Not Your Usual Spy Story

Wow.  This is a made-for-TV spy story that nobody would believe unless they knew it was based on fact.  It has the President’s son-in-law, his daughter, and ex of Rupert Murdoch and in the background a park in the middle of Washington D.C. close enough to the Hill to monitor every Congressman and White House visitor.  The Chinese wanted to build this park near the Arboretum, near where I used to work.  Every major Congressional Office, Committee room, and the White House are close enough to spit on from there.  Put a few dozen Chinese cameras and microphones, tap a couple of telecommunications lines, hack every office around, and you have a base that is close.  It sounds better than it is.

First, the Chinese have already done all that and more, but they would do it again if given he opportunity.  Nobody “thwarted “ this heinous attempt to collect intelligence from foreign and US persons.  These are enough Chinese working on the Hill to populate most intelligence services.  They have good access already.

What it comes to is the Chinese ability to get Chinese immigrants to the US  to help them spy.  This report alleges involvement where it is most likely to occur - Chinese who come here to live, stay, and help out where they can.  It comes back to loyalty.  We saw it especially in spying on various parts of the nuclear weapons programs (How do the Chinese get the designs of every nuclear weapon in the US inventory?) and in agriculture, but there are plenty of others.  Some Chinese have work visas that came from getting an education in the US and staying for a job.  They use that job to collect trade and business Information.  Their loyalty is to China, not to the US.  Some come over on various types of visas - my favorite being the EB-5, 90% of which are issued to Chinese, which they can buy into - and they spy too.  Not all of them do, maybe just a small minority, but it is enough to make
collection much easier for them.  It is direct, inside, human intelligence that is hard to come by.

Loyalty is something we do not consider before allowing a person to come to the US on a visa.  How do you measure that?  Are they loyal to ISIS?  Those are murky areas, but on the EB-5, we allowed a seated member of the People’s National Congress to enter the US on a visa and get all the privileges that go with that.  He is treated almost like any other US citizen.  Time to change the rules here.