Great-power spy conflict is brewing in Asia

After 10-year break, highly classified leaked Pentagon papers reveal US has not scaled back its clandestine operations

Citing anonymous US officials, a Bloomberg report said the US was constructing a web of intelligence links in Asia to counter China. The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the new and strengthened partnerships, formally known as intelligence liaison relationships. America’s efforts to develop isolated-but-overlapping alliances for covert activities including an intelligence-sharing arrangement with QUAD is a risky maneuver at a time when it is sending officials and lawmakers in droves to Beijing to reconsolidate the relationship.

This flashes back to 2013 when whistleblower Edward Snowden fled the US for Hong Kong and told the South China Morning Post that the US government “has committed a tremendous number of crimes against Hong Kong” and “the PRC (China) as well”. His allegations that America was spying on the European embassies led to expulsion of the CIA station chief in Germany after the country’s agencies found that Angela Merkel’s mobile phone was bugged by a couple of American spies.

Merkel “made it clear” to then US President Barack Obama that “spying on friends is not acceptable at all.” Leaders of Austria, Bulgaria, Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands backed her complaint and sought an explanation from the US. A furious Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff called off her state trip to the US in protest, forcing Obama to ban such surveillance activities. In Paris, an American ambassador was summoned before Obama promised his French counterpart to end those espionage practices.

Following a 10-year break, highly-classified leaked Pentagon papers – which unearthed this April that the US was eavesdropping on its allies, including South Korea, and was pressuring them to supply arms to Ukraine –revealed that the US had not scaled back its clandestine operations.

Opposition Democratic Party of Korea equated the alleged US espionage with “a serious violation of national sovereignty”. The officials of the Five Eyes alliance expressed concern that the leaked Ukraine war information could handicap their countries in the battlefield.

The UN too chided the US on the reports of spying on the private conversations of its Secretary-General António Guterres and other senior officials, stating such actions were inconsistent with the US obligations as enumerated in the UN Charter and convention on the privileges and immunities.

Latest episode redraws focus on the fact that America’s sanctions and exports control on the Chinese companies such as Huawei, which it has accused of espionage for Beijing and declared a national security threat, target to hobble China’s economic and technological advancement. This push is being supported by the US efforts to fabricate a seamlessly integrated web of intelligence networks around the Middle Kingdom.

Washington’s Huawei chase dates back to the early 2010s when an 18-month review reportedly found no evidence that it had been spying for China. “As far as the report cited is concerned, it proves again that allegations against Huawei are unfounded,” said a Chinese spokesperson. A German IT watchdog, Federal Office for Information Security, in 2018 also dismissed spy accusations on the company.

In July 2020, the US ordered the closure of a Chinese consulate in Houston for it “was a hub of spying and intellectual property theft”. The political move, ahead of the presidential election in the country, marked a dramatic step in escalating tensions between the world’s largest economies and threatened to be “very damaging” to the bilateral relationship. The balloon saga earlier this year which President Joe Biden admitted wasn’t a “major [security] breach” shows the extent to which the US is captivated by the China threat.

The US arguably operates the world’s largest and most sophisticated surveillance system. Its spy network in China has suffered a catastrophic blow. A Foreign Policy magazine’s report in 2018 told how a firewall, brought over from the Middle East by American intelligence to communicate with dozens of its spies in China, compromised their identities in 2010 and turned out to be one of the agency’s “worst intelligence failures in decades”.

Yet the US intelligence isn’t inclined to pull the plug on or suspend espionage operations in China. Announcing the establishment of the China Mission Center, CIA Director William Burns in 2021 vowed to “further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government”. His statement this July at the Aspen Security Forum – the US agency had “made progress” on reestablishing its intelligence network in China, inviting immediate condemnation from Beijing, just a month after Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visited Beijing “to reduce the risk of misperception and miscalculation” – as well as a recent Reuters report about the revival of cold war submarine spy programme by the US navy to counter China signal that America is trying to buy more time to undergird its military footprint in East Asia.

For America, espionage activities are critical part to confine China’s economic and technological rise. They strip the US of the right to impugn the Chinese counter-espionage law that encourages and rewards people to report suspicious activities and strives to dismantle clandestine operations being overseen by America through its spies such as John Shing-wan Leung who backstory was published by China’s Ministry of State Security last month.

After India cold-shouldered the US regional agenda over fear of reigniting two-front conflict with China and Pakistan and once the tripartite conference in Camp David focused on strengthening the US coordination with Japan and South Korea separately, just pledging to bring the trilateral security partnership “to a new height”, America’s bid to concoct NATO clones in the region have nosedived. With deputy foreign ministers of China, Japan and South Korea agreeing to hold a leaders’ summit at the “earliest mutually convenient time”, the US reliance on stepping up espionage operations will likely increase.

Akin to Afghanistan where the US used Pakistan as a lever to defeat the former Soviet Union, it’s seeking Southeast and East Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam to play the same role for Washington as did Islamabad in South Asia.

But this expansive and generational great-power spy conflict between America and China will have consequences for wider Asia, and Biden’s mantra of preventing the competition with Beijing from veering into a conflict given that the latter has been and remains a formidable (original link) peer competitor to the former across the realms of economy, technology and military.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, November 13^th, 2023.

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