WASHINGTON – The CIA on May 1 rolled out two Chinese-language videos aimed at enticing officials in China to leak secrets to the US, the latest public effort by the intelligence agency to ramp up human intelligence gathering on Washington’s strategic rival.
The move comes after the CIA in October launched a drive to recruit new informants in China, Iran and North Korea by posting instructions online on how to securely contact the agency, following what it said was successful efforts to enlist Russians.
The CIA is confident that the videos are penetrating China’s “Great Firewall” internet restrictions and reaching the intended audience.
“If it weren’t working, we wouldn’t be making more videos,” a CIA official told Reuters, adding that China was the agency’s foremost intelligence priority in a “truly generational competition” between the US and China.
The two videos posted to the CIA’s social media accounts depict fictional scenes in which a senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official and a more junior government worker with access to classified information become disillusioned with China’s system and approach the CIA.
The CIA official said that the US was not just interested in counterintelligence, but was also seeking information on advanced science, military and cyber technology, valuable economic data, and China’s foreign policy secrets.
China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the videos, but it has previously accused the US of waging a systematic disinformation campaign against China, and said any attempts to drive a wedge between the Chinese people and the CCP would fail.
US intelligence agencies said in March that China remains the top military and cyber threat to the US, noting that China has the ability to hit the United States with conventional weapons, compromise US infrastructure through cyber attacks and target its assets in space, and that Beijing seeks to displace the US as the top AI power by 2030. REUTERS
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