The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials worried about their place in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government: Come work with us.
The agency released two Mandarin-language videos on social media on Thursday inviting disgruntled officials to contact the CIA. The recruitment videos posted on YouTube and X racked up more than 5 million views combined in their first day.
The outreach comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China, which has recently targeted US officials with its own espionage operations.
Photo: Reuters
The videos are “aimed at recruiting Chinese officials to steal secrets,” Ratcliffe said.
“China is intent on dominating the world economically, militarily, and technologically,” he said. “Our agency must continue responding to this threat with urgency, creativity and grit, and these videos are just one of the ways we are doing this.”
The more than two-minute-long videos are of cinematic quality and feature scenes of Chinese Communist Party insiders, luxury automobiles and glittering skyscrapers, as narrators share their growing disillusionment with the system they have served.
In one video, a man described as an honest party member speaks of his unease about the power struggles among his peers, and what it might mean for his family’s safety. As the pace of the music picks up, he says: “I’ve done nothing wrong, I can’t go on living in fear!”
The man is then seen using his smartphone to contact the CIA, and the video ends with the agency’s seal.
Links below the video offer instructions on contacting the agency securely, along with a warning cautioning potential informants about fake accounts that might impersonate the CIA.
The videos are the agency’s latest attempt to make it easier and safer for potential informants to share information.
Last year, the CIA posted online instructions in Korean, Mandarin and Farsi detailing steps that potential informants can take to contact US intelligence officials without putting themselves in danger. The instructions include ways to reach the CIA on its Web site or on the darknet, a part of the Internet that can only be accessed using special tools designed to hide the user’s identity. The CIA posted similar instructions in Russian three years ago.
A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment about the videos.
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