For years, Beijing has been tightening its hold on the United States, drawing intelligence from the U.S. government while silencing critics with the help of agents embedded in U.S. society.
The United States is now hitting back—and seeing results, according to experts.
There has also been a marked increase in the rate of convictions or pleas in recent months. The Justice Department (DOJ) has brought forth dozens of CCP-directed espionage and foreign agent cases in the past four years, resulting in at least 13 convictions or pleas, with more than half of those taking place this year—including three in the past month—according to an Epoch Times review of the court records.
“I feel that our nation must take every opportunity to stop these threats,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), chair of the cybersecurity subcommittee for the House Armed Services Committee, told The Epoch Times, noting that the U.S. Intelligence Community has identified Beijing as the No. 1 threat to the United States.
Who Are the Spies?
The CCP has long targeted people of Chinese descent—of whom there are more than 60 million outside China—as potential assets in its intelligence operations.Among those charged by the DOJ in the foreign agent cases are officials of the CCP’s top intelligence gathering agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS); Chinese citizens traveling to the United States under false pretenses; hackers residing in Asian countries; and asylees, permanent residents, and U.S. citizens of Chinese descent.
Some reside in the United States, while dozens of others charged are known to reside in China and will now face arrest if they ever set foot on American soil.
There are also many who are U.S. citizens that aren’t of Chinese descent. They include active military members, former law enforcement, and experts in competitive fields.
The CCP engages in what experts such as Casey Fleming, chair and CEO of risk consultancy BlackOps Partners, describe as “unrestricted warfare,” meaning there are no legal, ethical, or moral lines it will not cross to pursue its objectives. It capitalizes on people’s baser instincts—greed, pride, lust, shame—to recruit assets.
“Number one, it’s money. Number two, it’s ego. Number three, it’s blackmail,” Fleming, who advises the DOJ, FBI, and Congress on the CCP threat, told The Epoch Times.
The defendant had harassed the Chinese man with bogus lawsuits and told the victim that it “really is a drop in the bucket for a country to spend $1 billion” to achieve what the CCP ordered, promising “endless misery” for the victim, according to case documents.
“It is definitely true that all of your relatives will be involved,” one defendant told the victim.
“I mean, he’s paying me, so I was like, ‘OK, I’ll just do whatever he says,’” the sailor told the FBI in an interview, describing the job as “easy money.”
Last month, Sgt. Korbein Schultz, an army intelligence analyst with the First Battalion of the 506th Infantry Regiment at Fort Campbell, pleaded guilty to sending military secrets to a CCP agent, receiving $42,000 in return.
Beginning in about June 2022, Schultz began sending sensitive military files to an unnamed conspirator working for the CCP. Schultz received payment of up to $1,000 per document in return.
A month into the partnership, Schultz told the conspirator he would like to turn the relationship into a long-term one, according to the indictment. He provided materials including details about U.S. precision rockets, their performance, and how they would be used. He also shared manuals and technical data of several U.S. aircraft, documents referencing the Chinese military, and documents related to the U.S. military forces in the Indo-Pacific.
The conspirator asked for information of higher levels of classification as the partnership progressed and promised higher payments for more exclusive information.
“I hope so! I need to get my other BMW back!” Schultz wrote in response to the promise of higher pay.
He told the conspirator that he wished he could be “Jason Bourne” and brought up the idea of moving to Hong Kong so he could work for the conspirator in person.
Four months into the partnership, the conspirator raised the suggestion of recruiting another servicemember who had access to higher classified information, and Schultz set out to do so over the next few months.
Insider Threat
Fleming said some “insider threats” were planted in companies and the military decades ago, pointing to the former Verizon software engineer who had been sending the CCP data on Chinese dissidents in the United States since at least 2012 as an example, and companies are now beginning to recognize the long-term effort with these high profile cases.Some recruits are attracted by the money, others to prestige.
“They’ve done that to Harvard professors and so on: ‘We’re going to let you set up a sister lab in China ... and you’ll be the head of the lab,‘” Fleming said as an example. “’You’re so smart and accomplished. We‘d like you to do a white paper.’”
Fleming said he receives a few of these offers per year himself. The most recent one, from Hong Kong, came just months ago. He promptly deleted it.
“I know what’s going on, but many people don’t, and they take $7,500 to do a white paper,” Fleming said.
The initial task may be innocuous enough, and pointedly aboveboard. But the second offer may require more exclusive information that makes use of the recruit’s company’s intellectual property, and the third might require even more exclusive trade secrets. By that time, the experts are subject to blackmail, having already violated company regulations and the law.
“They pay a little more, they ask for more,” Fleming said. “This happens every day in the United States.”
The offers can come from a wide range of people, he said, but “the Chinese Communist Party is the grand puppetmaster.”
Sam Cooper, author of “Wilful Blindness: How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West,” said there is also a pattern of the CCP’s use of former law enforcement.
“Chinese secret police and United Front networks are absolutely making deep efforts to hire, for example ... the IRS, Border services, and these [former police] private eyes who still maintain close and friendly relationships with their colleagues who are still in law enforcement and have access to privileged and private databases,” Cooper told The Epoch Times.
In a separate case of individuals trying to coerce a family to move back to China where the CCP could imprison them, one of the defendants was a former New York Police Department sergeant turned private investigator.
According to case records, Michael McMahon knowingly helped men working for the CCP locate the victim’s address and surveil and harass the victim, and he even used his police contacts to keep them away from the neighborhood ahead of a confrontation in the event someone called the police to report suspicious activity.
Three of the conspirators reside in the United States and have been tried, while several others remain at large and include MSS officials in China.
In these recently successful cases, the United States has relied on rights that starkly contrast with those that the CCP recognizes.
“Unlike the victims that the defendants stalked for the Chinese government outside of the U.S. system, the defendants in this case have been given their due process,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Heeren said during closing arguments.
“We’ve reached the end of the criminal justice process where the defendants have had a fair trial. Now it’s time for them to be held accountable for their actions, for terrorizing the people you saw here at the direction of the Chinese government. Ladies and gentlemen, find these defendants guilty.”
Sowing Discord and Division
As seen in recent cases, the insider threat is found in anti-CCP groups, too.
Wang came to the United States in 1994 and founded a pro-democracy group in 2006, the same year he began working for the MSS, according to evidence gathered by prosecutors. For almost two decades, Wang regularly reported on the activities of anti-CCP activists to the MSS, passing along plans and personal information.
According to the indictment, he didn’t begin spying for the MSS until 2018, after he tried to visit a family member residing in China. It is an open question whether Tang was coerced by the CCP into spying, as threatening the life of family members in China is standard practice for the MSS.
“They use soft power. They use people’s greed. They use coercion, especially Chinese Americans. You may have family back home that they can really turn the screws to to have people behave in a way that they know they shouldn’t,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) told NTD, sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.
“This influence scheme and operation that they have going on, it’s at the state level, the local level, the national level, and at every element of our society.”
Five men were charged with conspiring to “undermine” Yan’s candidacy, with text exchanges revealing plots to beat him, create a car accident to “completely wreck” him, hire a prostitute to get compromising photos of him, or even plant child pornography to incriminate him.
“They’re sowing divisions and discord within our societies,” Cooper said. “They’re violently threatening, perhaps even harming in some cases, citizens that came to a new nation for a free and democratic life. ... They’re meddling with the social cohesion of our democratic nations and dividing societies, creating distrust.”
Cooper’s book exposed the CCP’s deep infiltration of Vancouver beginning in the 1980s and how that model had been exported to other Western cities. He testified before the Canadian Parliament about the CCP threat, and he was warned by national security officers about threats to his safety because of his ongoing reporting. Cooper, like Fleming, has received recruitment offers from CCP-linked entities that he’s turned down.
‘On the Front Lines’
One blatant example of CCP-directed activity occurred during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last year when pro-CCP protestors harassed and assaulted human rights demonstrators.Anna Kwok, executive director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council, was there in San Francisco in November 2023 to protest the human rights suppression in her home city and recalled pro-CCP agents holding flagpoles trying to beat up activists on her side.
Throughout that week, friends surrounded her on the streets to create a human shield and protect her from physical harm. But others weren’t so lucky. A recent report her group co-authored on the violence documented 34 cases of harassment, intimidation, and assault. At least a dozen Chinese community leaders with close connections to Beijing participated in the attacks, according to the report.
“The U.S. is not as safe as I thought it would be,” Kwok told The Epoch Times.
Part of the CCP’s goal is to spread fear, to make them feel they are being watched 24/7, she said.
After Hong Kong and mainland Chinese officials publicized the bounty, some people in the Hong Kong community began to wear masks or stand away from Kwok for fear they would be photographed alongside her, she said.
“That kind of fear spreads. And I think that that’s exactly what the Chinese government is trying to do,” she said.
Kwok said she thinks it’s a way to target the dissident community at large, “such that the entire community will feel that sense of fear and succumb to it.”
It’s hard to measure how deeply the regime has infiltrated the state and federal level, but what has come out of the Justice Department prosecutions should be a cue for Americans to keep their eyes open, according to Kwok.
“Otherwise, we will just be in the same loop over and over again,” she said.
Fleming said he hopes to see more resources dedicated to training Americans on spotting and reporting Chinese espionage and infiltration activities.
“I think we’re getting better,“ he said, but it’s still ”nowhere near where it needs to be.”
The Chinese regime’s tactics are evolving, new technologies are being exploited, and “the American people are on the front lines,” he said.
