If You Do It, It's Spying. If I Do It, It's
Research.
LARRY ROMANOFF • AUGUST
10, 2020
CHINESE
ENGLISH NEDERLANDS PORTUGUESE SPANISH
In
the late 1950s and early 1960s there was an American TV series called “The Naked City”, set in NYC. The
opening for each episode began with the intoned words, “There are eight million
stories in the Naked City. This is one of them.” Well, there are probably 8
million American spy stories that have taken place in China during the past few
decades. Here are two of them.
Introduction
Several years ago it was reported that the Pentagon
was building an international spy network that might become even larger than
that of the CIA, planning to have at least 1,600 “collectors of information”
spread around the world. In addition to military attaches and others who do
not work undercover, more clandestine operatives would be trained by the CIA
and deployed overseas to undertake tasks the CIA was unwilling to pursue. It
was duly confirmed that China was among the Pentagon’s top intelligence
priorities, reflecting the American affinity for espionage and covert
action, evidence of which we no longer need. Americans are frequently
conscripted by the CIA or the US military into espionage service in China,
operating with the assistance of the US State Department.
Foreign individuals in China, ostensibly acting
independently, are regularly apprehended by Chinese authorities for carrying
out illegal surveys and mapping, marking the location of key military and other
facilities. Almost 40 illegal surveying and mapping cases were detected in
China in the past several years alone, mostly surrounding some of China’s
military bases and installations, and in sensitive border areas such as
Xinjiang and Tibet, the data almost certainly used in planning the
foreign-sponsored unrest that occurred in those provinces.
In one recent case, an American citizen was found
using two professional surveying and mapping GPS receivers on which he had
recorded more than 90,000 coordinates, 50,000 of those near military
installations. He travelled to
XinJiang on a pretext of registering a travel agency to offer outdoor tours to
foreigners in Urumqi, and clearly was there on assignment from the US
government when he was caught. This is the reason Google’s mapping service was
killed in China. Google was busy collecting high-resolution intelligence for
the CIA, again images of sensitive military areas.