Thursday, November 21, 2019

Beijing's Espionage

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

By Gary Bauer


Several weeks ago, I told you about reports that the Trump Administration was taking steps to stop China's efforts to recruit scientists in the United States for its espionage efforts.  A Senate report released this week reveals just how extensive Beijing's efforts were.
 
The Chinese "Thousand Talents" program began in 2008.  It recruited at least 2,600 scientists in the United States, most of them Chinese nationals, at government labs or federal funded university research facilities. 
 
While these scientists were being paid by the U.S. government to conduct research on a wide range of issues, they were also being paid by the Chinese Communist Party to make sure their research found its way back to China. 
 
Incredibly, the FBI did not begin aggressively confronting the Chinese espionage until 2018!  Presumably, James Comey, Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok were just too busy sniffing out Russians in the Trump campaign to notice all the Chinese spies crawling around our college campuses and government labs.
 
But I do remember being surprised when Comey's successor, FBI Director Christopher Wray, told the Senate Intelligence Committee at the beginning of this year:
 
"[T]he Chinese counterintelligence threat is more deep, more diverse, more vexing, more challenging, more comprehensive and more concerning than any counterintelligence threat I can think of."  
 
While the left and the media are focused on Russia and Ukraine, the Chinese are robbing us blind.