Chinese Students Do Pose Security Threat, Former Top CIA Counterspy Says
Sue Miller, the agency’s former chief mole hunter, tells how a 15 year old spy debacle hangs over the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on Chinese espionage
In the fall of 2021, the CIA sent a highly unusual top secret cable to its officers around the globe. The agency had been plagued by compromises and sloppy tradecraft, resulting in serious setbacks in some overseas missions, the cable explained. In an extraordinary admission, it even revealed the specific number of agents who had been executed by rival intelligence agencies—“a closely held detail,” the New York Times noted at the time, “that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”
If anything , the CIA memo understated what is now widely acknowledged as one of the most catastrophic intelligence failures in the agency’s recent history. Between 2010 and 2012, as many as 20 Chinese spying for the CIA were either imprisoned or killed— with one of them reportedly gunned down in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building. “It was devastating,” says Sue Miller, a recently retired senior CIA officer who, as chief of counterintelligence, investigated what happened. Her agency colleagues were shocked and emotional, she recalled, having either recruited or worked with many of the compromised spies. It was a painful reminder of how much the agents risked to provide intelligence to the United States, with some paying the ultimate sacrifice. “These people were basically American heroes,” says Miller about the executed and imprisoned spies.
The not-so-ancient history of that CIA debacle has recently taken on new relevance as the Trump administration seeks to counter an intelligence threat from the People’s Republic that seems to grow only more menacing by the day. As The Washington Post reported this week, the CIA is embarked upon a stepped up effort to recruit more human spies all over the world, with a special emphasis on making up for reverses it suffered more than a decade ago in China and elsewhere. A visible piece of the agency’s campaign: Slickly made videos targeting potential agents, narrated in Mandarin and posted on social media, featuring imagined scenarios of Chinese officials getting on the wrong side of the party or a boss and losing everything, sometimes even their lives. It could be you, the videos strongly suggest, before offering discreet ways to contact the CIA.
At the same time, the Trump administration is taking steps to clamp down on the theft of secrets by Chinese here in the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this week the administration will begin to “aggressively revoke” student visas held by Chinese students studying inside the United States, targeting those “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.” While widely seen as Trump’s deliberate escalation of diplomatic tensions (denounced by Beijing and some American China experts), the cancellation of Chinese visas is, from a counterintelligence perspective, music to Miller’s ears.
“I like it. I really, really do,” Miller said in an interview on the SpyTalk podcast. “And it’s been something that we and the FBI have been saying—‘We’ve got to do this.’”
As Miller explained it, her “biggest fear” from Chinese espionage, as she explained it, is the flood of young Chinese who come to the United States on student visas—currently about 277,000—get high tech degrees at elite universities like Stanford and U.C. Berkeley, then stay in the U.S., landing sensitive jobs in defense and tech industries with access to U.S. military secrets.
“What are we doing?” said Miller, who in October 2021 opened the doors of the CIA’s China Mission Center, established to bring together operations officers, intelligence analysts and technical experts with a single focus on Beijing. “All these students are coming in and working for Apple or they’re [working for defense contractors] on fighter planes. I swear at one point we found that Chinese citizens…were working on some of our nuclear programs.”
To be sure, efforts to investigate Chinese espionage inside the U.S. have led to criticism that they unfairly targeted Chinese Americans, prompting the Biden administration to cancel one such program run by the Justice Department, known as “the China Initiative." But Miller says what is not often understood about Chinese students who come to the U.S. is the powerful leverage Beijing has over them.
“It’s not because every one of those students wants to be a spy,” she said in a follow up interview. “China is holding on to the rest of the family while they’re over here. If they want you to take pictures of a power plant, you can’t say no. They have a hold on your family.”
The potentially devastating consequences of Chinese espionage — coupled with the U.S. government’s own security lapses — became painfully clear to Miller when she ran CIA counterintelligence from 2016 to 2020, first as its deputy head and then chief. One of her principal jobs there was to piece together the giant screwup that had taken place in China just a few years earlier, when a “large percentage” of the agency’s assets inside the country were rolled up.
It soon became clear the debacle had an international dimension. As was first reported by Yahoo News in 2018, the compromise of the agents were traced in part to a penetration of a covert internet-based communications system that the agency used to send and receive secret messages between CIA officers and their sources around the world. The “covcom” system, originally designed for ease of secure messaging in war zones, had serious vulnerabilities. A double agent in Iran tipped off Iranian intelligence, which announced in May 2011 it had busted a ring of 30 CIA spies. Some were reportedly executed. Equally significant, the Iranians alerted the Chinese, who easily penetrated the messaging system themselves and targeted the CIA spies.
It was, Miller said in the SpyTalk podcast, a serious lapse in tradecraft. The agency had become overly reliant on its instant messaging system and was using it way too freely. “We were handing out covert communications to a whole bunch of different people because we thought it was safer than meeting in person. And it isn’t.”
But there was, Miller said, a whole other piece to the intelligence failures in China: The Chinese had moles inside the CIA itself, at least one of whom, says Miller, was funneling them information about the identities of CIA spies inside the country.
Decades earlier, the arrests of the CIA’s Aldrich Ames (in 1994) and the FBI’s Robert Hansen (in 2001) generated sensational worldwide coverage as startling examples of the ability of Russian intelligence to penetrate U.S. security agencies. But while documented cases of Chinese penetration of the CIA have gotten far less attention, they may have had equally serious consequences.
Miller pointed to one set of spies, Alexander Ma, a former CIA officer and later a FBI translator, and his brother, who also had worked for the CIA; they were accused of accepting thousands of dollars in cash and expensive gifts, such as a new set of golf clubs, in exchange for turning over classified information— including the identifies of CIA officers and assets— to the Chinese government. Ma was sentenced last year to 10 years in prison.
There was also another Chinese spy, Jerry Lee, who did even more damage, according to Miller. A former CIA officer, Lee pled guilty in 2019 to conspiring with Chinese intelligence agents for nearly a decade in exchange for $840,000 in payments. He was sentenced to 19 years in prison, a heavy penalty, but, says Miller, “he should have gotten a lot more.”
Some in the CIA and FBI had suspicions about Lee for many years, but they were largely dismissed “because we thought he was a putz,” Miller said—incapable of pulling off such a brazen betrayal. In fact, he was a dedicated spy who had multiple covert meetings with his Chinese handlers. When FBI agents secretly entered a hotel room in Honolulu that Lee was staying in, they found handwritten notes detailing the names and numbers of at least eight CIA sources. The Justice Department never specifically charged Lee with disclosing the true names of CIA assets, but as far as Miller was concerned, there was no doubt he had. He “absolutely” tipped off Beijing to the identity of the CIA’s Chinese spies, she said.
And that, perhaps, is the most important lesson to be learned from the bitter Chinese intelligence fiasco: You can tighten up tradecraft all you want, and produce all sorts of Hollywood slick videos to recruit new spies. But at the end of the day, never forget to look over your shoulder.
I rewrote the FBI Student Program circa 1987 and at that time, we argued, to no avail, that there should be some semblance of reciprocity with student exchanges. The few American students in China students were conducting diggings in Xian while the large number of Chinese students in the U.S. were studying at MIT! The Chinese government has one of the lowest, if not the lowest, R&D budget among the industrialized nations, in large part, because they've routinely stolen U.S. (and other western countries) technology. I recall, one of the first indications of the extent of thefts that were ongoing when universities noted a huge increase in copying paper in the immediate aftermath of the hundreds of Chinese students arriving in the U.S., students, by the way, were often times middle age, And a PRC student told me if students failed to send back reams of papers, etc., they stay in the U.S. would be cut short. I'm certainly no fan of this administration, but in this case, I have no issue with the action being taken.
I worked with Chinese students in Denton, Texas in the 80's. I was a science librarian and supervised student assistants. The USA is basically an open source. China has satellites and means. We gain much more by having international students. This carp from the President is stupid. The gains far outweigh the risk.