intel officials, many foreign intel “collectors” in the Bay Area are not spies in the traditional sense of the term. Making it even more complicated, said multiple former U.S. (A spokesperson for Feinstein said the office doesn’t comment on personnel matters or investigations, but noted that no Feinstein staffer in California has ever had a security clearance.) At the Aspen Security Forum last week, FBI director Chris Wray acknowledged the threat Chinese spying in particular poses, saying, “China from a counterintelligence perspective represents the broadest, most pervasive, most threatening challenge we face as a country.” Senator Dianne Feinstein, and the source reported back to China about local politics. Former intelligence officials told me that Chinese intelligence once recruited a staff member at a California office of U.S. technology secrets, noted former intelligence officials, but it also is heavily invested in traditional political intelligence gathering, influence and perception-management operations in California. China, for example, is certainly out to steal U.S. (The FBI declined to comment for this story.)
#Chinese espionage operations and tactics full#
Another former intelligence official told me that, at one point recently, a full 20 percent of all the FBI’s active counterintelligence-related intellectual property cases had originated in the Bay Area. Spies “are very much part of the everyday environment” here, said this person. But this economic espionage is also ubiquitous.
“It’s a very subtle form of intelligence collection that is more business connected and oriented,” one told me. The open, experimental, cosmopolitan work and business culture of Silicon Valley in particular has encouraged a newer, “softer,” “nontraditional” type of espionage, said former intelligence officials-efforts that mostly target trade secrets and technology. Unlike on the East Coast, foreign intel operations here aren’t as focused on the hunt for diplomatic secrets, political intelligence or war plans. And even more worrisome, many of its targets are unprepared to deal with the growing threat.įog overtakes the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. In fact, they warn-especially because of increasing Russian and Chinese aggressiveness, and the local concentration of world-leading science and technology firms-there’s a full-on epidemic of espionage on the West Coast right now. intelligence officials, that’s true today more than ever. We tend to think of espionage in the United States as an East Coast phenomenon: shadowy foreign spies working out of embassies in Washington, or at missions to the United Nations in New York dead drops in suburban Virginia woodlands, and surreptitious meetings on park benches in Manhattan’s gray dusk.īut foreign spies have been showing up uninvited to San Francisco and Silicon Valley for a very long time. “What,” he replied, “You didn’t expect me to come?” The undercover FBI agents, who knew the whole affair had turned farcical, greeted the Soviet counterintelligence chief. The two Soviet intelligence operatives walked into the office room. The operation, Smith knew, was over-the presence of the Soviet spy boss meant that the FBI’s target had reported the meeting to his superiors-but they had to go through with the meeting anyway. FBI surveillance teams reported that he was being accompanied by a Russian diplomat known to the FBI as the head of Soviet counterintelligence in San Francisco. “Come meet us again.” He agreed.īut the second time, the suspected intel officer wasn’t alone. “We can offer your full claim,” Smith told the man. The goal was to compromise him with repeated payments, then to turn him. When they discovered that a known Soviet spy, operating under diplomatic cover, had filed a claim, Smith and several other bureau officials posed as federal employees disbursing relief funds to meet with the spy. Bush.įBI counterintelligence saw an opening, recalled Rick Smith, who worked on the Bureau’s San Francisco-based Soviet squad from 1972 to 1992. And local Soviet spies, just like many other denizens of the Bay Area, applied for their share of the nearly $3.5 billion in relief funds allocated by President George H.W. Sixty-three people were killed and thousands injured. Freeway overpasses shuddered and collapsed, swallowing cars like a sandpit. The powerful Loma Prieta earthquake, the most destructive to hit the region in more than 80 years, felled entire apartment buildings. SAN FRANCISCO-In the fall of 1989, during the Cold War’s wan and washed-out final months, the Berlin Wall was crumbling-and so was San Francisco. Zach Dorfman is senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
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