The country’s top counterintelligence official, William Evanina, says China is devoting “ungodly resources” and increasingly employing “more aggressive” and “more diversified” non-traditional means to conduct espionage against the United States.<\/p>\n
“It’s a persistent thousand grains of sand,” he said. “They hit our academia, our industry, our research development, and obviously our government. The FBI has arrested double-digit individuals in the last year or so \u2013 all for spying on behalf of China.”<\/p>\n
Evanina, who has served as director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center since 2014, said the range, persistence and variety of operations from China put it, relative to other adversaries like Russia and Iran, in a category of its own.<\/p>\n
“China is number one,” he said. “Existentially, long term, they’re the largest threat to our national security, bar none \u2013 it’s not even close.”<\/p>\n
“They bring ungodly resources that we can’t handle right now,” he said.<\/p>\n
National security officials have been issuing increasingly stark and public warnings about Chinese capabilities over the past several months. At an appearance at the Aspen Security Forum in July, FBI Director Christopher Wray said China, from a counterintelligence perspective, “represents the broadest, most challenging threat we face at this time.”<\/p>\n
“The volume of it, the pervasiveness of it, the significance of it, is something this country cannot underestimate,” Wray said.<\/p>\n
Evanina, in an interview with\u00a0Intelligence Matters\u00a0<\/em>host and CBS senior national security contributor Michael Morell, said China’s economic and cyber espionage efforts targeting U.S. intellectual property and critical infrastructure have — after a brief lull prompted by a commitment made by Chinese President Xi Jinping and\u00a0 then-President Barack Obama in 2015 — resumed their original pace.<\/p>\n “It’s too successful for the Chinese to stop their theft,” Evanina said.<\/p>\n Where there has been a marked increase, he continued, is in non-traditional intelligence collection efforts. “Those out-of-embassy jobs where they send over engineers, businessmen, students to do the same type of collection, recruitment, co-opting of information\u2026at mass scale,” he said.<\/p>\n “They have the numbers, the resources; they have the will and the intent,” Evanina said, with capabilities that “are out of this world with respect to cyber.”<\/p>\n “And they’re intent to have a holistic mindset, a whole-government mindset [on] how to take from us what they need,” he stressed.<\/p>\n Evanina, who was part of an FBI team that for years surveilled a network of Russian intelligence agents that operated without diplomatic protection as so-called “illegals” \u2013 and whose arrests in 2010 led to a high-level prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Russia \u2013 observed that Russia’s espionage tactics have likewise evolved to take advantage of Americans’ open-society traditions.<\/p>\n