America’s history of getting its agents into Red China began badly. By 1952, after the Chinese civil war and after several years of operations, the United States had dropped 2,012 agents into China; 101 of those ended up killed, 111 captured. These were Chinese who trusted CIA competence and sealed for themselves a terrible fate.
Numerous failures later, when Jimmy Carter’s old friend Admiral Stansfield Turner took the helm of the CIA as a reformer, it was said that he believed that the U.S. was not good at human intelligence operations and that the Agency would therefore focus on technological means of collection. “Turner gutted some 20 percent of the CIA’s clandestine service (reportedly some 800 operatives),” reports The Heritage Foundation, “preferring instead to focus on high-tech intelligence collection such as satellites.”
The CIA outlasted his reforms.
Ames, Hanssen
But then came the CIA’s own Aldrich Ames (“ultimately, he revealed the name of every U.S. agent operating in the Soviet Union”) and the FBI’s Robert Hanssen (who “revealed numerous double agents planted in the Soviet intelligence system, at least three of whom were arrested and executed”). These premier Soviet assets left a bloody trail of dead U.S. spies behind them. Hanssen was active from 1979 to 1991, Ames from 1985 to 1994. Their cases suggested that the U.S. was not very good at human counterintelligence either.
When eventually caught, Ames and Hanssen generated so much bad press that it became easy to conclude that any person spying for America would eventually be betrayed.
After the bloodbath they’d made possible ended, disasters continued anyway. In 2023, the headlines were filled with news of at least 20 Chinese agents being killed after Beijing rolled up a CIA spy ring in prior years. Some analysts put the number at 30. An estimate of those additionally captured but not executed was not ventured.
That agent rollup had begun in 2010—after the CIA decided to have its agents communicate with their handlers over the Internet in China. Over the Internet.
The Department of Justice called it “possibly the worst intel disaster in U.S. history.” It led to follow-up stories about how the CIA was struggling to rebuild its network in China.
President Biden’s CIA director, William Burns, said: “We’ve made progress and we’re working very hard to make sure we have a very strong human intelligence capability to complement what we can acquire through other methods.”
When asked about a Foreign Affairs piece by Burns in which he expressed this commitment, Wang Wenbin, spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, replied: “Thank him for reminding us U.S. spies are everywhere.”
Confidence…
Now comes the news that the CIA is advertising for its Chinese spies on YouTube.
The Agency produced two ads. In the first, “Why I Contacted the CIA: To Control My Fate,” a gray-haired apparatchik has his (we assume) Chinese tablet running on a (presumably) Chinese network, displaying an American web page titled “Contact CIA,” with two clickable options, “Contact CIA Online” and “Contact CIA by Mail.”
Astonishing. Is there really such a website or is this a more general hint to seek contact?
In the second, “Why I Contacted the CIA: For a Better Life,” the young assistant to a powerful boss endures what appears to be a grinding work life and daily indignities. By the end of the video his phone is showing the CIA page and his thumb clicks “Contact CIA Online.”
This webpage gambit would be fantastically risky, Internet communications being neither private nor safe.
Referring would-be informants to a site where they can download Tor exposes them to communist collection of the downloader’s personal data even before the Tor browser is installed. Moreover, to quote from Github: “Recent papers discuss the vulnerabilities of Tor’s Onion Router design and question the effectiveness of Tor. These vulnerabilities are increasingly exploited by de-anonymizing attacks. Over the years the attacks have grown to be more complex and effective.”
A Guardian story translates some of the Chinese narration and includes a bit of hubris: “ ‘If it weren’t working, we wouldn’t be making more videos,’ a CIA official told Reuters, which said officials were confident the videos were getting past China’s strict internet controls.”
The officials are confident. Do you bet your life on their confidence? Even if they’re correct now, they won’t be correct forever.
Maybe this is just lazy thinking from dumb bureaucrats. The Internet: it supplies quick, easy, automated recruiting, and automated HR workflows; and it spares our CIA all that expensive, time-wasting, person-to-person stuff. Here’s Stansfield Turner’s technology aspiration made to work for exactly what he didn’t want the CIA to do.
Then what?
After choosing to contact the CIA online, will recruits need to click on a website user agreement before proceeding? Is there then a pop-up window to ask them for their cookie preferences? Will autofill be enabled for the name and address fields? Are interviews to be done via Zoom? Will there be follow-up emails and text messages from HR?
This video idea looks as if some Ames-like communist agent within the CIA had invented a trap to identify and report would-be traitors.
Meanwhile, Beijing is staging outrage while perhaps stuffing the website with double agents.
That’s not too far-out given this level of insanity. □
James Roth works for a major defense contractor in Virginia.
