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.
CHAMPIONS: President Lai congratulated the players’ outstanding performance, cheering them for marking a new milestone in the nation’s baseball history Taiwan on Sunday won their first Little League Baseball World Series (LLBWS) title in 29 years, as Taipei’s Dong Yuan Elementary School defeated a team from Las Vegas 7-0 in the championship game in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania. It was Taiwan’s first championship in the annual tournament since 1996, ending a nearly three-decade drought. “It has been a very long time ... and we finally made it,” Taiwan manager Lai Min-nan (賴敏男) said after the game. Lai said he last managed a Dong Yuan team in at the South Williamsport in 2015, when they were eliminated after four games. “There is
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers have declared they survived recall votes to remove them from office today, although official results are still pending as the vote counting continues. Although final tallies from the Central Election Commission (CEC) are still pending, preliminary results indicate that the recall campaigns against all seven KMT lawmakers have fallen short. As of 6:10 pm, Taichung Legislators Yen Kuan-heng (顏寬恒) and Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔), Hsinchu County Legislator Lin Szu-ming (林思銘), Nantou County Legislator Ma Wen-chun (馬文君) and New Taipei City Legislator Lo Ming-tsai (羅明才) had all announced they
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) yesterday visited Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), as the chipmaker prepares for volume production of Nvidia’s next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) chips. It was Huang’s third trip to Taiwan this year, indicating that Nvidia’s supply chain is deeply connected to Taiwan. Its partners also include packager Siliconware Precision Industries Co (矽品精密) and server makers Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) and Quanta Computer Inc (廣達). “My main purpose is to visit TSMC,” Huang said yesterday. “As you know, we have next-generation architecture called Rubin. Rubin is very advanced. We have now taped out six brand new
POWER PLANT POLL: The TPP said the number of ‘yes’ votes showed that the energy policy should be corrected, and the KMT said the result was a win for the people’s voice The government does not rule out advanced nuclear energy generation if it meets the government’s three prerequisites, President William Lai (賴清德) said last night after the number of votes in favor of restarting a nuclear power plant outnumbered the “no” votes in a referendum yesterday. The referendum failed to pass, despite getting more “yes” votes, as the Referendum Act (公民投票法) states that the vote would only pass if the votes in favor account for more than one-fourth of the total number of eligible voters and outnumber the opposing votes. Yesterday’s referendum question was: “Do you agree that the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant
RSS