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No idea if eternal spy and counterspy cat and mouse game counts as part of culture wars, but here are some recent news from this area.
1/Teixeira leaks were discussed here when they happened, here is the resolution of the case.
We would all agree that 16 years of maximum security prison is price worth paying to impress your gamer buddies in Thug Shaker Central Discord.
2/In related news, important US Foreign Service officer, former ambassador to Bolivia was uncovered to be lifelong spy for ... Cuba.
Another source.
Do not laugh, Cuban DI counts among the better ones in the spook world, infiltrating Washington DC previously while running circles aroud US agents in Cuba. US is rather lucky that Cuba is shithole in every other measure.
3/Another, more pedestrian case of desperate American greed and disgraceful Chicom penny pinching. Surely US top secrets are worth more that $42,000? What insult.
Conclusion: US security is as big shitshow as it had always been. No loyalty (if you keep back stabbing everyone who trusts you, what could you expect), no grand idea inspiring self sacrificing volunteers and no rewards for service either.
Good that any superpower or wannabe superpower competitors are even worse. Notoriously insular Chinese who understand nothing about outside world and have to rely on cash and Chinese ethnic ties, and the less said about Russian Petrov & Boshirov clown show, the better.
Unlike the great and tragic struggle of the First Cold War, the second one is going to be slapstick comedy. Freedom and Democracy (TM) vs. Bright Communist Future(TM) are over.
LGBTQ+BLM vs Xi Jinping Thought is the game now. Enjoy the show.
edit: links now work
During my recent two months in China I infrequently watched the news and remember seeing about three reports of uncovered spies working in the government. At the time my sentiment was “that seems like too many spies, probably this is political maneuvering.”
In light of this post, maybe not. Or maybe a bit of both.
Also curious that uncovered spies make the nightly news in China, but not here in America.
The true extent of Chinese espionage in the US is only going to become apparent following the war.
If China doesn't have an extensive illegals program where it sent fake dissidents in the US to raise US born Chinese who could then get top secret clearances and get into the right places I'm a Mormon.
Obviously they do have it, and obviously US is not up to task to rooting this particular kind of spy out. Obviously even if they caught one it'd be kept quiet because no one wants a paranoid spy mania aimed at all the POC democrat voters and competent MIC personnel who thankfully aren't toxic white males.
I don’t think most second-generation Chinese-Americans have any particular fondness for the CCP or any ideological reason to root for Chinese victory in Taiwan over the US and allies. They have a better life than their peers in China in practically every respect, life in China for professionals is just a worse version of life in the US. The only reason they’d do it is for money, and again, that works just as well on American intelligence personnel of other races. The discovered examples are pretty low level and seem mostly financially motivated.
Consider that the US and UK often seem to have pretty good intelligence inside China and Russia without needing to seed settler populations there.
My understanding is that the CCP is more than happy to threaten the families of ethnic Chinese living abroad. The "C" part of MICE. I imagine the usefulness of that coercion gets less and less potent as the generations toll on and they get more distant from any family which is still within the territorial domain of the CCP, but second-generation is sort of in that "sweet spot", where they could conceivably qualify for high-level US clearances, but could also have significant ties to extended family back in China. I don't know how US counterintel is dealing with this problem. Presumably, they could choose to simply deny clearances to folks who have too much family that they are too close with back in China. Alternatively, they could still grant those clearances, yet try to flag those relationships as being of sufficient concern for some sort of extra monitoring. Or, of course, they could just be doing nothing besides trying really hard to impress upon the person applying for the clearance, "You know that if you do this, there's a decent chance that you'll be putting your family in danger. And you must must must must immediately report it if you receive any threats like this, no matter how scary it is or how much you care for them. Or else."
That sums it up yeah. It’s not a secret. You can google getting a clearance with foreign associations and learn the basics.
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Or just give every second-gen Chinamen who's granted a security clearance up to x# of greencards to get cousins and grandparents out of the CCP's reach. China's population pyramid being what it is we're not talking about giant extended clans here.
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