The US is hamstringing itself in its spy war with China 

FBI Director Christopher Wray routinely warns of the near apocalyptic threats and consequences from Beijing’s massive counterintelligence campaign. China’s spying aims to secure the military advantage observers caution might enable it to prevail in a war with the U.S. — a war that is likely to incur unprecedented American casualties.  

Despite China’s current conditions offering the CIA a limited window of opportunity, we might not be able to seize it because of a congressional process that perennially underfunds it.  

China’s intelligence appetite is massive, as is the espionage enterprise that feeds it. A Center for Strategic and International Studies study reflects just some of the resulting significant damage. But look more closely, and there’s a pattern of duplicative effort and problematic tradecraft that the CIA can exploit. 

China’s spies take risks to steal what they can get for free. And its competing intelligence services, the civilian Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the Joint Intelligence Bureau of the General Staff, known colloquially within the U.S. intelligence community as 2PLA, often direct multiple efforts against the same targets. Operating from a distance, rather than collocated with their targets, China’s intelligence officers rely heavily on coopted amateurs from the country’s state commercial enterprises and academic institutions — sometimes with comical results. 

MSS Zhejiang branch officer Daniel Woo recruited former Belgian senator Frank Creyelman to influence discussions in Europe on issues ranging from China’s crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong to its persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. According to a Financial Times investigation, Woo communicated with Creyelman internationally over clear text, in one instance writing, “Our purpose is to divide the US-European relationship.”  

In November 2022, according to U.S. court documents, Xu Yanjun, a career MSS officer posted to a regional field office and the first Chinese government intelligence officer ever to be extradited to the U.S. for prosecution, used various covers with minimal backstopping and sloppy communications practices to target American aviation companies. Much of the evidence used to convict Xu was found unprotected on his electronic devices and in the cloud. In some instances, Xu cross-contaminated true name and alias documents, as well as official, administrative and personal correspondence.  

In 2016, Chinese national Mo Hailong was sentenced to 29 months in prison for conspiracy to steal trade secrets from DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto. Hardly James Bond, and not a professional intelligence officer but rather a coopted civilian, Mo was observed by curious farmers as he dug up propriety corn seeds from their fields in southern Iowa. He then attempted to smuggle the seeds back to China in his luggage for reverse engineering.  

China’s espionage is being conducted against the backdrop of President Xi Jinping’s economic and political struggles, which are creating a large pool of unhappy people with axes to grind. Xi recently purged nine additional generals after replacing the Rocket Forces’ top two commanders and sacking his defense minister. Media reporting suggests the moves respond to a degree of corruption so profound as to have undermined China’s military modernization. But his actions will disrupt China’s military, strain loyalties and exacerbate public bitterness. Xi needs time to transform the Chinese Communist Party’s culture, long built on personal networks, entitlement and obligations in a uniquely Chinese system referred to as guanxi.  

In 2021, the CIA created a China Mission Center, whose growth and urgency is reminiscent of its counterterrorism surge following 9/11. But unlike then, there’s little evidence that Congress has increased the overall budget or raised the CIA’s personnel strength. The CIA’s piece of the $874.2 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal 2024 is classified, but it represents a fraction of what goes to the Pentagon or for the nation’s high-tech satellite collection platforms. 

The Pentagon has trillions of dollars to spend and a broad consortium of vendors, lobbyists and elected political officials anxious to help them do so. The CIA does not. While the intelligence community refers to the CIA as the nation’s first line of defense and collector of last resort, congressional members face little public backlash when cutting the agency’s budget behind closed doors. In contrast, how often do we see Congress reject Pentagon programs, regardless of merit, which bring money and jobs to their constituencies? 

Even when the CIA receives a boost to support a new initiative, the money comes with high expectations but rarely positions or base funding that can be counted on annually. The agency compensates by drawing from operational funding to cover support needs and to hire contractors to augment staff personnel. But legal considerations and limited experience restrict what duties contractors can perform, requiring the CIA to realign existing staff personnel from other duties. The agency takes pride in doing more with less, but the reality means doing less with less.  

China is not an easy intelligence target. It combines daunting technical counterintelligence capabilities with an aggressive public outreach to enlist society to inform on family, friends and neighbors, harkening back to the days of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. But Chinese officials aren’t any harder to recruit than their peers in other societies, just culturally different from some. Russians I knew, for example, were more driven by transformative idealistic beliefs rather than transactional measures and believed their spying could change the world. The Chinese agents I knew sought merely to change their own small part of it.   

The irony is how intelligence operations often pay for themselves. Some years back, I raced a coming sunrise in a safehouse located in a sketchy part of town to photograph a series of military manuals. My agent, a military officer, nervously paced about, given his need to replace the materials before the opening of business. The manuals he delivered provided everything written about some of the latest equipment being fielded by our then Warsaw Pact adversaries. In exchange for what was a relatively trivial sum, his secrets netted the U.S. an incalculable financial savings in research and development, not to mention saving countless American lives.  

Sun Tzu said that “the greatest victory is that which requires no battle.” If we want to prevail over China, as well as all else that threatens us in this increasingly dangerous world, rethinking how we fund the CIA strikes me as a reasonable and nonpartisan national security imperative. 

But the clock is ticking. 

Douglas London, a former CIA operations officer, served for 34 years in the Clandestine Service with multiple assignments as a Chief of Station. He is author of “The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence.”Mr. London teaches intelligence studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and is a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute.