WASHINGTON, DC, Feb 9 – Everybody likes a good spy story – except when it is a real spy story. This is a real spy story.
You can bet that the Russians continue to maintain a spy network in America, notwithstanding the collapse of the Soviet Union and the establishment of a Russian version of Democracy. Don’t forget, Russia’s would-be president for life, Vladimir Putin, is ex-KGB, and they’ve been at it since well before World War II.
But, for some time now, Communist China has emerged as an equal – if not superior — a clandestine threat to our nation’s security.
As FBI Director Christopher Wray describes it: “When we tally up what we see in our investigations—over 2,000 of which are focused on the Chinese government trying to steal our information and technology—there is just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, our innovation, and our economic security than China … The Chinese government steals staggering volumes of information and causes deep, job-destroying damage across a wide range of industries—so much so that, as you heard, we’re constantly opening new cases to counter their intelligence operations, about every 12 hours or so.”
Communist China’s espionage threat is a clear and present danger. Wray made those remarks just last week in a speech at Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
Wray went on to say that the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] pose the threat we’re focused on countering—not the Chinese people, and certainly not Chinese Americans, who are themselves frequently victims of the Chinese government’s lawless aggression. Protecting them from the Chinese government is top of mind for us, too. America is richer and stronger because of the generations of people who immigrated here from China … America’s strength is built on our innovation, on our striving citizens, and the world-changing products and services they build—from the invention of the airplane back around the time of the FBI’s founding to the computer, the Internet, GPS, life-saving medicines, and thousands of others over the decades.”
For years, Beijing has been infiltrating the U.S. using spies in the guise of academicians: graduate students and research scholars. In September of 2020, President Trump sought to deal with this growing menace by adding restrictions on cultural exchange and student visas.
In a report issued last July, the Center for Immigration Studies [CIS] noted that, “For nearly two years now, the FBI has nabbed dozens of Chinese Communist Party spies who, while posing as graduate students and research scholars at top academic institutions, siphoned out America’s most cutting edge national defense material for untold years. The spies, many secretly members of China’s military services, had to get in close to do damage this grave and found an unguarded path through America’s largely self-babysitting cultural exchange and student visa programs.”
The CIS commentary went on to discuss how President Trump’s solution would have relieved “the espionage problem and many more besides, like foreign terrorist infiltration and immigration fraud.” However, President Biden “canceled the repair and instead bestowed a priceless gift on People’s Liberation Army intelligence services: continued American vulnerability.” Who knows what he was thinking at the time? Perhaps, Mr. Biden – being Mr. Biden – he wasn’t thinking at all.
The outspoken Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui who left the Chinese Communist Party and escaped the country in 2015, was an insider who revealed in an interview with the Washington Beacon in 2017 that, at the time, Beijing’s U.S. spy networks was made up of some 25,000 CCP intelligence operatives aided by 15,000-plus hired spies.
And, in an Opinion Article published in the Epoch Times, commentator Stu Cvrk concluded that “the CCP has a robust, well-coordinated and ongoing economic espionage effort that targets U.S.-developed intellectual property, technologies, and industries. This campaign is an important element of Beijing’s ongoing pursuit of world economic domination and is the key engine that powers the continuing growth of the Chinese economy–frequently at the direct expense of foreign competition.”