Long before the Cox report detailing Chinese espionage was released
— in fact, long before much of anything in modern history — the
first Chinese spy manual was written.
Since about 500 BC, the Chinese have developed and used a number of
unconventional techniques to glean sensitive technological information
from other nations. In fact, said one expert, the Chinese regard it as
a moral imperative.
Ralph Sawyer, a noted author and expert on Chinese military history,
told WorldNetDaily that much has been left out of the Cox report that is
both damaging to U.S. national security and naïve of Chinese history
involving espionage. His book, ***”The Tao of Spycraft,” ***
http://britishheritage.com/reviews/bk_taospy.htm (“Tao” is pronounced
“Dao”), also provides several details about Chinese military
capabilities and projected qualities that have not “gotten much play” in
the public’s eye.
“The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has always retained
technological capabilities,” Sawyer said, even though much of the
population remains wedded to a primitive economic and military system.
“To their credit, they utilize the perception among many that they are
pacifistic, non-militaristic, and more concerned with things other than
power and power projection. That is simply not the case.”
Sawyer said “there are currently hundreds of Russian scientists and
technicians in Beijing that have superb expertise in nuclear weapons and
missiles.” Also, he said, despite western emphasis on nuclear
submarines, “China currently operates at least four modern diesel subs,
and they are still very reliable, very good platforms” which the Chinese
eventually plan to develop to launch nuclear-tipped cruise missiles
“from less than a hundred miles off the coast of the United States.”
Sawyer said the Chinese will have this capacity in about two to three
years, and added that even the U.S. was considering building new diesel
submarines because of their quiet efficiency.
“The miniaturization of warheads, coupled with better re-entry and
guidance systems — all which have been pointed out as being lost by
U.S. labs in the Cox report,” should give the PRC extensive new military
capabilities in years rather than decades. Sawyer told WorldNetDaily
that the popular view taken by western intelligence services is that the
Chinese “have suffered some data loss in stealing our secrets and
therefore will be unable to build what they have stolen,” but he
disagrees with that assessment.
All of these new capabilities have come to the Chinese because of
their traditional emphasis on spying — a tradition that dates back
hundreds, not dozens, of years.
“Ninety percent” of Chinese intelligence collection “is just
day-to-day gathering of open source intelligence on a nation’s society,
political workings and the like,” he said, adding that it is an ongoing,
daily process. However, today’s China has “a great need for highly
technological information,” and that is where the Chinese leadership has
placed the country’s emphasis on all espionage activities.
Getting that information from the United States was never as
difficult as many might have imagined, Sawyer said. Since the U.S. is
“such an open society, they (the Chinese) can see everything that is
going on here.”
He also pointed out that because of this cultural emphasis on spying,
up to about 200 years ago, “China was a very technologically advanced
nation, more so than most European nations.” It was only due to a few
key inventions and discoveries during the Industrial Revolution,
according to Sawyer, that that allowed America and much of the West to
pull ahead of Beijing in technology.
Specifically, the Chinese have always placed a priority on acquiring
new military technology, said Sawyer. “And they have attained most of
it through conventional means — clandestine work,” such as “buying
people off, coercion, and so on.”
Sawyer said what makes the Chinese different — and hence, difficult
to detect — in the realm of espionage, is that “they don’t always
engage in the traditional methods of information gathering, by Western
standards.” Some of those methods include “planting moles, overusing
planted assets, and buying off disgruntled workers.”
Conversely, the Chinese — in a newer phenomenon — use front
companies to gather intelligence, because of the willingness of “all
kinds of Americans in trying to do business with China.” Chinese
intelligence agencies also try to target vulnerable people to employ in
their spy networks — people who are not necessarily even Chinese or
Chinese-Americans. “Those people are too visible,” he said.
“So instead, sometimes it’s just a one-time thing. They might hire a
legitimate technician or someone trained in a certain field they are
interested in, then employ that person for, say, a week or two, pay them
an exorbitant amount of money, then steal or copy the technological
information involved in whatever that technician was hired to do.”
Sawyer added that the Chinese like to find “people who are disgruntled
and are willing to talk, or they just find Americans who are very
vulnerable — Americans love to talk about what they’re doing, so
they’ll give insights into it.”
That kind of espionage is massive and ongoing, explained Sawyer, who
said it is being conducted by Chinese students, embassy and consular
staff, trade and commercial missions, “which differs from the Russian
model, which still relies on the dedicated, small cell type of
operation.”
“China also has a continuous literary tradition,” Sawyer said, noting
its generals have always written about military planning because they
viewed it as integral to China’s continued existence. In his 30 years of
researching Chinese military espionage, Sawyer said he found the earlier
records of it five centuries before the birth of Christ.
There are “documented cases of the Chinese writing about the craft of
spying.” He noted that one reputed military classic read by Asian and
Western military experts alike, “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu, “contained
at least three to four pages describing spying and how to accomplish
it.”
“Chinese military scholars have written for years about spies,
describing “who and what they are, what their objectives are, how you
run them, how to control them, and how to verify what information
they’re giving you is correct and accurate.”
Most notable, said Sawyer, is the Chinese perception of why spies
should be employed at all.
“There are two traditional reasons,” he says “why the Chinese employ
spies: Economics, because warfare is very expensive — the most
expensive affair of state; and humanitarian, that you should never send
your own soldiers out into combat if you haven’t made every effort
possible to gather as much information about your enemy as possible.” A
ruler who does not engage in spycraft, he said, “is considered immoral.”
The Chinese have always prided themselves in being able to discover
non-traditional, non-conventional ways of doing things, and developing
techniques that may seem far-fetched or unrealistic to some but which
work very well for China, Sawyer added.
