It's Open Season on America's Secrets: LinkedIn as a Recruitment Vehicle to Entrap U.S. Officials
Four recent cases of U.S. ex-intelligence officers caught spying for China raise concerns.
I received today the following email:
“Hi! it's Kim are you online?”
Of course, I didn’t reply. Likely some loser in Lagos angling for suckers using the tried-and-true ploy of hooking horny middle-aged males to pry them from their bank accounts.
It got me to thinking about all the other come-ons I’ve received over the years from all manner of con artists. But then I scratched my head about connection requests from Chinese on LinkedIn.
Why?
Because the PRC’s intelligence services are aggressively using LinkedIn as a vehicle to approach potential targets for recruitment. These include former government officials, like myself, as well as current ones. But they also liberally target academics, think-tankers and business executives in possession of trade secrets.
I checked my LinkedIn account to find that they retain connection requests going back only a half-year, or so. No Chinese among the lot.
Former U.S. counterintelligence chief, William Evanina told Reuters that Chinese agents were contacting thousands of Americans at a time on LinkedIn. “It’s the ultimate playground for collection,” he said. German domestic intelligence officials revealed that Chinese agents had used LinkedIn to try to contact 10,000 Germans in 2017. French intelligence agencies reported that Chinese agents used social media, principally LinkedIn, to reach out to 4,000 Frenchmen, mainly targeting government officials, scientists and corporate executives, according to Le Figaro. “I think it’s all China, all the time,” former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus replied when asked his assessment of America’s top security threat.
LinkedIn is to modern espionage what Vienna was to Cold War spying. Only China is using human wave attacks against its recruitment targets.
And they’ve had some success, notably the case of former CIA and DIA officer Kevin Patrick Mallory. As NBC reported two years ago:
In February 2017, Mallory responded to the LinkedIn message from Michael Yang, who passed himself off as a think tank representative looking for a foreign policy expert. The FBI says he was a Chinese intelligence officer.
The two struck up a relationship, records show, and Mallory eventually was paid $25,000. He took two trips to China and handed over important secrets, according to trial testimony. His handlers gave him a Samsung phone that doubled as a covert communications device, according to testimony.
As he worked with the Chinese, Mallory began reaching out to former CIA colleagues in an apparent effort to pump them for information. The ex-colleagues grew suspicious and contacted the CIA, prosecutors say.
It turned out Mallory was $230,000 in debt. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
2018 was a cropper year for U.S. intelligence officer turncoats.
Also arrested that year was ex-CIA case officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee. China-born Lee had served in the U.S. Army, followed by 13 years with the CIA. Like a scene out of Tom Clancy novel, on a frigid evening in January 2018, FBI special agents swarmed into JFK Airport to take Lee into custody just as his plane from Hong Kong arrived.
Lee had turned over to Chinese intelligence the details on CIA informants, resulting in the arrest or execution of many. Lee was sentenced to 19 years.
Ex-DIA officer and 20-year Army veteran Ron Rockwell Hansen, also arrested in 2018, was found guilty of passing classified defense information to China and was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment the following year.
Finally, yet another former ex-CIA officer, Hong Kong-born Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, was arrested in 2020 for having passed information on CIA cover practices and CIA officer identities to Chinese intelligence. Ma also had worked for the FBI as a translator. He has yet to be tried.
The motivation common to all these cases is money.
U.S. counterintelligence officials believe the totality of betrayal by these four turncoats may have led to the PRC’s roll-up of the CIA’s agent network in China between 2010 and 2012 in which at least 30 informants were executed. Some, however, believe the CIA’s secure communications network, covcom, may also have been breached.
A former senior U.S. counterintelligence official acknowledged to me China’s success in exploiting social media in its intelligence recruitment efforts and the role of greed in motivating some Americans to betray their country. Nonetheless, he confided that “of the millions of Americans at any one time with clearances, only a relative handful actually betrayed their oaths. Glass half full, I know, but it helped me stay optimistic when it sometimes felt like the world was going to hell in a hand basket.” He added, “The good news is that we are catching them. The bad news is that there are more of them out there. This is less about our effectiveness at CI than it is about the width and breadth and persistence of the threat” — i.e., China.
Beijing’s espionage operations against the United have surged since Xi Jinping came to power eight years ago, the Center for Strategic and International
Studies has found.
China has emerged as our number one national security threat. It seems clear that U.S. counterintelligence, though having had important successes, is facing a massive HUMINT as well as cyber assault from China that poses a huge challenge. A measure of the magnitude of the problem is FBI Director Wray’s statement that his bureau opens a new China-related counterintelligence case “every 10 hours.”
For its part, the Biden administration is striving to meet the challenge and counter our adversaries’ plots to undermine our national security. Read about it in my upcoming piece in Washington Monthly.
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.