CIA Launches Chinese Spy Recruitment Video

(Compiled from ABC News and Fox News) – The CIA is stepping up its recruiting efforts in China, releasing two Mandarin-language videos that appeal to government officials who might be open to [spying for the U.S.].

The videos, published on the CIA social media channels, including YouTube, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram and X, follow fictional men who presumably belong to the Chinese Communist Party, one a senior official and the other a junior staffer, as they work daily with classified information. Their Mandarin voiceovers say they have seen colleagues and friends “disappear.”

“I must have a backup plan,” one [man] says. By the end of both videos, the officials are shown reaching out to the CIA via the dark web, following Mandarin instructions handed out by the CIA to do so securely.

“One of the primary roles of the CIA is to collect intelligence for the president and for our policymakers,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Fox News. “One of the ways we do that is by recruiting assets that can help us steal secrets.”

The first video is directed at senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders who U.S. intelligence officials believe may be willing to talk. Many of these leaders see their colleagues fired, jailed and, in some cases, they vanish altogether. The video closes by telling the viewer, “Grasp your fate in your hands.”

“This video explains to them how they can contact the CIA through our dark website and have an ability to improve their safety and well-being and that of their family,” Ratcliffe said.

Ratcliffe said during his tenure as director of national intelligence during the first Trump administration that [the Chinese Communist Party] was the United States’ most formidable adversary; economically, politically and militarily.

The second video is directed specifically at more junior officers within the CCP. He said the lower-level workers do not have much of an upward career trajectory, and their work only benefits CCP government elites.

The second video ends with the phrase “Heaven helps those who help themselves. Your fate is in your control.”

“Do you have any information about economic, fiscal, or trade policies?” the CIA asks in the caption. “Do you work in the defense industry? Do you work in national security, diplomacy, science, advanced technology, or deal with people who work in these fields? Please contact us. The information you can provide is important and we value your insights on these topics.”

The videos end with encrypted contact information for the agency.]

Ratcliffe said he’s confident the videos will get past “The Great Firewall of China” and be seen by the right people in mainland China. The CIA previously released Mandarin-language instructions on how to connect with the agency through the dark web, which reached millions of people. Ratcliffe says the agency’s line is open. Now, he wants people in China to come forward, while understanding their conversations will remain confidential.

“We’re moving forward and putting more distance between the United States and China early on in the Trump administration and that’s going to continue,” Ratcliffe said.

….. The videos follow a similar effort undertaken by the CIA in Russia in 2023, when it released Russian-language productions in which characters decide to spy on the CIA’s behalf.

The CIA official told ABC News the agency is continuing the effort after its Russia series yielded positive results, but the official would not provide details about partnerships that might have developed from the outreach in Russia.

The CIA, which leads human intelligence efforts in the U.S. intelligence community, said the videos are a modern approach to its mission of gathering intelligence from spies around the globe.

“In today’s world of UTS, we can’t recruit sources the same way that we did 20 years ago, probably the same way you did 10 years ago,” the CIA official said, referring to the acronym for universal technical surveillance.

“And as part of this, we have to go where the people go — that’s online,” the official added.

Emily Harding, the director of the Intelligence, National Security and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the CIA may find success by appealing to people in China disaffected by political or economic conditions. …

“One of the main reasons that people do spy against their country is [the] ideology piece,” Harding noted, conceding that “China is a particularly hard target.”

“They have a robust surveillance state that makes it very, very hard to maintain contact with an asset,” she said.

The CIA’s online gambit wouldn’t broadly affect international relations, Harding said, since the United States and China are known to spy on each other — and recruit spies.

When U.S. government layoffs began [following DOGE assessments] earlier this year, China was “very aggressively reaching out to places online … to put out feelers like, ‘Hey, if you have a clearance, come talk to us,'” Harding said. …

Compiled from articles published at ABC News by Chris Boccia on May 2 and by David Spunt, Jake Gibson on Fox on May 1. Reprinted here for educational purposes only. May not be reproduced on other websites without permission.