Chinese Intelligence Operations (review)

90 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 1995 Nicholas Eftimiades. Chinese Intelligence Operations. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1994. xv, 169 pp. Hardcover $29.95. Many Americans were shocked by die arrest of Larry Wu-tai Chin, a Chinese American United States citizen who had worked for the U.S. Government from 1944 to 1981. From 1952 to 1981, Larry Chin worked for an arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service. He was arrested and indicted on espionage charges in 1985, charged with having been a double spy in die employ of the Chinese intelligence service. Nicholas Eftimiades was not surprised. In fact, his book tells us tìiat the Larry Wu-tai Chin case is stereotypical of the way that die People's Republic of China's (PRC) intelligence services target and recruit Americans to gather information on behalf of the PRC. Eftimiades also documents witii case histories the way that China coerces and uses its own citizens as intelligence collectors. This book is an interesting and valuable read for academicians, people in business, and those who deal with the PRC in cultural matters. It opens a door for the uninitiated into matters that usually remain secrets ofgovernment. The strength ofEftimiades' work is that he has managed to contact, interview , and debrief nine Chinese sources, all of whom had some relation to Chinese intelligence services, and to tell their stories. Among his sources are four former Chinese military officers with intelligence affiliations, two former Chinese diplomats , and diree persons affiliated with Chinese student organizations. Some may argue that these do not constitute a large enough number of sources to be statistically significant. Empiricists may claim that nine persons are an inadequate population sample from which to generalize the operations and mediods used by Chinese intelligence. This is not so. First, Eftimiades has a major advantage over the average researcher or scholar. Drawing on years ofhis own professional intelligence affiliations in the U.S. Government, he knows where to look and how to identify accurate information from publicly available sources on Chinese intelligence gathering. With ten years of experience in the U.S. intelligence community, where he has most recently focused on counterintelligence, Eftimiades can pick representative sources and cases. Second, he has done extensive research on open source materials documenting cases of Chinese espionage that went to trial. Chinese Intelligence Operations covers the structure of China's intelligence-© 1995 by University gathering bureaucracy, its methods ofrecruiting Chinese and foreign agents, and ofHawai'i Pressits targets for the collection of information. There are shortcomings, however. Few Chinese-language sources are consulted, and all interviews seem to have been conducted in English or through an interpreter. Another problem is that the work Reviews 91 is not particularly well grounded historically, nor does it cover Taiwan's intelligence services or operations (these are also Chinese intelligence operations). Readers who want a historical overview maywish to look at a few ofthe books in Eftimiades' bibliography. For instance, Richard Deacon's The Chinese Secret Service (New York: Taplinger Publishing, Inc., 1974), provides a broad overview of the history of China's intelligence operations dating from five centuries before the birth of Christ. Deacon also covers the operations of Nationalist China on the mainland and on Taiwan. Another facet ofthe PRCs intelligence operations that could use better discussion by Nicholas Eftimiades is China's willingness to use coercion and sexual entrapment in the conduct of operations in comparison to the operations of the former Soviet Union and Eastern European nations. While Beijing seems willing to use coercion on foreigners and its own citizens in die conduct ofoperations and to use sexual entrapment, it seems to have avoided kidnapping and assassinations. In die case of Taiwan's intelligence services, at least as late as the 1980s, there are allegations ofmurder (Henry Liu in San Francisco ) that have yet to be fully resolved. Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of Chinese Intelligence Operations for non-Chinese scholars and academicians is the description Eftimiades has provided of die spotting, assessment, and recruitment of a Chinese student to spy in the United States by the PRCs Ministry of State Security (MSS). Described in the...