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美國詹姆斯頓基金會(智庫)《中國簡報》最新一期文章，原題：北京的間諜網說起冷戰時期竊取美國公司和軍事機密(特別是技術機密)，沒有哪國的情報機構比得上蘇聯的克格勃。不過，情況已變。在今天的資訊時代，中國已經取代蘇聯，並在借鑑克格勃工業間諜方法的基礎上更勝一籌。如今，中國是最有潛力對美國的技術優勢及國家安全構成威脅的國家之一。
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資料圖：中國軍工廠內正在組裝的99式主戰坦克
黨媒文章，僅供參考。
資料圖：中國海軍2艘054A新型護衛艦
與冷戰時的克格勃相比，中國享有一大優勢：擁有進入美國科研院校和工業界的空前機會。在美國留學和工作的中國公民超過10萬人。這裏要強調，這些人未必就是間諜，但考慮到中國公民的身份，他們很可能成為中國秘密工業情報收集活動的重要組成部分。中國招募廣泛人群和組織來當「白手套」，幫其在國外從事骯髒勾當，包括科學家、留學生、企業高管甚至設立幌子公司或收購美國公司的子公司。
中國軍事----―工業複合體的緊密聯繫可用「16字方針」概括，即軍民結合、平戰結合、軍品優先、以民養軍。這些方針同樣被應用於中國的工業和經濟間諜計劃：軍工企業通過採購或合資形式取得兩用技術，並以商業為幌子。同時，直接為中國工作的間諜以各種身份作掩護，奉命竊取由美國及其西方盟友開發的高技術工具。
據聯邦調查局估算，目前美國境內有超過3000家公司與中國及其技術收集計劃有聯繫。這些公司許多都是中國公司設在美國的子公司，過去它們相對容易識別，最近的調查顯示許多公司已經改名，為的是與背後的中國老闆保持距離。
中國針對美國技術的間諜活動數十年前就有。但中國間諜手法迅速完善，構成的挑戰會令西方許多人措手不及。例如，聯邦調查局最近調查的一個案子涉及一戶美籍華人，這導致調查局在三藩市灣區報紙刊登廣告，敦促美籍華人報告可疑活動。此外，中國針對美國技術的間諜活動顯然着眼長遠，部分間諜甚至潛伏數十年之久。
當美國致力於全球反恐戰爭時，中國正悄無聲息地發起一場全球間諜戰。從許多方面看，來自中國的間諜活動構成的威脅更大，理應成為美國外交政策的當務之急。極端恐怖組織被逼入絕路，不太可能發起全球範圍的協同襲擊，但中國的間諜活動不然，它資金充足，並且有成千上萬的「步兵」參與。更重要的是，它的目標不是防衛森嚴的政府設施和標誌性建築，而是防護糟糕的商業技術機密，而這正是美國經濟和軍事優勢的源泉。這些零碎的信息似乎不足為害，但從數年甚至數十年裏收集的數據來看，那些零碎的信息會迅速變成未打磨的鑽石。(作者丹•弗頓，汪析譯)
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The Evolution of Espionage: Beijing’s Red Spider Web
By Dan Verton
During theof the Cold War no other nation could match the desire and ability of the Soviet Union’s KGB to steal American corporate and military secrets, particularly technology secrets. That has since changed, however. In today’s information age, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has replaced and even improved upon the KGB methods of industrial espionage to the point that the PRC now presents one of the most capable threat to U.S. technology leadership and by extension its national security.
What We Know, and Don’t Know
What we know thus far about China’s espionage activities against U.S. weapons laboratories and other technology development programs is cause enough for concern. The U.S. intelligence community’s official damage assessment of Chinese espionage targeting America’s nuclear technology secrets tells us this much:
What we know:
• China obtained by espionage classified U.S. nuclear weapons information that probably accelerated its program to develop future nuclear weapons. This collection program allowed China to focus successfully on critical paths and avoid less promising approaches to nuclear weapon designs.
• China obtained at least basic design information on several modern U.S. nuclear reentry vehicles, including the Trident II (W88).
• China also obtained information on a variety of U.S. weapon design concepts and weaponization features, including those of the neutron bomb.
What we don’t know:
• We cannot determine the full extent of weapon information obtained. For example, we do not know whether any weapon design documentation or blueprints were acquired.
• We believe it is more likely that the Chinese used U.S. design information to inform their own program than to replicate U.S. weapon designs.
Yet there is much more to China’s quest for U.S. technology. China has obtained a major advantage that the former KGB did not enjoy during the Cold War: unprecedented access to American academic institutions and industry. At any given time there are more than 100,000 PRC nationals in the United States attending universities and working throughout U.S. industries. It is important to note here that these individuals are not assumed to be spies, but given their status as PRC nationals they remain at higher risks of being a major component of the PRC’s nebulous industrial intelligence collection operation. In fact, there are very few professional PRC intelligence operatives actively working on collecting U.S. technology secrets compared to the number of PRC civilians who are actively recruited (either by appealing to their sense of patriotism or through other more coercive means) to routinely gather technology secrets and deliver those secrets to the PRC. Thus, the PRC employs a wide range of people and organizations to serve as its 「white glove,」 and do its dirty work abroad, including scientists, students, business executives and even phony front companies or acquired subsidiaries of U.S. companies as evidenced by a string of recent high profile cases.
Beijing’s 16-Character Policy
Nowhere is the nexus of the military-industrial complex in the PRC more evident than in the codification of the 1997 「16-Character Policy,」 which makes it official PRC policy to deliberately intertwine state-run and commercial organizations for casting a cloud of ambiguity over PRC military modernization. In their literal translation, the 16 characters mean as follows:
Jun-min jiehe (Combine the military and civil);
Ping-zhan jiehe (Combine peace and war);
Jun-pin youxian (Give priority to military products);
Yi min yan jun (Let the civil support the military).
The 16-Character Policy is important because of what it does for the strategic development of the PRC’s industrial and economic espionage program: it provides commercial cover for military industrial companies to acquire dual-use technology through purchase or joint-venture business dealings, and at the same time for trained spies who work directly for the PRC’s military establishment, whose operational mandate is then to gain access to and steal the high-tech tools and systems developed by the United States and its Western allies [1].
The two primary PRC organizations involved in actively collecting U.S. technological secrets are the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the Military Intelligence Department (MID) of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The MSS, now headed by Minister Geng Huichang (Xinhua News Agency, August 30, 2007), relies upon professionals, such as research scientists and others employed outside of intelligence circles, to collect information of intelligence value. In fact, some research organizations and other non-intelligence arms of the PRC government direct their own autonomous collection programs [2].
According to FBI estimates there are currently more than 3,000 corporations operating in the United States that have ties to the PRC and its government technology collection program. Many are U.S.-based subsidiaries of Chinese-owned companies; while in the past they were relatively easy to identify, recent studies indicate that many have changed their names in an effort to distance themselves from their PRC owners (Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2005).
China’s Red Spider Web
China’s espionage efforts targeting proprietary technologies developed in the United States stretch back decades. But China’s spy craft has evolved rapidly and now presents a serious challenge that many in the West are unprepared to counter. For example, recent cases investigated by the FBI have involved entire families of naturalized American citizens from China, prompting the Bureau to take out a Chinese-language advertisement in San Francisco Bay area newspapers urging Chinese Americans to report suspicious activity. In addition, China has clearly taken a long-term view of espionage against the U.S. technology industry, handling some agents for decades.
One of the most recent cases, for example, involves a former Boeing engineer who now stands accused of giving China proprietary information about several U.S. aerospace programs, including the space shuttle. The affidavit in the case alleges that Chinese intelligence officials first approached Dongfan 「Greg」 Chung of Orange, Calif., with intelligence collection requirements in 1979. Chung was arrested on February 11, 2008 and was scheduled to be sentenced this month.
At the same time Chung was arrested and accused of stealing proprietary Boeing information, Chinese businessmen Tai Shen Kuo and Yu Xin Kang, were arrested and charged with cultivating several U.S. defense officials, one of whom passed information on projected U.S. military sales to Taiwan for the next five years.
Many PRC domestic intelligence activities are directed against foreign businessmen or technical experts. The data elicited from unsuspecting persons or collected by technical surveillance means is used by Chinese state-run or private enterprises. Prominent Beijing hotels, such as the Palace Hotel, the Great Wall Hotel, and the Xiang Shan Hotel, are known to monitor the activities of their clientele.
Chinese government-owned companies have also been involved in schemes to steal the intellectual property of U.S. companies. They have done this using the corporate equivalent of sleeper cells—foreign executives hired by U.S. companies on work visas, as well as naturalized American citizens who then establish U.S. companies for the purpose of gaining access to the proprietary data of other U.S. firms.
Military
One notable case in 1993 involved a man named Bin Wu, who was convicted of transferring restricted night vision technologies developed in the United States to his MSS superiors in the PRC. Wu, a pro-Western professor who once taught in China, had been given the option by the MSS of either helping them acquire sensitive technologies or going to jail for supporting the Tiananmen Square uprising. He chose freedom and was instructed to travel to the United States and establish himself as a legitimate businessman.
Wu founded several front companies in the Norfolk, Virginia, area. He then actively solicited information from various U.S. companies and made many outright purchases of advanced technologies, including night vision equipment. The technologies were then shipped to the PRC.
U.S. investigations into Chinese espionage show that Wu was part of a much larger community of PRC sleeper cells. Many were not professional spies. Rather, they were simply business professionals or academics who were managed by MSS agents and given collection requirements based largely on the U.S. military critical technology list. In fact, during the 1990s these sleeper cells were used to establish front companies that would eventually the Aegis missile system. In particular, the PRC seems to have been interested in acquiring the proprietary software that formed the basis of the command and control system for the Aegis [3].
Business and Intellectual Property
On May 3, 2001, the U.S. Department of Justice arrested and charged two Chinese nationals and a naturalized Chinese-American citizen with conspiring with a Chinese state-owned company to steal proprietary source code and software from Lucent Technologies Inc. As of this writing there has been no court decision in the case. However, according to the federal indictment, Hai Lin and Kai Xu, both of whom were employed at Lucent as 「Distinguished Members」 of the company’s technical staff, colluded with Yong-Qing Cheng, a naturalized American citizen and vice president of a U.S. optical networking company, to form a new business based in Beijing using stolen Lucent technology.
The criminal complaint filed against the three executives alleges that they approached a Chinese state-owned company named Datang Telecom Technology Co., seeking to establish a joint venture, which they stated in an e-mail would become the 「Cisco of China.」 Lin, Xu and Cheng then formed a company called ComTriad Technologies Inc., and with $1.2 million in funding from Datang, the two companies formed DTNET—a joint venture approved by Datang’s board of directors. There was just one problem: the internet-based voice and data services product that Lin, Xu and Cheng were developing on behalf of the new venture (dubbed the CLX 1000) was based entirely on the proprietary software in Lucent’s PathStar Server, a product that earned Lucent more than $100 million during the previous year. It also was the very same technology that Lin and Xu had been working on while employed by Lucent.
Justice Department prosecutors allege that FBI searches of the computers used by the defendants reveal that on January 21, 2001, Lin sent an e-mail to a representative of Datang advising that the 「bare src」—allegedly referring to a portion of the PathStar source code—had been transferred to the ComTriad password-protected Web site, and that more source code would follow.
All three men were arrested on May 3, 2001 at their homes in New Jersey. When FBI agents searched their houses they seized large quantities of the component parts of the PathStar Access Server, including software and hardware, as well as schematic drawings and other technical documents related to the PathStar Access Server marked 「proprietary」 and 「confidential.」 Among other things, the agents seized a modified PathStar machine from Lin’s basement.
In a superseding indictment announced by prosecutors on April 11, 2002, the damage caused by this alleged economic espionage case goes well beyond Lucent. According to prosecutors, several other companies had licensed portions of their proprietary technology to Lucent for use in the PathStar Access Server. Those companies included Telenetworks, a business unit of Next Level Communications, headquartered in Rohnert Park, California; NetPlane Systems, Inc. (formerly Harris & Jeffries, Inc.), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mindspeed Technologies, Inc., headquartered in Dedham, Massachusetts; Hughes Software Systems, Ltd., a division of Hughes Network Systems, Inc., headquartered in Gurgaon, India; and ZiaTech Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation, headquartered in San Luis Obispo, California.
As is evident from the above case, individual acts of economic espionage can impact multiple companies. That was certainly the case in November 2001, when FBI agents arrested two San Jose-based businessmen as they were about to board a plane to China carrying suitcases full of trade secret documents totaling more than 8,800 pages and $10,000 in equipment that they had allegedly stole from four U.S. high-tech companies.
When FBI agents arrested Fei Ye and Ming Zhong, they discovered microchip blueprints and computer-aided design scripts from Sun Microsystems Inc., NEC Electronics Corp., Transmeta Corp. and Trident Microsystems Inc. Both once worked at Transmeta and Trident. Likewise, Fei Ye also worked at Sun and NEC. Prosecutors alleged that both men, originally from China, planned to use the stolen technologies to start a microprocessor company with the assistance of the Chinese government.
According to the indictment filed on December 4, 2002 in a U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, Ye and Zhong established Supervision Inc. (a.k.a Hangzhou Zhongtian Microsystems Company Ltd., and a.k.a Zhongtian Microsystems Corp.) to sell microprocessors in China. They also allegedly sought the direct assistance of the Chinese government and stated in their corporate charter that their company would assist China in its ability to develop super-integrated circuit design, and form a powerful capability to compete with worldwide leaders in the field of integrated circuit design [4].
Although the indictment does not charge any government entity of China, it does suggest that there was considerable interest in and potential support from the Chinese government. A 「panel of experts,」 for example, found that the Supervision project had 「important significance」 for China’s high-level embedded CPU development program and integrated circuit industry, and recommended that 「every government department implement and provide energetic support.」
Conclusion
These cases show that while America is preoccupied with the Global War on Terrorism, a quiet global espionage war is being waged by the PRC. And in many ways, the Chinese espionage threat holds greater overall importance and should be an immediate priority for U.S. foreign policy. Unlike radical terrorist groups, who have been pushed into a corner and are far less capable of coordinated action on a global scale, China’s espionage program is well-funded and its foot soldiers number in the thousands. More important, its targets are not well-defended government facilities and iconic structures, but poorly defended commercial technology secrets that feed America’s economic and military advantage. Taken alone, these bits of information often appear harmless, but when viewed within the context of data collected over the course of years, and sometimes decades, those bits quickly become diamonds in the rough.
Notes
1. U.S. House of Representatives, "The Cox Report: The Unanimous and Bipartisan Report of the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China," (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1999), 13.
2. Ibid., 19.
3. This is according to case documents in the case against Chi Mak, who stole secrets belonging to L-3 Communications. This has also been confirmed in a statement by Joel Brenner, the top counterintelligence official in the office of Director of National Intelligence, to a reporter for Bloomberg News, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ab2PiDl1qW9Q&refer=home
4. United States of America V. Fei Ye and Ming Zhong, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, San Jose Division, Dec. 4, 2002, p. 3.
*Note to China Brief readers. Although this article has no indigenous sources we felt that it was important enough article to be published in China Brief and wanted to share this analysis with our readers.
http://www.jamestown.org/china_brief/article.php?articleid=2374310