http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071221/NATION/676409066/1002
Article published Dec 21, 2007
China taps into U.S. spy operations
December 21, 2007
By Bill Gertz - China's intelligence service gained access to a
secret National Security Agency listening post in Hawaii through a
Chinese-language translation service, according to U.S. intelligence
officials.
The spy penetration was discovered several years ago as part of a
major counterintelligence probe by the Naval Criminal Investigative
Service (NCIS) that revealed an extensive program by China's spy
service to steal codes and other electronic intelligence secrets, and
to recruit military and civilian personnel with access to them.
According to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity,
China's Ministry of State Security, the main civilian spy service,
carried out the operations by setting up a Chinese translation
service in Hawaii that represented itself as a U.S.-origin company.
The ruse led to classified contracts with the Navy and NSA to
translate some of the hundreds of thousands of intercepted
communications gathered by NSA's network of listening posts, aircraft
and ships.
NCIS agents discovered that the translation service, which officials
did not identify by name, had conducted contract work for the
National Security Agency facility at Kunia, an underground electronic
intelligence post some 15 miles northwest of Honolulu that conducts
some of the U.S. intelligence community's most sensitive work.
Kunia is both a processing center and a collection point for large
amounts of Chinese- and other Asian-language communications, which
are translated and used in classified intelligence reports on
military and political developments.
Naval intelligence officials familiar with the Chinese spy
penetration said the access to both "raw" and analyzed intelligence
at Kunia caused significant damage by giving China's government
details on both the targets and the sources of U.S. spying
operations. Such information would permit the Chinese to block the
eavesdropping or to provide false and misleading "disinformation" to
U.S. intelligence.
The officials did not say how long the Chinese operation lasted
before being detected.
NCIS also discovered a major Chinese intelligence operation that
sought to recruit Chinese Americans as spies, and to recruit Navy and
civilian intelligence workers with access to Kunia's secrets.
According to the officials, China's program to recruit intelligence
workers was discovered in 2005 after a Navy cryptographic technician
was caught accepting a no-cost visit to China, paid for by Beijing's
government.
The case led to an NCIS probe that discovered other intelligence
personnel, many of them nearing the ends of their careers, who were
targeted by Chinese intelligence for recruitment.
The ethnic recruitment effort involved similar tactics. China's
intelligence service used intelligence officers and supporters to
identify Chinese Americans with access to secrets who would be
approached and offered free visits to China, often to meet relatives.
The Chinese would then use the visit to attempt to recruit the
Americans as spies.
Chinese-American ethnic groups in the past have denounced the U.S.
government for singling out Asian Americans as spy targets, accusing
counterintelligence officials of racism. But the Chinese recruitment
program shows that Beijing actively seeks to develop spies through
such ethnic targeting.
NSA and NCIS spokesmen declined to comment when asked about the
Chinese intelligence-gathering operations in Hawaii.
I.C. Smith, a former FBI special agent, said both China's civilian
MSS and military spy service, known as "2 PLA" for the Second
Department of the Chinese military, are targeting NSA.
"There can be no higher target for an intelligence service, and that
includes China's MSS and 2 PLA, than gaining access to an
adversaries' codes and electronic intelligence," he said, because it
is the ultimate in "foreknowledge" advocated by ancient Chinese
strategist Sun Tzu.
Getting U.S. electronic intelligence and codes would give China
specific information on what is known and allow Beijing to take
defensive measures "based on knowledge, not supposition," Mr. Smith
said, adding that "it also allows for disinformation to be done with
confidence and it basically gives the intelligence service every
advantage over the enemy."
The NSA Hawaii operations center employs several thousand people and
was recently expanded at a cost of more than $350 million. An NSA
press release in August stated the expansion is "one facet of the
agency's efforts to evolve a global cryptologic enterprise that is
resilient, agile and effective in prosecuting a dynamic threat environment."
The facility was singled out for criticism in the past by
intelligence reform advocates because of its restrictive policies on
information-sharing.
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