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- [00:04]
David McCloskey
For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books. Join the declassified club@therealisclassified.com this podcast is.
- [00:19]
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David McCloskey
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- [02:24]
David McCloskey
Hi, my name is Shirley but global headhunter a global well known fund associations is looking for a remote consultant to cooperate. Luckily to see your LinkedIn we found you were so excellent candidate. Look forward to cooperate with you. If you have interest please contact me. Well, welcome to the rest is classified. I'm David McCloskey and I'm Gordon Carrera. And that was the delightful prose of Shirley Shenzhen. Shirley is a global headhunter and Shirley is in that wonderful bit of prose sending a message over the professional networking site LinkedIn to a researcher in your parliament, Gordon, in the UK parliament. It sounds like an interesting opportunity to make some money on the side, doesn't it?
- [03:15]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, it sounds like a great opportunity. Who could resist such a beautifully crafted email with such lovely, inviting language? I've had a few messages over LinkedIn, including some strange offers, but none quite so enticing as that. So, I mean, you'd have taken it, wouldn't you, David?
- [03:33]
David McCloskey
What could possibly go wrong? You know, just reply to a message on LinkedIn and I think it sounds like a nice side hustle for us on the rest is classified.
- [03:42]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, exactly. I'm not sure how Goal Hanger would feel about that. But yes, this week we are not talking about side hustles and how to earn some extra money with some consulting. We're in fact talking about how Chinese spies try to recruit people in sensitive positions using professional networking sites as well as other techniques. So MI5 here, the security service of the UK, just a few days ago issued what's called an espionage alert to the Houses of Parliament, the mother of Parliament's warning of what was called a covert and calculated campaign to target people. And that also comes in the wake of a very high profile collapse of a prosecution of two people alleged to have been spying for China, one of whom worked in Parliament. So this is very much in the news, this issue of people approached over networking sites. And we're going to take a deep dive in two episodes into how these operations really work and what to look out for.
- [04:40]
David McCloskey
And I think it's also, Gordon, I think a chance to place some of these cases in the wider context of Chinese espionage because I think, you know, we've done a lot of episodes on this podcast about Russian espionage and we did a couple episodes on China hacking Google. We've done a few on North Korean bank robbers and cybercrime. But I think we, we have sort of realized that we haven't set kind of the context for just how big of a deal Chinese espionage has become. And it's, it's really actually quite astounding. I mean, if you go back even just a couple years, there was a unprecedented public appearance of the heads of the various security services in the US and the UK in July of 2022. Yeah, it was that you were there, you were present, of course you were, you were in the room. And, and so you would well know that at that session, the then FBI director said that Beijing was, quote, the biggest long term threat to our national and economic security, which it's a big deal to sort of publicly call out Beijing as being such a national security threat. I mean, MI5 at the time was running seven times the number of China related investigations as they had been just five years earlier in 2018. So the growth of sort of investigations into alleged Chinese espionage, the sort of realization that Beijing poses a really significant kind of espionage threat worldwide. I mean, there's another, you know, great stat from the FBI here which has said it's right now working on more than 2,000 investigations with links to China. It opens a new investigation that is China sort of related every 10 hours on 10 hours. Insane. That's insane.
- [06:43]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. So this is a chance to kind of look at that. We're not going to do all of Chinese espionage two episodes. I think it's too big. But I think we will look at this kind of through the lens of their approaches to people. Some of the mix of technical and human, or at least digital and human espionage that they're involved with, and including the kind of targeting of politics and Parliament. And it's not just Britain's Parliament and parliamentarians that are at risk of Falling for dodgy LinkedIn messages, is it, David? Because even former CIA officials, some of the smartest people around, have fallen prey to these schemes. And we're going to be looking at that, aren't we?
- [07:21]
David McCloskey
Well, that sounds, that sounds unlikely to happen, Gordon, to be honest. You know, I mean, come on.
- [07:25]
Gordon Carrera
But it did.
- [07:27]
David McCloskey
But it did. But it did. It's shocking. That's right. We're going to be looking at the case of a former CIA case officer who gets approached over LinkedIn, travels to China, and then, I mean, ends up being caught in a almost darkly comedic fashion when our friends the Phoebes get onto him and get into his, his covert communications device that he had been using to communicate with his Chinese handler. So we're going to kind of zoom in on some particular cases here over the next couple episodes that show how China spies today. But before we, we get to this dark chapter in CIA history, Gordon, let's start with what's happening in your Parliament.
- [08:11]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, let's do that. So the MI5 alert that I mentioned was issued to Parliament on November 18th. We're recording actually just less than a week later. And it warned that alert that two particular networking profiles were being used to conduct outreach at scale with a view to laying the groundwork for long term relationships. And the claim is that behind these two profiles, you read beautifully, one of them, Shirley, earlier. But behind those profiles were not shock, horror, global Headhunters, but China's Ministry of State Security. So let's talk a little bit about the Ministry of State Security or the mss, because I guess part of the point is China's different, isn't it? I mean, one thing is its mission. I mean, the Ministry of State Security, even the title gives you a slight clue that this is an organization, a spy agency, designed to secure the state and particularly the kind of hold of the Communist Party in power. And as a result, it is slightly different in its purposes from other intelligence agencies, isn't it? It is doing the kind of political, diplomatic, military intelligence that the CIA and MI6 would do, but it's also doing issues around domestic dissent. Exiles like Tibetans who might be challenging the hold of the Communist Party and other dissident groups, people who are linked to Taiwan, is a big deal for them. There's also economic espionage, which is there because to keep the hold of the Communist Party in power, you need economic growth, which kind of gives them legitimacy. Therefore, you need to drive economic growth through stealing secrets of companies. So it's a more kind of complicated picture, isn't it, of what an intelligence agency does than maybe the one we're used to?
- [09:58]
David McCloskey
I think that's right. And it's also, I think, bureaucratically become a more important institution under Xi. It's not a very old institution. It was actually formed in the early 80s as a merger of sort of different security agencies that had existed for years. It's not actually particularly old, but in recent years, you know, in the past decade, it's become a kind of much more prominent organization inside the sort of elite circles. The other bit of it, Gordon, that I think is really important to understand is just how massive it is. Right. Because the scale is one of, I think, the unique challenges of dealing with Chinese espionage, or thinking about it, is that the resources that they can throw at espionage in general are just significantly more than I think any Western agency would really be able to throw at a problem.
- [10:53]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, that's right. The scale is enormous. I mean, the estimates kind of vary, but, you know, what I've seen is 600,000 people are working for Chinese state security and intelligence organizations. So that's at home and abroad. But that is staggering, isn't it? Talking about tens of thousands in the uk, America's bigger, but it's, you know, it's nothing like that, is it?
- [11:17]
David McCloskey
That would probably make it larger than the old Soviet KGB at its height. Yeah, the estimates I've seen on the kgb, I mean, obviously we should Say these numbers are pretty rough. Right. But I've seen estimates that put the Soviet KGB in like the mid 400,000s at its height in terms of its size. So this is significantly larger than that. I mean, I think it's also does bear mentioning that a lot of the actual human espionage, it's still a labor intensive process. So it's helpful to have more people and obviously they have an internal security component to them. So not all these resources are directed outside of the state, but it's, it's helpful to have massive numbers of people. And if you're trying to steal a whole bunch of different kinds of IP and secrets and things like that across a bunch of different domains, it's helpful to have large numbers of humans.
- [12:10]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, I think it was Stalin who said quantity has a quality of its own. And I guess it's something that the Chinese can use. I'm just reminded also of when we go back to the slightly different cultures. I remember a Western intelligence official who worked in counterintelligence many years ago, met his Chinese counterpart and the Chinese counterpart said, what's your job title? And the Western official goes, well, I'm head of counterintelligence. And he said to his Chinese counterpart, what do they call you? And he said, they call me the Smasher of Spies. And I thought to myself, that's a title I'd love to have my business Smasher of Spies. Anyway. So that was possibly before they became a bit more modernized.
- [12:51]
David McCloskey
No, that's a great title.
- [12:52]
Gordon Carrera
It's a good title.
- [12:53]
David McCloskey
You want to put that on your business card. I mean, I think the other, the other piece of this that just is important to mention and I think it's connected to scale, but it is somewhat unique and distinct. Is that. So we're going to be talking in these episodes about some particular cases of trying to essentially just in an old school way, using some new school tech, find people, spot, assess, develop them, recruit them. That's kind of what the model is. And it's very, it'll sound very similar to the way that the CIA Works or MI6 Works or the Russians work. But the Chinese also, I think have some particular strategies for in particular like gaining ip. Basically setting up fake venture capital firms that invest in a company, get its IP and then pull their investment out once they've, you know, absorbed or hoovered.
- [13:45]
Gordon Carrera
Up the ip once they got the secrets.
- [13:46]
David McCloskey
Yeah, exactly. Or like in the States they acquire bankrupt companies sometimes to go after the ip. So again, that's industrial and commercial espionage. We're not talking about that here, but it just gives you a sense of like how it enables all different kinds of espionage that frankly a lot of Western services just don't engage in.
- [14:04]
Gordon Carrera
So I think that those are the key points, aren't they? The breadth of what they do is different and the depth to which they can do it is different because of the scale that they've got. And I was in MI5 in October, so just about a month or so ago for the annual speech by Ken McCallum, who's the head of MI5 and he gives an annual speech on threats, journalists are invited in. And there's an interesting line that I picked out from that where he said, try not to think too much. Just in terms of classic card carrying spies based out of the embassy in the John le Carre mould, he said, when he was talking about China, you know, that was his point. And I guess going back to this parliamentary alert, you can see that here these are not people who are diplomats undercover, these are people posing as headhunters. Shirley, who you beautifully read from at the start, claiming to be recruitment agencies and using LinkedIn. And LinkedIn has been this very powerful platform. LinkedIn says it's trying to deal with some of these problems, but you know, what it means effectively is if you're trying to recruit someone who works in, say, Parliament, you don't need to hang out in the bars in Westminster anymore. You just send out a LinkedIn message to one of these researchers and hope that one of them bites the difference between kind of fly fishing and going out in a trawler and just dragging a big net with thousands of LinkedIn messages. And of course, you know, the advantage is, as we said, it's done remotely. You know, the risks are close to zero for whatever MSS officer is sitting in Beijing or Shanghai. If a profile is burnt and exposed like it was in this alert, then they just can move on to a new profile.
- [15:36]
David McCloskey
It is really interesting how advanced some of the kind of initial targeting and development tools can be online. You know, so, for example, there have been cases where North Korean hackers have started a conversation with someone on LinkedIn and then try to get on their calendar or something like that, have a zoom meeting. And when that person clicks into the zoom meeting, they're in fact taken to a kind of almost hijacked zoom portal. So it looks like a zoom link they're clicking on for the meeting, but it's actually sending them to a different portal that is a zoom room that in some cases could actually be deepfaked and there's some commercially available tech called, I think it's called deepface Live, that can actually allow you to set up. So if you and I, Gordon, are having this conversation, we could look and sound like totally different people.
- [16:33]
Gordon Carrera
So what you're telling me, David, is right now I could be talking to an MSS officer rather than David Mikovsky? That's right. Except I think I'd spot the sense of humor. Well, that could, I think I could tell. I think after all our conversations, I could tell if this was actually a Deep Lake McCall.
- [16:50]
David McCloskey
Apparently the hairline is the hardest thing to fake.
- [16:53]
Gordon Carrera
I'm looking really closely at the camera.
- [16:55]
David McCloskey
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Have a look at that. No, but the point being. So then in these kind of zoom rooms, oftentimes what has happened in these cases is the person who is brought in, their microphone or their headphones don't work. And, and so then a link is sent via the chat to fix the audio, and then on that link, when they click it, malware is deposited onto their computer. And so you're absolutely right on the sort of, you know, trawling the west, the Westminster bars. It's like, if you think about the old school kind of agent recruitment cycle, spotting, assessing and even developing now, a lot of that can be done online with these new tools. It's pretty remarkable.
- [17:35]
Gordon Carrera
They'll start with just that message over LinkedIn, then you might have the zoom meeting and then next comes the offer of an all expenses paid trip to China and to meet someone in person, and then the request to just do some consultancy reports for a client about topical issues. You maybe just write us a report about, you know, Britain's relationship with Europe and how it's going on. This is being used, according to this alert, to target parliamentary staff, economists, think tank employees, geopolitical consultants. So people who work broadly around Westminster, MI5 warned, you know, these people would then get paid in cash or cryptocurrency. Now, personally, I think that should raise some alarm bells. If those are the only ways you're being offered to pay for your, for.
- [18:16]
David McCloskey
Your consultancy, why didn't someone edit Shirley's LinkedIn message? Do you have a sense? Because it strikes me that someone who had some proficiency with English would have looked at that and said, we could make this 10 times better.
- [18:33]
Gordon Carrera
I'm always reminded someone told me something about scam messages, you know, the email scams, which are not spy based but financial based, that actually there was an advantage for having ones which were actually quite poorly written. You're after people who are kind of desperate, naive or stupid enough to engage. And actually someone who either doesn't spot or does spot and doesn't care about that kind of bad language is actually already you've narrowed it down to someone who's more likely to engage with it, whereas someone who's smart won't. I don't know if that's true, but I agree it does seem odd people are being offered money for consultancy writing reports. The point is building a relationship, isn't it? You know, these reports aren't going to contain secrets, but the idea is a kind of cultivating someone, luring them in one step at a time to write a report, even if it's just open source. Build a relationship and then you start to ask for more sensitive material. You know, in the latest, that alert referred to a desire to get insider insights. And I guess that's the point. It's not secrets, it's not classified documents, is it? Because there's not many of those in Westminster. But what there is is insider insights. And that's pretty useful stuff, isn't it?
- [19:47]
David McCloskey
Well, I guess the gossip, even if it's not a state secret, is pretty useful for targeting purposes. You know, I mean, if a, if a particular MP is in debt or having an affair or there is value in learning sort of who's up and who's down and where the cracks and seams might be in people, and if you don't have someone who's on the inside of that bubble who can tell you this stuff from the outside, it'd be pretty hard to, hard to determine. And I guess it's also helpful, you know, for example, like if a parliamentary committee is traveling, let's say, to Taiwan, which China obviously claims you could, you know, sort of disrupt those plans or pass that information to another element inside MSS, who would be able to actually spy on them during the trip, as an example.
- [20:30]
Gordon Carrera
And I mean, what you also see is there's this kind of long term patient attitude that Chinese intelligence had of building up networks of people who have influence and so that they can basically have influence or interfere with political life. What in practice that means is shaping political debate. So you make sure that some subjects, I don't know, you know, Tibet and other areas, you know, are raised or raised in ways that are sympathetic to China. That's what building influence allows you to do. And I mean, there is this very interesting case, it's worth just spending a couple of minutes on, which goes back a few years to January 2022, when there was another alert by MI5 and actually the first really prominent alert. There'd been one kind of smaller one before about Russia, but this was a kind of prominent alert warning Parliament about a specific individual called Christine Lee, who was a lawyer with a Chinese background who'd come to Britain, been in Britain for a long time, and was acting as a kind of ambassador for China, UK relations and an advocate for the Chinese community. And in that role, she was very active within Parliament. Now, MI5 said it received intelligence suggesting she was the conduit for money flowing into the UK political system with its true origins in China. Hidden. Now, specifically, she was working not for the mss, but something called the United Front Works Department, which is a really interesting organization. People describe it not as an intelligence agency, but as an influence agency. So, you know, its job is to kind of spread the word about China and to build networks of influence about China, rather than be a kind of COVID clandestine organization. But, you know, the Chinese Communist Party describe it as their magic weapon because it's helping create influence around the world. And in this case, Christine Lee was said to be the conduit for funding to be passed across the political spectrum. You know, one Labour mp, Barry Gardiner, had received, I think, close to half a million pounds to support his work, you know, donations to his political office. But she'd also met with Theresa May and David Cameron, both of whom ended up as Prime Minister. She'd donated to the local party of Ed Davy, the Liberal Democrat leader when he was Secretary of State for energy. And MI5 had been kind of warning people for a while about her activities, which they considered suspicious. And then eventually, I think they decided they needed to go public about it.
- [22:46]
David McCloskey
What is the connection between MI5 and MPs on something like this? How does that practically work?
- [22:55]
Gordon Carrera
So it's really interesting because MPs historically have kind of guarded themselves against being the subject of, if you like, domestic spying by the security service, kind of understandably, there is a kind of supposed to be a relative kind of firewall around Parliament. So Parliament has its own security team, its own director of security, which liaises with MI5. But there was this kind of historic kind of concern that you don't necessarily want a security service which spends its time and you think you can understand why, kind of poking around MPs, looking at their finances, looking at who's funding them, you know, doing background checks on candidates. There was a concern, I think, for many years, you could then end up with a security service being used as a political tool and, you know, being used to go after enemies. And that's something you see in lots of other countries. So there's quite strict criteria, for instance, about whether MPs phones can be tapped. And the reason is people have been worried. And they've been points in the past, including the 80s when there were worries that MI5 was getting a bit drawn into politics. You had a government then who wanted them to spy on cnd, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, other left wing groups and people from MI5. Some felt they did open too many files on people. So there's always been this kind of slight caution about getting too involved in politics. But then the problem is if you don't look, that leaves a kind of free reign for Russians and Chinese agents to start interfering in political life. So there's a kind of, you find it with MPs, they're like, we don't want to be spied on or vetted or be poked around by MI5, but also we want to be protected against Chinese and Russian spies. The two things are there at the same time. There's a kind of natural tension. But then since the last 10 years where we've seen Russian interference and now Chinese interference, I think there's more engagement now. And you find there's a much probably a more healthy relationship between, between the two sides.
- [24:51]
David McCloskey
Well, it's tough, isn't it? Because what is the line between sort of an influence operation slash espionage and just lobbying? That's a pretty fuzzy kind of barrier. And I mean, I guess in this case the concern, you know, go back to Christine Lee. I mean, the concern would be that China is essentially trying to kind of support, or maybe, you know, to put it uncharitably, buy off a kind of a new generation of political candidates, which obviously is very concerning.
- [25:22]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, and I think that was one of the particular worries there was that it was a long term game from China. So they were backing people early in their career to get into parliament in public life. You know what someone described to me, I remember when I covered it at the time, as a seeding operation. In other words, they were seeding people into the system across the political spectrum. So it's worth saying Christine Lee disputed the claims about her. She took a court case against MI5 to challenge some of these claims, but she lost that case and we've not heard that much from her since. I mean, I did try and contact her for a long time and, and didn't hear back. So it's a very interesting story though, about some of the concerns that have existed around Parliament.
- [26:02]
David McCloskey
The patience reminds me a bit of the way the Russians view the illegals program. This kind of long term patience with letting these operations kind of run. And in any given 36 month period, maybe nothing is really happening, but there's kind of a willingness to invest and wait and see if these things bear fruit over the long term. But of course Gordon, there's a much more recent and dramatic case involving Parliament in the last few months. So maybe let's take a break and when we come back will look at how that spying case collapsed. This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
- [26:43]
Gordon Carrera
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- [26:56]
David McCloskey
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Gordon Carrera
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- [27:35]
Gordon Carrera
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- [28:57]
David McCloskey
Well, welcome back, Gordon. I think maybe you should give us the briefing on this most recent case in Parliament. For those maybe in particular across the pond here, us Americans who have not been following it as closely as you have.
- [29:13]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, because this became a big story for quite a few weeks here in the uk, but I'm aware others, you know, we've got a lot of international listeners might not have followed it, but two people had been charged under what's called the Official Secrets Act. Quite an old piece of legislation. We'll come back to that. Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry. Christopher Cash worked in Parliament, including for the China Research Group, which is a very influential and generally seen as quite hawkish group on China, which provided briefings for Parliament inside and outside. The interesting thing is these two individuals. So Christopher Cash in Parliament in the uk, he'd spent time in China and got to know the other Christopher, Christopher Berry, who still based out there. Important to say at the outset, both men denied the charges. So we'll come to the fact the case, you know, didn't go to trial, but they have consistently denied the charges and they were going to deny them in court. So these are just allegations. But the allegation is not in this case that this was through LinkedIn, but thanks to this personal collection. And the allegation was that there were senior officials in China who were in contact with Christopher Berry, including some quite senior ones in Beijing. And there were messages being passed and instructions being passed, if you like, from officials in China through to Bury through to KA in London to provide information. And, you know, there were going to be messages which were going to be used in the case in which, you know, Barry tells Cash about some of these contacts and Cash responds, you're in spy territory now. Now, however, you know, I think the defense were going to dispute whether some of these officials in Beijing were really the people who people said they were. So it's certainly complicated, but the allegation was that that there was a tasking here by the Chinese state to get information from Parliament. So things like who might win a Conservative Party leadership campaign and there was a kind of dialogue between the individuals that this was confidential information, not necessarily top secret, but confidential to some extent. Again, it's the kind of off the record gossip that people in Westminster thrive on.
- [31:22]
David McCloskey
It's not like you're lifting documents from a safe inside, inside SIS and bringing them out, you know, so it is kind of trading in information that's maybe not public but also potentially not classified either.
- [31:35]
Gordon Carrera
Exactly, exactly. And it was claimed that they were asked by handlers to provide information on British attitudes to the subject, which is very sensitive in China, of forced labour in Xinjiang, which is the province which is home to the Uyghur minority, and where there have been claims that they've been used in forced labour and they've been talk about then trying to boycott or not buy products used with that kind of labour. And that's something China is very sensitive about. And there are other subjects as well, which alleged to have been the subject of requests, including potential sanctions on China and the review of the sale of a semiconductor plant in the uk, all, as I said, allegations denied by the men. And again, there is this question, as you said, is this even spying when there's not access to secret. But it's back to that question, what's China after? Is it after insight, understanding and influence, which is something much broader than. Than secrets? And the response of the men was that this was just gossip and publicly available information. And it's important to say, you know, that the two men didn't have the chance to defend themselves in court, even though a lot of these allegations have come out. So it is tricky. But the crucial thing is they didn't get the chance to defend themselves in court because just days before the trial is due to start. The charges are withdrawn, the case collapses. Now this becomes a massive political story as there's a blame game between, on the one hand, the prosecutors, the Crown Prosecution Service, as they're called in the uk, and on the other hand, the government. And it turned on whether or not they could prove in court, under the Official Secrets act, that China was indeed an enemy, or to put it in different terms, a threat to the interests and to the national security of the UK at the time the offences were committed. And basically, as the trial approached, there was this sudden realisation that the prosecutors were not getting what they felt they needed in order to be able to stand up the case in terms of material from the government, not about what the men had done, alleged to have done, but about how to view China. And it's all to do with the fact this was the Official Secrets act, which is an archaic piece of legislation, under which, in the language of the old act, you had to say you were passing information to an enemy. And in here, enemy got defined as someone who posed a kind of a threat to the national security of the time. So they needed witness statements from the government being precise about what. What it meant to be an enemy and whether China Kind of hit that standard. And they could see, I think as the case approached that the defence were going to kind of hammer on this point. And of course this is all happening as the current government is trying to build better relations with China. So the whole thing collapses and there is this question like was it collapsed by the government or was it just a kind of cock up or conspiracy as we like to put it? Which one was it?
- [34:48]
David McCloskey
What's your sense of that?
- [34:50]
Gordon Carrera
Well, my sense it was a bit of both. I think both sides tried to blame each other, the prosecutors and the government for not having the evidence they needed. There are definitely people I've heard in government, particularly in the Foreign Office, who were never very keen on this case going to trial. And you know, there are a lot of people linked to the Foreign Office around government who might have felt that as well. And I think it was more cock up than conspiracy. But I think both sides got cold feet about this case. Basically. I think the prosecutors were suddenly thinking we've taken this to court, but we're not sure we're going to win this and it's going to be a problem if we don't win this. And I think the government is thinking this is a problematic case, especially if we don't win and we're going to have to kind of say in court how we see China as an enemy. And so both sides kind of get cold feet and then try and blame the other for not being willing to kind of go through with it. And you kind of think why did it take a year to get to that position if you realize you haven't got the evidence needed? I mean that's just, I find that bizarre, frankly.
- [35:54]
David McCloskey
It does highlight, I think maybe two themes around Chinese espionage that, that are, I don't know if they're evergreen, but they seem consistent across a lot of different cases and countries. And one of them is that there is this constant tension between what Western countries might see as their sort of political or national security interests and frankly, let's be honest, commercial interests, right, where there's tension between those two things and as a result elements inside any Western government who are going to be really loath to sort of rake the Chinese over the coals because there's an understanding of how important the sort of commercial ties are. And then the second piece is like what's the difference? Or at what point does passing rumors and sort of non public information become actual espionage? And it's really hard to define where that line is in a case like this, where it's not a former CIA officer who's passing classified documents to the Chinese intelligence service. Right. That wasn't happening in this case. And so it becomes really kind of squishy to define espionage, I guess, in a way, like where is that line?
- [37:06]
Gordon Carrera
And I think the, you know, the thing people say is that this was partly a problem of the old legislation. There's a new National Security act which makes it easier to prosecute because the weird thing in, in the UK is putting aside this case in the past, actually working for a foreign intelligence agency wasn't a crime in the uk, so working for the Russian state or the Chinese state wasn't a crime because the Official Secrets act basically said it was only the passing of a document containing material damaging the UK interests to a country considered an enemy constituted a crime. And so the new National Security act does change the kind of boundaries, which I think makes it easier. We've already seen some other prosecutions under this. So it was always going to be a kind of difficult and a very high profile case. I think the government wrongly thought that it would disappear quickly, but instead it just raised all these questions about China. And I think one of the questions is it should be possible to have a grown up relationship with China in which you trade with them, there's economic investment, but you also call out when they're spying. And I think someone said to me, someone who knows this world very well, said the problem with the way the Brits handled this was almost the kind of worst of both worlds, worlds because it made the UK look weak. And they said the Chinese will be kind of laughing at the UK for this, for not being able to do it. So I think the thing was pretty disastrous. And even the head of MI5 at that briefing I was at in October, which was just as it was all collapsing, said he was frustrated. I've definitely picked up, speaking to a lot of people, a lot of frustration amongst people who worry about security at the way this was handled and the kind of fallout of it.
- [38:44]
David McCloskey
And you know, again, I guess important to say these are allegations. Nothing was proved in court because the charges were, were withdrawn. Some of the underlying pieces of this do, you know, help to illustrate this kind of, I guess, pattern of activity as it relates to China's intelligence services and the way they interact with, with the West. I mean, it's not just Britain, isn't that right, Gordon? I mean, other countries are sort of starting to sound the alarm about Chinese espionage as well.
- [39:16]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, I mean, the Canadians have done it, the Australians did it very Early, I mean, the. The head of the Australian Foreign Intelligence Service offered a public warning about someone he said had deep connections with a foreign government. You can work out which one that is. And who acted as, as he described it, as a puppeteer to finance potential parliamentary candidates. And that became quite politicized, I think, in Australia, because it was like, are you accusing us of, you know, taking Chinese money? These things have a habit of becoming very political and quite hot, but they're also a sign, I think, that it's not just the uk, but a number of Western countries which have seen similar kinds of activities.
- [39:52]
David McCloskey
And I guess it's not just the Chinese going after Parliaments, is it? You've said that the. I think it was the head of MI5 a few years back had some pretty staggering numbers for you about the scale of the outreach in the UK.
- [40:08]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. So this is back in 2023, I went to this really interesting. It was the first time the five eyes. So us, uk, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the heads of the security agencies publicly appeared together. And I had to go, David. I had to go to California to cover it, which was a terrible burn.
- [40:28]
David McCloskey
A terrible.
- [40:29]
Gordon Carrera
It was a terrible burn. All us British journalists who were there were like, wow, this, you know, it was like sunny in October and we'd come from kind of rainy London. We're like, hello, California. It was very nice. We were there, obviously, for the serious business of hearing these security chiefs talk about China, basically, and give a warning. They'd gone to Silicon Valley, actually, and to Stanford to talk about it, to warn about some of the stuff you mentioned earlier, the kind of theft of intellectual property and venture capital firms being used. But the head of MI5 did an interview with him there and he talked about the epic scale of Chinese espionage and said that more than 20,000 people in the UK had been approached covertly by Chinese spies. And that includes, you know, particularly over LinkedIn, but other ways as well. 20,000 people covertly approached just in the UK. I mean, it's astonishing, isn't it, in terms of. Back to that issue of the numbers game that they play.
- [41:22]
David McCloskey
Well, and I guess it's also think about maybe an ordinary person's LinkedIn profile. There's a lot of information on there that'll help you understand what sorts of information they might have access to or have had access to in the past. It's not hard to build a kind of simple network map of who they're connected to. And so if you're looking at getting access to somebody, you could sort of Come up with five different people you could start to connect with to get access to that person. I mean it's, there's a lot of information out there publicly that we all make available that I think really enables this kind of targeting.
- [42:01]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. And I think that that scale gives you a sense it's not just kind of politicians, people who work in Westminster or another parliament who are getting approached, but also, David, former spies. Because here we go. In early 2017, a self employed consultant living in Leesburg, Virginia called Kevin Mallory gets a message over LinkedIn and it's from a Chinese headhunter and it comes at an opportune or maybe a missed opportune at time because he's heavily in debt. And what's more, Kevin Mallory is not just any old consultant. He is a former CIA officer who spent 20 years in the US intelligence community. And I think the story of what happens to him is a really interesting case study of how one of these pitches from the Chinese over LinkedIn evolves, leads to meetings and in his case leads to a pretty dramatic downfall.
- [42:57]
David McCloskey
Well, Gordon, that sounds like an unimprovable cliffhanger. So let's end our first episode exploring how China spies there. We are going to be back for round two where we'll get into the Kevin Mallory case. But if you want to listen to that right now, go and join the declassified club is what we would say@therestisclassified.com where you'll get access to all of that right now.
- [43:22]
Gordon Carrera
Great Christmas present for those of you. But do be careful if you get approached by someone over LinkedIn suggesting you join the club, just do double check just to make sure it's someone legit, not trying to kind of lure you into being an agent of the Ministry of State Security because you never know.
- [43:39]
David McCloskey
Not someone looking for a remote consultant to, to cooperate. That's if you're approached on that front, you know, to look away. We should also say, Gordon, we are doing a live show next month in London on 31 January at the South Bank Center. You can get your tickets for that also@therestisclassified.com we'll see you next time.
- [44:01]
Gordon Carrera
See you next time.
- [44:07]
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