TheCIAis on a recruitment drive for foreign spies. In their sights are Chinese officials and workers, who the US intelligence agency hopes to turn against Beijing via some newly released glossy videos.
The two videos touch on probable anxieties among some inside the Communist party machine – getting stuck in a lowly job assisting an increasingly wealthy corrupt official, or becoming victim to the endless purges that have targeted millions of party members at all levels since Xi Jinping came to power.
“As I rise within the party, I watch those above me being discarded like worn-out shoes, but now I realise that my fate was just as precarious as theirs,” a narrator says in one video, adding that he must protect his family whose fate is tied to his.
In another, the narrator declares: “Our leaders’ failure to fulfil repeated promises of prosperity has become a well-known secret … It’s time I start working towards my own dreams.”
The two Chinese-language videos released on Thursday come as trade hostilities between the two superpowers continue to spiral. Accessible on Youtube, they are titled in Chinese: “Why I contacted the CIA: to take control of my fate” and “Why I contacted the CIA: for a better life”.
“Do you have any information about economic, fiscal, or trade policies?” the CIA asks in the caption.
“Do you work in the defence industry? Do you work in national security, diplomacy, science, advanced technology, or deal with people who work in these fields? Please contact us. The information you can provide is important and we value your insights on these topics.”
The videos end with encrypted contact information for the agency.
The campaign follows earlier efforts which began in October, with instructions posted online for potential assets inChina, Iran and North Korea to get in touch with the CIA. The agency has said it has had previous success enlisting Russians.
“If it weren’t working, we wouldn’t be making more videos,” a CIA official told Reuters, which said officials were confident the videos were getting past China’s strict internet controls.
In recent weeks Russian military recruitment videos have spread across Chinese social media,looking for mercenaries to fight in its war on Ukraine, but it’s not clear if Chinese authorities have allowed those videos to spread or simply been unable to stop them.
The CIA has a particular focus on rebuilding an espionage network inside China. A couple of years before Xi came to power in 2012, China’s ministry of state securityreportedly dismantled a US spy ring, jailing and executing at least a dozen CIA assets.
In return, China has strengthened anti-espionage laws and encouraged citizens to carefully monitor and report the suspicious activities of those around them.
The US now considers China to be its most serious military and cyber threat.
“It is intent on dominating the world economically, militarily, and technologically,” CIA director John Ratcliffe 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 this.”