Chinese espionage against the U.S. since WWII has been mainly focused on two areas, which constitute the two major threads of Wise’s account: 1) stealing U.S. nuclear weapons data housed at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and 2) penetrating U.S. counterintelligence. According to Wise, over the past thirty years, China has acquired a great deal of information regarding the nuclear warhead W-88, America’s most advanced and sophisticated missile.
Recently I read “Tiger Trap” (2012) by espionage writer David Wise. It is a scary, but at the same time, astounding and critically needed book. Americans know very little about the espionage activities of China in the United States. The 292-page book contains a good index, and is fully annotated and illustrated with an insert of glossy photographs identifying most of the villains, a few innocent bystanders, and even a few heroes.
Wise asserts the Chinese continue to follow the advice contained in the 6th century B.C. book, “The Art of War,” by military sage Sun Tzu, who advises the commission of espionage by “a thousand grains of sand”; that means obtaining small but innumerable pieces of information by vast numbers of people acting as armies of spies sent against the enemy.
Moreover, the communist Chinese in the 21st century, asserts Wise, unlike the Soviets, are not interested in recruiting agents with vulnerabilities or people motivated by revenge or misfits, but “good” people, who are naively convinced of the humanitarian nature of their actions. Spies recruited by the Chinese spymasters do genuinely want to assist China and help her to improve technologically, to modernize, and to achieve parity with the West.
This recruitment usually translates to ethnic, first generation Chinese immigrants with cultural and familial ties to China. The Chinese government then reciprocates by helping their part-time spies create or proceed with commercial or business ventures in the United States. This is called guanxi. Thus, supposedly, the Chinese spymasters don’t offer money, and they do not accept walk-in cases — i.e., volunteers who may be “dangles” (double agents sent by the enemy).
Most espionage activities are coordinated by the Ministry of State Security or the military intelligence arm of the People’s Liberation Army. Nevertheless, Wise then relates several cases of espionage that challenge those same assumptions, resembling not “grains of sand” information, but “large fish,” predatory espionage resembling the horrendous theft of secrets and heinous betrayal by traitors Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.
Take for instance the case of “Parlor Maid,” the code name..