The CIA on Thursday released two Mandarin-language videos designed to coax Chinese officials into leaking state secrets to Washington – the latest move in its escalating bid to boost human intelligence against America’s chief strategic rival.
The videos are part of a broader campaign the agency launched in October, when it began publishing secure online instructions to recruit informants in China, Iran and North Korea, citing earlier success in drawing Russian assets.
U.S. intelligence officials say they are confident the videos are slipping past China’s strict internet censorship and reaching the right viewers.
“If it weren’t working, we wouldn’t be making more videos,” a CIA official told Reuters, adding that China is the agency’s foremost intelligence priority in what he called a “truly generational competition” between the U.S. and China.
The two short videos posted to the CIA’s social media accounts depict fictional scenes in which a senior Chinese Communist Party official and a junior government worker with access to classified information become disillusioned with China’s system and approach the CIA.
The videos appear aimed at tapping into possible discontent within the Chinese government and senior ranks of the Communist Party, as Beijing has purged top officials and military leaders, some considered close allies of President Xi Jinping.
“As I rise within the party, I watch those above me being discarded like worn-out shoes. But now I realize that my fate was just as precarious as theirs,” the narrator says in Mandarin in one of the videos, as the camera pans over empty seats around a lavish dinner table.
“My family’s fate cannot rest in their hands,” the man says before the video shows him contacting the CIA using a tablet computer. It ends with the CIA logo and dark web contact details for the agency.
The CIA official said the U.S. is not just interested in counterintelligence but is also seeking information on advanced science, military and cyber technology, valuable economic data, and China’s foreign policy secrets.
China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the videos. It has previously accused the U.S. of waging a systematic disinformation campaign against China and said any attempts to drive a wedge between the Chinese people and the Communist Party would fail.
U.S. intelligence agencies said in March that China remains the top military and cyber threat to the U.S., noting that it has the capability to strike the U.S. with conventional weapons, compromise infrastructure through cyberattacks, and target American assets in space. They also warned that Beijing seeks to displace the U.S. as the global leader in artificial intelligence by 2030.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said no adversary has ever posed a more formidable challenge to the U.S. than the Chinese Communist Party.
“It is intent on dominating the world economically, militarily and technologically,” he said in a statement. “Our agency must continue responding to this threat with urgency, creativity and grit, and these videos are just one of the ways we are doing that.”
