revealed to this magazine on condition of anonymity.
“That was when the CIA realized the existence of internal collaborators, and since then it has become extremely cautious in its recruitment of personnel.”

The hiring standards of media organizations such as NHK and Asahi—bodies that can hardly be described as anything other than conglomerations of pseudo-moralism and pseudo-humanitarianism—must be nothing short of a paradise for spies, not cautious in the slightest but effectively a free pass.

(To be continued.)