Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2019. ix, 359 pp. (Map.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-68247-303-0.
With growing worldwide concern about Beijing’s ambitions in Africa, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, and the South China Sea, what could be more helpful to the intelligence community than a comprehensive analysis of the Chinese communist security and intelligence apparatus? China is likely to be the world’s largest economy in the next decade, and the country’s increasingly autocratic ruler shows no sign of adopting liberal norms of international behaviour. On the contrary, Xi Jinping has amended the constitution to extend his term in office, due to end in 2023, for life. Under President Xi, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has gained superpower status, and the Huawei controversy has served to highlight its global reach, supported by an ominous cyber capability. Only China seems to be able to exercise influence over a worryingly erratic North Korea. Now, perhaps more than ever, policymakers need well-informed advice.
It might be thought that there is limited open-source information available about the Ministry of State Security (MSS), but over the years the organization has suffered several high-level defections including, most famously, the 1985 desertion of Yu Qiangsheng, the adopted son of intelligence chief Kang Sheng. Codenamed PLANESMAN by the CIA, Yu was a veritable treasure trove of information whose meal ticket was Larry Wu-Tai Chin, the man who conducted the longest and most senior hostile penetration of the CIA. Since Chin’s exposure, and subsequent suicide, the CIA has experienced further MSS penetration at the hands of Jerry Lee, who is described as having been recruited by the MSS three years after his retirement in 2007 as a Clandestine Service case officer.
These three cases, Yu, Chin, and Lee can be taken as a litmus test for the degree to which the authors have been bound by their own secrecy commitments, for Mattis is himself an agency retiree, having been employed as a counterintelligence analyst. Under normal circumstances one would expect a former insider to be contractually required to submit any manuscript to the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board for clearance, a routine procedure that can manifest redactions, but usually is indicated by a textual acknowledgment. No such mention is made, leaving the reader wondering if, and to what extent, the content has been edited by CIA management. The issue is potentially important because of the treatment given to these three spies. In Yu’s case, we learn that that he was acting as an agent long before his defection, an assertion made (and attributed to) The Spy Within (Tod Hoffman, Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2008). However, what is odd is that the two very brief passing references to Yu (plus an indexed page reference to Yu that does not exist) hardly do credit to his huge contribution to our understanding of the modern MSS. Why the reticence?
Whereas Larry Chin and Jerry Lee merit their own separate individual entries—in a format which contains most of the text, amounting to more than 220 pages—the absence of Yu is striking and seems rather odd. Drilling down on Chin’s story, he is described as “among the most damaging spies in US history,” yet is also said to have been “an employee of a sideline CIA activity” (203), which rather suggests that he was not the CIA’s most senior and longest-serving China analyst—someone privy to all the agency’s human and technical sources for more than two decades since joining the CIA in 1952. In contrast, Hoffman called Chin “one of the most significant cases in the history of espionage, and the longest-running penetration of an intelligence organization ever discovered” (book cover). Even discounting an element of self-serving hyperbole, the implication is that something does not quite add up in the Chin assessment. Similarly with Lee, a CIA agent handler with 14 years’ experience recruiting and managing Chinese assets. Disappointed by his lack of promotion, Lee was arrested by the FBI in January 2018, ten years after he had retired, and just as rumours started circulating about a huge roll-up of some 20 CIA sources in Hong Kong and a massive compromise of CIA data systems. In his confession, Lee admitted having sold classified information to his MSS contacts since 2010, and in November 2019 was sentenced to 19 years’ imprisonment. From a counterintelligence perspective, Lee was very important, as reflected by the severity of his prison sentence, because it was an example of MSS penetration of the CIA, and of the aggressive nature of the MSS hierarchy. Curiously, Lee’s entry merits only 15 lines, much the same as the account of Kun Shan Chun, another espionage case which revealed an MSS close interest in the FBI’s New York Field Office. Arguably, Lee and Kun were far more significant to the intelligence community than Kuo Tai-Shen, a Taiwanese furniture manufacturer caught up in a much larger investigation into Gregg Bergersen in 2008, to whom 27 lines have been devoted.
With the first author’s declared counterintelligence background one might have expected more of the entries to be more directly related to MSS, an organization that demonstrably poses a serious threat to the West, as articulated recently by FBI Director Christopher Wray’s assertion that a new Chinese case was initiated every ten hours! Setting aside the day-to-day routine of chasing the technology transfer thieves and the cyber criminals testing Western defences, history tells us that the most effective reaction to an espionage offensive on this scale is counterintelligence, meaning the kind of imaginative operation conducted in 2018 when Xu Yahjun was lured to Brussels, where he was arrested and extradited to the United States. This is a classic tale of trapping an adversary and then leveraging an advantage, and the implication is that Xu is now cooperating with the FBI. Alas, there is only a single, tangential reference to Xu in Chinese Communist Espionage. Likewise, a key component of effective counterintelligence is the ability to attract and manage high-level defectors, and when Chen Yonglin surfaced at the Sydney consulate in May 2005, he looked like an intelligence bonanza for Western recipients of his wisdom, but he goes unmentioned by the authors.
The value of Chinese Communist Espionage, which describes itself as an intelligence primer, lies in its individual entries, and it would be tedious to complain about such glaring omissions as Huawei or Edward Snowden, but this is far from a comprehensive analysis of the subject. Naturally, the authors have been restricted to open-source material, such as publicly disclosed criminal indictments, affidavits published in the course of criminal prosecutions, and newspaper or internet articles, but the discerning reader wants authors with a specialist inside knowledge, as avowed by Mattis and Brazil, to offer the benefit of their own specialist viewpoints.
Nigel West
Independent Scholar, London