The invasion of Europe by Chinese spies: They are all around us, and their plan is clear

It was like an episode of the spy thriller “The Bureau”. A French intelligence officer known only as “Henri M” goes on an assignment in Beijing, where he falls in love with the ambassador’s translator and begins sending useful intelligence classified as confidential to the enemy. Not long after, he was impeached, returned to France, and sentenced to eight years in prison in 2020 for providing information to a foreign state. But this is not an isolated case, all the Chinese intelligence agencies use a similar strategy to draw members of competing services into the spider’s web and take information from them.

His colleague Pierre-Mar H, who worked in China until 2017, was also caught in the trap. He received 12 years in prison.

The drastic sentences are part of France’s determination to uncover crimes through extensive trials, but also confirm European suspicions that China’s spy and counterintelligence services pose a growing threat, even greater than that coming from Russia.
“Chinese intelligence is no less dangerous. Moreover, their espionage operations are now even better than the Russian ones,” confirmed a former high-ranking official of the American CIA.

China is widely known for advanced cyber attacks, such as the attack on Microsoft in 2021 when 30,000 organizations worldwide were compromised, and the attack was proven to be carried out by a group supported by the official Beijing. China, of course, rejected these accusations.

The method of collecting data through direct human action on the ground (HUMINT) is also increasingly advanced, which was interpreted in the West as an alarm signal.
“The Russians have been doing espionage since before the Soviet Union, they love it,” says the former head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency, Alex Younger, alluding to the fact that the Chinese have weaker software capabilities when it comes to artificial intelligence, but have come dangerously close to the Russian way of doing things.

MI5 chief Ken McCallum says the Chinese Communist Party is investing heavily in the development of espionage.

“We’re not shouting “wolf, wolf” here, this is a serious security threat,” concludes McCallum.

Another intelligence officer says that Chinese espionage is not similar to Russian and it is very difficult to tell who is and who is not an agent. For example, Russian spies are mainly focused on high-ranking officials and have developed numerous intelligence skills such as breaking coded information to find out specific information. However, the Chinese are developing their espionage system much more broadly, and are also engaged in political influence, lobbying or placing commercial advertisements that change public opinion or collect technological information. The Chinese variant involves a “whole society approach”.

“Russians can sometimes be clumsy and arrogant, and Chinese intelligence officers avoid any possibility of scandal because they want to preserve the reputation of “good bilateral relations”, says the American intelligence officer and adds that this is a completely new paradigm in international intelligence operations.

Such tactics can sometimes fail, so it is possible to have multiple of the same intelligence agents following the same target, but they are still very effective. and the EU estimates that these operations cost the EU $50 billion a year.

“Efficiency is very important to Chinese intelligence,” says Nigel Inkster, also a former MI6 director and international relations strategist.

Europe has so far expelled more than 600 Russian diplomats and intelligence officers since the start of the invasion of Ukraine. However, a similar situation with Beijing could be significantly more demanding because it will be very difficult to establish the identity of all the numerous officers.