Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China Read Online Free

is discovered inside US intelligence, the counterintelligence experts try to determine what factors led to the betrayal and might have been detected in advance. Aldrich Ames, the CIA Soviet counterintelligence officer, had a severe drinking problem. So did Edward Lee Howard, the CIA officer who fled to Moscow in 1985 after betraying the agency's secrets to the KGB.
    But looking for employees inside American intelligence who have a severe drinking problem or some other personal aberration would in all likelihood not help to uncover a Chinese mole inside the CIA, the FBI, or the national weapons labs. Because China would normally prefer not to deal with them.
    Moore elaborated on the point. "To protect our country we have all the CI [counterintelligence] units in the government, and the security guys, the polygraph operators, and they ask about drinking and money, and talk to neighbors for background information. All the security guys are looking for vulnerabilities. If the Chinese are not looking for people with vulnerabilities, when we screen out people with vulnerabilities we don't find the people they are using."
    For twenty years, Moore was the FBI's chief China analyst, toiling away in the bureau's CI-3B unit at headquarters. He developed a set of two dozen rules that he believed could apply to Chinese intelligence cases. Three are of particular importance.
    First, China does not, in most instances, offer money in exchange for information.
    Second, China does not accept typical walk-in cases, because of the possibility that "volunteers" are being dangled as bait by an opposition intelligence service. By contrast, some of the KGB's biggest coups came from walk-ins, not only Ames but John A. Walker Jr., a former Navy chief warrant officer who, with his son, brother, and a friend, sold the Navy's codes and spied for the Soviets for eighteen years. *
    Moore's third rule is that China "collects information from good people, people who don't have financial problems, don't have emotional problems, who are not motivated by revenge, not unsuccessful in their lives. Not someone who is lonely, needs a friend, needs a woman.
    "China is looking to get good people to do bad things. How do you recruit a good person? You get a good person to do this by convincing him it would be good to help China. China is a poor country, they say, and somebody has to help them modernize, improve their defense system. We need people to help us a little bit. The idea is to convince someone that what he is actually doing is good. You don't talk about the fact that he would be betraying a trust. They say, 'We think you have an affirmative obligation to help China modernize.'
    "The metaphor is sex: you are trying to woo a woman and get her to go to bed. At least in my time, if you said would you go upstairs and have sex, the answer was usually no. But getting a kiss, the answer might be different. You would try to build from that kiss onward to greater things. That's what's going on here, seduction. The targets are being led astray in small increments. You have little bits of espionage."
    According to Nicholas Eftimiades, China's economic espionage follows a three-pronged pattern. First, persons are recruited in China and asked to acquire specific technological information when they travel abroad. Second, some American technology companies "are purchased outright by Chinese state-run firms."And third, high-tech equipment is purchased by front companies, often operating out of Hong Kong.
    One survey prepared for government agencies, the Intelligence Threat Handbook, estimates that China has more than 2,600 diplomatic and commercial officials in the United States, of whom a "substantial percentage" are "actively involved in collecting intelligence." More than 127,000 students from the People's Republic of China attend schools in the United States, "and many of these students have been tasked to collect information by the Chinese government," the handbook