FBI Director Warns China is America’s Most Significant Intelligence Threat

FBI Director Christopher Wray / Getty Images

 

Beijing engaged in ‘pervasive’ targeting of US secrets, Wray says

China is engaged in aggressive intelligence operations in the United States, ranging from the recruitment of academics to stealing agricultural secrets from farmers, FBI Director Christopher Wray says.

“I think China, from a counterintelligence perspective represents the broadest, most challenging, most significant threat we face as a country,” Wray said during a security conference in Colorado.

The FBI director said the Chinese utilize a “whole of state” spying effort.

China using students as spies

The 350,000 Chinese students in the U.S. “are here legitimately and doing great research and helping the global economy,” said Bill Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, but others are used as tools to facilitate nefarious activity. (Associated Press/File)

 

A senior U.S. counterintelligence official recently said publicly what many officials and experts have been warning privately for years: China is using its large student population in the United States to spy.

Bill Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, a DNI agency, said recently that China poses a broad-ranging foreign intelligence threat that includes the use of academics, students, cyberespionage and human agents to steal secrets from the government and private sectors.

“I look at the China threat from a counterintelligence perspective as a whole-of-government threat by China against us,” Mr. Evanina told a conference last week at The Aspen Institute.

“We allow 350,000 or so Chinese students here every year,” he said. “That’s a lot. We have a very liberal visa policy for them. Ninety-nine point nine percent of those students are here legitimately and doing great research and helping the global economy. But it is a tool that is used by the Chinese government to facilitate nefarious activity here in the U.S.”