American spies are saying the quiet part out loud to Chinese officials: Their knowledge of Beijing’s secrets would be welcome in Washington.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has taken to social media to publish slickly produced videos in Mandarin with Chinese subtitles. One features a senior Chinese official making the dramatic decision to contact the U.S. spy agency, seemingly after watching two colleagues be disappeared by the communist government. It’s all part of a bold public pitch by the CIA to lure disaffected bureaucrats to spy for the U.S.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe has confirmed the videos are “aimed at recruiting Chinese officials to steal secrets.” Links are provided with instructions on how to contact the spy agency in a secure manner.
China’s foreign ministry has labelled the initiative “a naked political provocation,” and the country has warned it will take steps to confront “infiltration and sabotage activities” accordingly.
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James Olson, a former chief of counterintelligence for the CIA, nonetheless expects the approach of “hanging out the shingle” will bear fruit.
“I am very optimistic that we will get contacts,” said Olson, who concedes the U.S. has often struggled to recruit sources from China.
Yet questions remain about how effective the U.S. can be in enticing Chinese sources to turn against their government, given the risks of doing so include long prison terms or even death sentences.
Juan Wang, an expert in Chinese politics at McGill University, says the highly overt manner in which the CIA has made its pitch may not rattle Beijing the way the U.S. hopes.
“This was not the first time that the American government actually tried to recruit Chinese government officials,” said Wang, noting that Beijing’s standard approach has included public statements condemning U.S. actions and publicizing the punishments for those caught spying.
Weeding through the walk-ins
The CIA has done this before, releasing similar videos in Russian, Farsi and Korean. (And Russia has since made its own appeal to “true American patriots” to get in touch with Moscow’s foreign spy service.)
Last October, Bloomberg reported that the CIA was trying to boost its recruitment of sources within China, publishing information on social media detailing how Chinese citizens could contact the spy agency.
Olson says it’s a strategy he’s long advocated using against “adversarial countries,” and one that can pay major dividends if the right source if found.
The retired spy says the CIA’s China-focused callout may be more about reaching sources working for the state who aren’t necessarily inside the country itself — such as people working at embassies, or in other arrangements outside China.
Olson says serious walk-ins will need to prove their bona fides, and will bring information with them to do so. The rest, he said, will be weeded out.
“If they don’t give up the goods very quickly, we won’t do business with them,” he said.
Getting connected with people inside China, however, is much more difficult.
“China is a particularly hard target,” Emily Harding, a former CIA leadership analyst, told ABC News.
“They have a robust surveillance state that makes it very, very hard to maintain contact with an asset,” said Harding, the director of the intelligence, national security and technology program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a U.S. think-tank.
The U.S. has had past failures spying in China. Starting in around 2010, Beijing reportedly “systematically dismantled” the CIA’s spy operations in the country over a period of several years. According to the New York Times, at least a dozen people were killed and others were arrested. The paper said this rivalled the fallout from infamous Moscow-linked spy scandals involving Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen decades ago.
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There may also be challenges with the way the CIA’s current China messaging was put together, as Wang says some of the language used was awkward, pointing to particular phrasing in one of the videos.
“Many of the sentences in the video sound like literal translation of English, and not natural Chinese,” she said.
Indeed, some have mocked the videos online, noting that if the spy agency isn’t able to get its message across smoothly, then it’s unlikely those being targeted would reach out.
Wang says that these kinds of pressures from the U.S. are unlikely to pierce the strong nationalist sentiment China has long nurtured.
But Olson says it was imperative for the CIA messaging to help drive home the point that for those with valuable information to share, “America is open for business” and has deep pockets.
‘Chaos’ of U.S. intel causes concerns
But the current U.S. political context could hamper that effort, given pending cuts to the CIA itself and poor handling of sensitive information by senior members of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.
“Given the chaos of the U.S. now, especially in the intel services … I can’t imagine recruiting anyone, much less a Chinese asset, is any easier,” former CIA covert agent Valerie Plame said via email.
Plame had her own experience with U.S. officials acting recklessly with secret information when an official in former U.S. president George W. Bush’s administration leaked her identity to the media more than two decades ago.
The leak came days after Plame’s then-husband ambassador Joseph Wilson publicly criticized the U.S. intelligence used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Plame’s book about the affair, Fair Game, was made into a 2010 film of the same name starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.
Following an investigation into the leak, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a vice-presidential aide, was convicted of lying to investigators and obstruction of justice. In 2007, Bush commuted Libby’s sentence and in 2018, he was pardoned by Trump.
Cases in the public eye
China also works its own sources to steal secrets from U.S., and the stories behind those efforts come to light when those individuals get caught.
Olson, the former counterintelligence chief, suggests the cases of Chinese spying against U.S. interests that are made public are just “the tip of the iceberg.”
Some recent China-linked national security cases in the U.S. have involved Americans working in the military or for intelligence services.
In April, former U.S. army intelligence officer Korbein Schultz was handed a seven-year prison sentence for selling sensitive defence information — allegedly including lessons the army had learned from the Ukraine conflict — to a source he believed was based in China.
A similar story emerged last year, when Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, a retired CIA employee, admitted to passing defence information to China, resulting in a 10-year sentence for the septuagenarian spy.
Another case that made headlines was that of Yanjun Xu, a Chinese intelligence officer, who U.S. prosecutors said spent years working to pass Western aviation secrets to Beijing. Xu was arrested in Belgium in 2018 and returned to the U.S. for trial. In 2021, he was convicted on charges relating to economic espionage and trade theft, resulting in a 20-year sentence.
However, Xu is no longer behind bars in the U.S. after his sentence was commuted by former U.S. president Joe Biden in November 2024, as part of what media reports revealed was a prisoner swap between China and the U.S.
“I’m furious about that,” said Olson, who testified as an expert for the prosecution at Xu’s trial.
Olson says that when spies are caught, a source has typically been involved in that process — suggesting that America has some reach into China, even if it’s not as far as it would like.
Despite the CIA’s recent efforts to recruit Chinese sources to spy for the U.S., McGill University’s Wang says there hasn’t been much concern from Beijing, and it appears that the ongoing trade war between China and the U.S. is a bigger source of tension.
But Wang says it’s not clear if China might use the CIA-publicized recruitment effort as “an excuse” to pursue some kind of action in the future.
