Kevin Mallory was no James Bond. The hapless former CIA agent attempted to deflect suspicion that he had been selling the Chinese secret information by voluntarily turning over a Chinese-provided cell phone to FBI investigators. Mr. Mallory assumed any compromising communications with the foreign agents had been erased, but a chip preserved the evidence of his treason. Last May Mr. Mallory was sentenced to 20 years under the Espionage Act. Six months later, another former CIA operative, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, received a 19-year sentence for selling CIA secrets to Beijing that may have resulted in the crippling of the CIA’s network in China and the disappearance or death of dozens of agents.
Messrs. Mallory and Lee are the human face of China’s global espionage. Equally prevalent are Chinese lurkers in the cyber shadows, penetrating the most secure computer networks. Old-fashioned traitors now vie with sophisticated digital operatives who purloin trade, military and government information. Long overlooked in the face of German espionage during the world wars—as well as the bitter, often romanticized struggle between the CIA and Britain’s SIS against the KGB during the Cold War—China is today’s greatest intelligence threat to U.S. interests.
In China, espionage and counterintelligence have often been inextricably linked. Indeed, as Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil recount in “Chinese Communist Espionage,” the two have sometimes been all but indistinguishable, as they were during the decades-long struggle between Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, and during the full-on war between the United Front (a tenuous covenant between the CCP and Nationalists) and the Japanese during the Pacific War. Many of the CCP’s most senior leaders, such as Zhou Enlai, were intelligence professionals, putting spycraft at the core of the Party. Famous fellow travelers, such as Madame Sun Yat-sen, widow of the leader of the 1911 Chinese Revolution, further aided the communists through surreptitious activities.
Forged in war against foreign and domestic enemies alike, China’s communist spies were run primarily by the People’s Liberation Army, long giving a distinct military tint to intelligence operations, while domestic surveillance was the province of the national police, reaching down to ferret out “counterrevolutionaries” at the local level.
