On Thursday, the CIA launched two videos in Chinese designed to encourage Chinese officials to share secrets with the United States, marking the agency’s latest initiative to enhance its human intelligence operations against its strategic competitor. This action follows the CIA’s October campaign to recruit informants in China, Iran, and North Korea by providing online guidelines for secure communication with the agency, which it claims has seen success in recruiting Russians.
The CIA believes these videos are successfully bypassing China’s internet restrictions and reaching their target audience. A CIA representative stated, ‘If it weren’t effective, we wouldn’t be producing more videos,’ emphasizing that China is the agency’s top intelligence focus in a significant competition between the U.S. and China. The videos, shared on the CIA’s social media platforms, portray fictional narratives where a senior official from the Chinese Communist Party and a junior government employee with access to classified information become disillusioned with the Chinese regime and seek out the CIA. The CIA official noted that the U.S. is interested not only in counterintelligence but also in acquiring insights into advanced science, military and cyber technologies, critical economic information, and China’s foreign policy strategies.
While China’s embassy in Washington has not yet commented on the videos, it has previously accused the U.S. of conducting a systematic disinformation campaign against China, asserting that efforts to create a divide between the Chinese populace and the CCP will ultimately fail.
U.S. intelligence agencies reported in March that China continues to pose the primary military and cyber threat to the U.S., highlighting China’s capability to strike the U.S. with conventional weapons, compromise its infrastructure through cyber attacks, and target its space assets, with Beijing aiming to surpass the U.S. as the leading AI power by 2030.
