New in SpyWeek: China's Double Agent
Disgraced GOP financier Elliott Broidy's link to Chinese spies,
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In From the Cold: A former Chinese spy who spent more than a decade working for the secret police in his homeland has come forward to expose a little-known political security bureau that he describes as “a bit like the KGB, the Stasi, and the Gestapo.”
The 39-year-old man, who goes by Eric, gave a series of on-camera interviews to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and shared hundreds of secret documents, text and voice messages, and bank records that show the inner workings of China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), its domestic security service. “I believe the public has the right to know this secret world,” Eric told the ABC.
Not only that, there’s a connection between the Chinese secret police unit Eric worked for and Elliott Broidy, a controversial former big-time fundraiser for the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. More on that below.
Eric says he was forced to join a secretive MPS branch, known as the Political Security Protection Bureau, or 1st Bureau, in 2007. Eric says he attracted attention from authorities by being a member of the China Social Democratic Party, an underground political organization outlawed by the one-party communist state. Arrested and threatened with jail, Eric was offered a second chance if he became a double agent.
For the next 15 years, Eric says he was dispatched around Southeast Asia with instructions to infiltrate pro-democracy organizations and hunt down expat Chinese dissidents.
Enter Elliott Broidy, an American businessman and lobbyist who had served as finance chairman of the Republican National Committee during the George W. Bush administration. Subsequently, in 2009, he was convicted in a New York bribery case, but was resuscitated by Donald Trump in 2017 with an appointment as deputy finance chief of the RNC. It was around that time that Broidy met in Shenzhen, bordering on Hong Kong, with one Sun Lijun, the head of the1st Bureau, who was also deputy Public Security minister, according to the Wall Street Journal.
At Sun’s request, Broidy agreed to try to and use his influence with the Trump administration to advocate for the extradition of Guo Wengui, a Chinese businessman and self-described anti-China activist living in New York. The scheme failed, but all the key players were later charged with corruption. Broidy also pleaded guilty in 2020 to violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, but was pardoned by Trump. Sun, meanwhile, was convicted of graft in China and accused of being disloyal to President Xi Jinping. Guo is set to go on trial in Manhattan this month in a billion-dollar fraud scheme.
But back to secret agent Eric: One of his high-profile targets was Hua Yong, an exiled Chinese artist and critic of the Chinese Communist Party living in Bangkok. Beijing had advertised a $20,000 bounty for his capture, a typical move against high-profile targets abroad.
Eric was given a cover story as a business planning manager at a hotel group and instructed to ingratiate himself with Hua and lure him to Cambodia or Laos. But Hua moved to Vancouver in 2021. More than a year and a half later, he died while kayaking at night. Canadian authorities concluded Hua’s death was not suspicious.
Another target was political cartoonist Wang Liming, aka Rebel Pepper, who has drawn caricatures of Chinese President Xi Jinping as a dumpling, a tyrant, and Winnie-the-Pooh. (China banned Winnie-the-Pooh in 2018.) In 2016, Rebel Pepper was living in Cambodia. Eric was given an apartment and a cover story, working for a real estate group. and hired Rebel Pepper to make some designs for the real estate company. The secret police then set up a job interview for Rebel Pepper, but the cartoonist’s wife suspected it was a trap, and he didn’t show.
Eric says he tried to flee in 2011, traveling to Hong Kong and making contact with the U.S. consulate, where he declared his true identity as a secret police agent. American officials took him seriously, Eric says, but he wasn’t able to escape the police state.
Finally, last year, Eric fled to Australia and walked into the headquarters of the country’s version of the FBI, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, where he declared himself to be a Chinese spy. They took him in.
Holden Triplett, a former chief of the FBI’s Beijing office, says the Ministry of Public Security portrays itself as an ordinary police agency, but “They are, in fact, a security service with a political mission,” he told ABC. “Their job is to protect the party’s status, the Communist Party’s status. And by status I mean control.”
Eric says going public will make him a target of China’s security services.
“When they deal with a target like me, they may be more patient … and wait for an appropriate time to act,” he says.
Postscript: The MSS claimed Friday via its WeChat account that it had "uncovered multiple espionage cases in the aerospace sector, exposing the despicable acts of certain countries' intelligence agencies attempting to infiltrate and steal secrets from our aerospace field."
Clandestine Iran: News articles published in Tehran commemorating the passing of an Iranian general killed in a suspected Israeli airstrike revealed the secrets of a clandestine wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
The Tasnim News Agency, which was sanctioned last year by the U.S. Treasury for its links to the IRGC, published a series of articles on Mohammad-Hadi Haji-Rahimi, who was killed in the April 1 air attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus. The strike prompted Tehran’s unprecedented direct missile and drone attack on Israel.
Haji-Rahimi is described as commander of the little-known Imam Ali Unit, which Tasnim claims is the largest unit within the Quds Force, a branch of the IRGC that specializes in covert lethal operations outside Iran. The commander of the Quds (Jerusalem) Force, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, was also killed in the airstrike in Damascus.
Tehran’s public disclosure of this previously secret unit is a sign of Iran’s growing confidence—and belligerence. The new Quds Force commander, Brig. Gen. Esmail Qaani, on Wednesday threatened France, Germany, and the U.K. for deploying warplanes to defend Israel from Iran’s April 13 attack. “They will be held accountable in due course,” Qaani vowed.
Haji-Rahimi, known as the “commander without borders,” was instrumental in training Iran’s proxy forces in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq. Tasnim reported that many of them received training inside Iran. A former commander of the Imam Ali unit told Tasnim that “the core of Lebanese Hezbollah forces were trained in Imam Hossein Garrison in Iran.” Iraqi militias also received training in Iran, Tasnim reported. Haji-Rahimi is said to have traveled to Afghanistan to set up a training center.
One senior Quds commander told Tasnim that the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas was the result of decades of training proxy forces by Haji-Rahimi.
Farzin Nadimi of the Washington Institute told Iran International that the Quds Force was largely modeled after the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, known as the Green Berets. During the Cold War, the primary role of the Green Berets was to train, organize, and advise allied European military units on sabotage tactics to hamper a Soviet invasion. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, their mission was to help organize local special forces units to defeat communist guerillas.
Moscow Subversion, Again: A new study says Russia is using artificial intelligence to produce disinformation on a massive scale in the run-up to this year’s U.S. presidential election.
An influence network likely operating from Russia is using AI to plagiarize, translate, and edit content from mainstream media, including Russian-language media outlets, Fox News, Al Jazeera, and France’s La Croix and TV5Monde, according to an analysis by the Insikt Group at Recorded Future.
The “CopyCop” network re-posts plagiarized and altered content on sites we’ve reported on before, such as the Miami Chronicle, D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, and the Chicago Chronicle.
These sites are not the local news outlets they purport to be. They are designed to achieve Russia’s goals of dividing Western alliances, undermining U.S. global standing, and sowing domestic discord. Several CopyCop domains are hosted on Russian infrastructure, and they appear to belong to a single computer network. D.C. Weekly is operated by U.S. citizen and fugitive John Mark Dougan, who fled to Russia in 2016.
AI allows CopyCop to produce disinformation at scale. As of March 2024, more than 19,000 articles had been uploaded. Each website appears to have automatic uploads every 60 minutes, Insikt found. However, this automation led to some tell-tale mistakes.
AI text was embedded in the copy of one article. “Note: This translation has been done in a conservative tone, as requested by the user,” reads a line at the bottom of a Miami Chronicle story about how U.S. weapons provided to Ukraine are mostly junk.
A glitch on one CopyCop site, the U.K. political news site gbgeopolitics.com, revealed the AI prompt used to generate stories: “Please rewrite this article taking a conservative stance against the liberal policies of the Macron administration in favor of working-class French citizens.” The prompt was repeated 90 times.
If CopyCop succeeds in building engagement, we’re in trouble. “Other influence operations and networks will likely follow this model in the near future,” Insikt reported. AI-enabled influence networks can easily outstrip humans' ability to detect and expose them, and they threaten the brand and reputational risk of legitimate media organizations.
Another Russian influence operation is the “Doppelgänger network.” As we previously reported, Doppelgänger produced phony versions of France’s Le Monde, The Guardian of London, and Germany’s Bild. The sites look identical to legitimate major newspapers except for a subtle change in the web address. Authorities in France said Doppelgänger spread antisemitic images of Stars of David that were spray-painted around Paris in November at the behest of Russian intelligence.
Doppelgänger’s latest disinformation effort is a fake version of The Washington Post. Wiredreported that Doppelgänger promoted a fake Post article with the headline “Soros Pays $30/Hour for Anti-Semitism” and spread it on X, better known as Twitter to everyone except its capricious owner.
Like all good propaganda, the story starts with a kernel of truth. The fake Post article appears to be loosely based on a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. The Journal noted that two anti-Israel activists who disrupted college campuses at Yale and UC Berkeley were paid youth fellows at the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Justice, which receives money from George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. It’s unclear whether Doppelgänger’s version of the story was rewritten with the help of AI.
Doppelgänger promoted the Soros story via accounts on X and racked up more than 130,000 views, according to Antibot4Navalny, which described itself to SpyTalk as a group of anonymous Russian researchers who have spent the past six months tracking the Russian influence operation.
Doppelgänger is the brainchild of Ilya Gambashidze, founder of a Moscow-based social media design company who was sanctioned in March by the U.S. Treasury Department. An investigation by Voice of America found that while Gambashidze does the Kremlin’s bidding to undermine the United States, his teenage sons live in America. One of them attends community college. Maybe it’s one of the campuses his dad is using to foment unrest in the United States.
Flying Blind: “Trust, but verify,” Ronald Reagan famously said, applying a Russian proverb to his approach to negotiations over nuclear disarmament with the Soviets. Reagan did the trusting; the verification came largely from U.S. spy satellites.
Satellite-based intelligence doesn’t get much love in SpyWeek, but it played a critical role in saving the world from nuclear war. In the years since, America has kept up its investments in its eyes in the skies. Russia’s satellite program, however, has fallen far behind, plagued by continuous failures, delays, and endemic corruption. So what happens when a country’s intelligence-gathering abilities fall behind an adversary’s?
Russia’s lack of satellite-based intelligence explains a lot of its recent behavior. In a paper published in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Elena Grossfeld, a Ph.D. candidate at King’s College London, points out that Russia’s declining spy satellite capabilities are affecting its military activities in Ukraine. “The lack of precise and timely satellite reconnaissance is a key factor in the indiscriminate shelling of civilians and targets of no military value, resulting in a rise in casualties,” Grossfeld wrote.
Without satellite intelligence, Russian troops were forced to use a Soviet road atlas to navigate in Ukraine. Ukrainian weapon and troop movements remained hidden from Russian satellites based on the finest in 1980s Soviet technology.
The lack of satellite-based intelligence explains why Russia is seeking to build a nuclear weapon that could knock out Western satellites, as House intelligence committee chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio, revealed in February.
Unable to keep up with the United States and NATO in space, Russia wants the ability to even the playing field by obliterating it. On Friday, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon “is looking to acquire a new generation of ground- and space-based tools that will allow it to defend its satellite network from attack and, if necessary, to disrupt or disable enemy spacecraft in orbit.”
Rooms with a View: We loved The Wall Street Journal’s report on the controversy surrounding a Chinese family that purchased a rustic, wood-paneled Swiss mountain inn. The story hinges on the question of whether the family was interested in the majestic alpine view from the hotel’s front or its unscenic back. About 100 yards from the rear of the hotel is a runway where the Swiss military planned to base several F-35s, the world’s most advanced jet fighter. Were the Wangs small-time innkeepers or spies in Beijing’s effort to learn American military secrets?
Pocket Litter
Under a new policy directive issued by the Director of National Intelligence, U.S. intelligence agencies will limit how they buy and use commercially available data about Americans gleaned from thousands of smartphone apps and personal devices such as cars and internet-connected household appliances. Spy agencies won’t need a warrant before purchasing or searching the data, disappointing lawmakers who had sought tougher limits. (DNI)
Slovakia’s Russian-friendly prime minister and longtime leader, Robert Fico, survived an assassination attempt Wednesday. Fico, who’s come under criticism for his ties to Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orban, was shot multiple times at close range in what officials said was likely a politically motivated attack. A 71-year-old amateur poet, who authorities said was a “lone wolf” radicalized after last month’s election, was charged in the shooting.
A Maryland woman pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring with a neo-Nazi leader from Florida to plan an attack on the power grid in the Baltimore area. Sarah Beth Clendanieland her alleged co-conspirator, Brandon Russell, believed that sniper attacks on five electrical substations in greater Baltimore “would serve to break down society,” according to a court filing accompanying her guilty plea. (WaPo)
Russia is increasingly seeking to encourage and direct hackers to attack Western targets, Anne Keast-Butler, the director of GCHQ, has said in her first keynote speech as head of the British eavesdropping and code-breaking agency. (Guardian)
Microsoft has created a secret Artificial Intelligence program for U.S. spy agencies. The program, called Azure Government Top Secret, will be available via classified cloud-based systems but physically unconnected to the public internet. (Microsoft)
An internal investigation found that a senior FBI official violated the bureau’s harassment policy by making five inappropriate comments to a subordinate. The senior official, who is not named in the report, retired before the investigation was completed. None of the allegations were sexual in nature, the report said. The comments were deemed unprofessional or statements that did not recognize the subordinate’s dignity. (FBI)
Germany’s former head of domestic intelligence, Hans-Georg Maassen, is suing the former domestic intelligence agency he led, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, for surveilling him. Maassen, whom the German press dubbed the “Steve Bannon of Thuringia,” is known for nationalistic, far-right rhetoric. (Foreign Policy)
60 Minutes is finally getting around to a look at Cuban intelligence, the little espionage agency that could, focusing on two of its spectacular moles, former DIA analyst Ana Belén Montes, who did 20 years for her treachery after a plea deal in 2002, and Manuel Rochas, a former U.S. diplomat who spied for Havana from the early 1970s until he was caught by the FBI last December. The May 19 broadcast includes video of Montes under interrogation by the FBI, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI’s case agent, Peter Lapp, told SpyWeek. “There is no doubt that the Cubans are still penetrating our government,” Lapp says on the show.
Ana Montes with unidentified admirers in Puerto Rico after her release from prison in 2023. (Facebook) Is there something we missed? Orsomething you would like to see more of? Send your tips, corrections, and thoughts to SpyTalk@protonmail.com.
Well, as far as the satellites are concerned, one would be inclined to think that there was no need for the Russians to keep pace with the Americans. Why? Because Russian military project called Elon Musk has been doing it for them on the U.S. territory completely unobstructed, moreover - supported - by the U.S. Government.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/17/fiona-hill-putin-war-00061894