According to them, this was influenced by a number of factors: China’s tough counter-intelligence regime and rigid centralization of power, the country’s extensive electronic surveillance mechanism, as well as a strict three-year quarantine in due to COVID-19. These and other circumstances made the collection of US intelligence data extremely difficult. Some officials spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the topic.
Moreover, the United States has yet to fully recover from the disastrous setback that exposed and dismantled an intelligence informant network inside China. As previously reported by the channel, this episode was one of the most significant intelligence failures in American history. According to numerous current and former government officials, Chinese counterintelligence agents gained access to secret communications and used that information to arrest and execute at least 20 CIA informants. “It was a terrible and devastating loss for the intelligence community,” said a former US intelligence official.
“This system (the authorities in China) is so closed because we just don’t know what’s going on there,” said Dennis Wilder, who served as the CIA’s deputy deputy director for East Asia. and the Pacific from 2015 to 2016. “That inner ring is hard to penetrate,” added Wilder, who is currently a fellow with the US-China Global Dialogue Initiative at Georgetown University.
Increasingly harsh rhetoric from Washington could spur China to more aggressive action rather than prevent it, former officials have said. Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang said on Tuesday that the United States and China were heading for inevitable “confrontation and conflict” if Washington did not change course. As former US intelligence officers have pointed out, the challenge posed by China and the increasingly hostile climate clouding US-China relations underscore the need for increased dialogue between the two superpowers to avoid “a involuntary confrontation.
The CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to network requests for comment. US intelligence chiefs have previously promised to treat China as their top priority. In 2021, the CIA announced the creation of a new center dedicated to collecting intelligence on China.
Top intelligence officials are due to testify Wednesday and Thursday at annual congressional hearings on global threats facing the United States, and China is expected to dominate much of the discussion, observers said.
