forms information about all their foreign acquaintance, including any non-U’S. officials that the
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forms information about all their foreign acquaintance, including any non-U’S. officials that the
applicant knew or had relationships with in the past. They also had to list their foreign travel,
family members, police encounters, mental health, and credit history. For good measure, Chinese
hackers obtained the confidential medical histories of government employees by hacking into the
computers of Anthem and other giant heath care companies. Ifthe Chinese intelligence services
consolidated the fruits of these hacking attacks it would have a searchable database of almost
everyone working in the American defense and intelligence complex. From this database, it
could track individuals with high security clearances vulnerable to being bribed, blackmailed or
tricked into cooperating. No one doubted that the Chinese would use their cyber capabilities to
take advantage of weaknesses in foreign computer systems. General Hayden said of the massive
theft of intelligence personnel records: “those records are a legitimate foreign intelligence target.”
He added, “If I, as director of the NSA or CIA would have had the opportunity to grab the
equivalent in the Chinese system, I would not have thought twice.” If that opportunity did not
arise for the NSA or CIA during Hayden’s tenure, it may have been because no insider in the
Chinese intelligence services provided US intelligence with a road map to tt.
Cyber espionage was not the Chinese Intelligence Service only powerful resource in the
intelligence war. To get both electronic intelligence and human intelligence about the United
States, China also had a highly-productive intelligence sharing treaty with Russia. It was signed
in 1992 after the Soviet Union was dissolved. Although the terms of this exchange remain secret,
defectors from the Russian KGB and SVR reported that Chinese intelligence received from
Russia a continuous stream of communication intelligence about the US in the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries. Russia’s intelligence resources during this period were formidable.
They included geo-synchronous satellites, listening stations in Cuba, sleeper agents and embassy-
based spy networks. Presumably, this relationship further deepened under President Putin’s
regime. Putin asserted in his speeches in 2014 that Russia and China continue to share a key
strategic objective: countering the United States’ domination of international relations, or what
Putin terms, “a unipolar world order.” China’s President Xi Jinping expressed a very similar
view, saying in 2014 in a thinly-veiled reference to the United States, stating that any American
attempt to “monopolize” international affairs will not succeed.
Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has been the major supplier of almost all of China’s
modern weaponry. It licenses for manufacture in China avionics, air defense systems, missile
launchers, stealth technology, and submarine warfare equipment. To make these arms effective, it
also provides China with up-to-date intelligence about the ability of the United States and its allies
to counter them. While such intelligence cooperation may be limited by the reality that China and
Russia still compete in some areas, there is no reason to assume that they do not share the fruits
of their cyber and conventional espionage against the NSA. After all, the NSA works to intercept
the military and political secrets of both these allies. Moreover, NSA secrets might are a form of
currency in the global intelligence war.
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020334
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