China versus the West – how Beijing is winning the intelligence war

When I ask the CIA veteran Nicholas Eftimiades about the severity of China’s spying threat to the West, his answer is unequivocal. 

“We’re under siege,” he tells me. “Everywhere you look, something different is happening.” 

It certainly feels that way. 

Just in the last 18 months, we’ve seen a spy balloon shot down off the US coast, up to 30 former RAF pilots recruited to train Chinese rivals, and a parliamentary researcher arrested in London over fears he was passing information to Beijing, which he denies.

A US Navy sailor was sentenced to two years in jail this month for leaking military information to China, while another case is ongoing. 

Last year i revealed last year how Chinese hackers accessed the Foreign Office’s internal systems, and that a tracking device linked to the authoritarian regime was secretly fitted in an official UK government car. 

And the lawyer Christine Lee is suing MI5 over claims that she has been conducting “political interference” in Westminster for the Communist state, which she rejects. 

Eftimiades has been logging all of these cases. Although he retired as an intelligence officer in 2017, he maintains a database of every incident of Chinese spying activity uncovered around the world, including the UK. It now has more than 800 entries, he tells i, “and the vast majority of them, 600-plus, are from 2012 onwards”. 

Of course, those are just the ones we know about.

Eftimiades has been studying Chinese espionage for more than three decades and has testified before Congress on the subject. He first caused a stir in the 1990s when he revealed that a Chinese firm with links to Beijing agencies was funding Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign through the Democratic National Committee. For his troubles, he’s been labelled an “enemy of the people” by the Beijing government. 

During a career that involved senior roles with the US Department of State and the Defense Intelligence Agency – and saw him posted to the American embassy in London for several years as a liaison officer – he grew increasingly alarmed. To this day, he believes the dangers are still too often overlooked by Western governments and agencies.  

“It’s been a steady state of China conducting espionage aggressively through technology, covert influence against the diaspora, and national-security espionage – all relatively unabated for decades,” he says. 

Eftimiades, who is now a professor of homeland security at Pennsylvania State University, shares concerns about Western vulnerabilities with Nigel Inkster, a former deputy chief of MI6.

Inkster warned in an interview with i last week that UK intelligence services have “difficulties” with Chinese language skills and cultural knowledge. The retired British agent said this was risky when facing opponents who are “incentivised to take risks” and appear to be “operating under no political constraints”. 

Eftimiades says he has heard similar sentiments from sources as recently as last week, and believes the situation is the same on both sides of the Atlantic. “The CIA doesn’t have the expertise to deal with this,” he argues.