In the ongoing great power competition between the United States and China, one of the most pressing threats to the American people is the quiet infiltration of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secret police into American communities.
I spoke with a number of individuals familiar with the CCP’s covert operations in the United States for this article, all of whom emphasized the urgent nature of the problem. Some requested anonymity due to still being a target of the CCP.
One Chinese defector, a former chaplain of a group that opposed the CCP who has been in hiding since the early 1990s, specifically lamented Joe Biden’s failure to address or even acknowledge the threat. He likened the Biden administration to Edmund Pevensie, the character from C.S. Lewis’s classic The Chronicles of Narnia series.
For those unfamiliar, in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, the most famous installment of Lewis’s saga, Edmund falls under the spell of the wicked White Witch after eating a poisoned Turkish Delight. He was deceived by the Witch’s sweet-sounding promises and nearly helped her accomplish her evil plan.
The Biden administration, much like Edmund, appears to be falling under the spell of China’s sweet-sounding words. As I have previously detailed, while the administration has attempted to front a tough-on-China stance, in reality its policies have been precisely the opposite approach, reversing many of former President Donald Trump’s policies that had forced the CCP to the negotiating table.
The reality, as Biden should well know, is that the CCP does not seek peace and prosperity for its people, but is as wicked as the White Witch. It’s aim, as the chaplain I spoke with relayed, is “domination over the world,” which it thinks it can achieve through “lying, stealing, and murdering.”
“We can’t feel completely safe anywhere, including the United States,” he emphasized, noting that CCP secret police have now infiltrated the U.S. – undoubtedly aided by the ongoing border crisis. In March 2024, apprehensions of Chinese nationals attempting to illegally cross the border were up an astonishing 8,000 percent over March 2021. These figures indicate that many more likely escaped into the country undetected.
The chaplain’s account coincides with the extraordinary confessions of a former CCP secret police operative who recently divulged shocking details about his work outside of China to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In that interview, the operative, who removed his cover and identified himself as Eric, said that he was a former pro-democracy activist who was recruited to be an undercover agent for the CCP’s Political Security Protection Bureau.
With aid from Beijing, Eric helped locate and target individuals in Western countries who were speaking out against the CCP. In one complex operation, Eric posed as a fan of a dissident cartoonist who lives outside of Washington, D.C., attempting to lure him to Cambodia by promising work designing the logo for a real estate company. That cartoonist, who uses the pseudonym Rebel Pepper, criticizes the CCP in his drawings.
Once Rebel Pepper was in Cambodia, the plan was for CCP agents to apprehend him at his hotel and bring him to trial in China. “I was quite tempted to go, but my wife feared it could be a trap,” the Chinese dissident told a journalist. He later received confirmation from a source in Cambodia that one of the individuals there with whom he had been conversing was with the Chinese secret police.
On another occasion, according to Eric, he tracked a dissident’s movement from Cambodia to Canada after the dissident moved there under a protective visa. The dissident was later found dead at sea in still unexplained circumstances. Reviewing the reports on that dissident, which Eric sent to China, Don Stanton, a 32-year veteran of the Canadian intelligence service, told the Australian ABC that the case was “a sovereignty issue for Canada.”
After watching the ABC report, a former high-ranking KGB official who defected in the 1980s and wished to be unnamed, fearing for his safety, told me that the Chinese spies had made it “extremely hard to detect their operations” throughout the West. “They had even managed to turn pro-democracy activists into agent provocateurs, a feat that was considered rare for the Soviets,” he continued. This, he said, is an alarming sign, even more so given the fact that the CCP feels confident carrying out operations inside the United States and other Western nations.
According to a new report out from Safeguard Defenders, a human rights group with a focus on China, there have been 283 cases of “extrajudicial repatriation” to China from 56 countries over the past decade. These forced return efforts were all carried out under two long-term operations codenamed “Fox Hunt” and “Sky Net” by the CCP. Chinese government agents routinely used lies and deception to lure unsuspecting dissidents to locations where they could be abducted by CCP agents.
The report specifically noted at least 25 successful return operations from the United States, with confirmation that such operations are ongoing.
The fact that CCP agents can apparently carry out missions inside the United States with the country’s leaders either none the wiser or powerless to stop it should concern every American. More than just an embarrassment, such a development is a full-fledged national security crisis.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
