MCLC: official arrested on suspicion of spying for US

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: official arrested on suspicion of spying for US
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Source: The Guardian (6/1/12):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/01/chinese-official-arrested-spyin
g-us

Chinese official arrested on suspicion of spying for US
According to sources, both countries have kept quiet about the incident
for several months to avoid fresh crisis in relations
By Reuters in Hong Kong

A Chinese state security official has been arrested on suspicion of spying
for the United States, sources said, a case both countries have kept quiet
for several months as they strive to prevent a fresh crisis in relations.

The official, an aide to a vice-minister in China's security ministry, was
arrested and detained earlier this year on allegations that he had passed
information to the US for several years on China's overseas espionage
activities, according to three sources, who all have direct knowledge of
the matter.

The aide had been recruited by the CIA and provided "political, economic
and strategic intelligence", one source said, though it was unclear what
level of information he had access to, or whether overseas Chinese spies
were compromised by the intelligence he handed over.

The case could represent China's worst known breach of state intelligence
in two decades, and its revelation follows two other major embarrassments
for Chinese security, both involving US diplomatic missions at a tense
time for bilateral ties.

The aide, detained sometime between January and March, worked in the
office of a ministry in charge of the nation's domestic and overseas
intelligence operations, the source said.

He had been paid hundreds of thousands of US dollars and spoke English,
the source added.

"The destruction has been massive," another source said.

The sources all spoke on condition of anonymity.

China's foreign ministry did not respond immediately to a faxed request
for comment sent on Friday.

The sources did not reveal the name of the suspected spy or the
vice-minister he worked for. The vice-minister has been suspended and is
being questioned, one of the sources said.

The Ministry of State Security rarely makes public the names of its
officials and does not have a public web site.

The incident ranks as the most serious Sino-US spying incident to be made
public since 1985 when Yu Qiangsheng, an intelligence official, defected
to the US. Yu told the Americans that a retired CIA analyst had been
spying for China. The analyst killed himself in 1986 in a US prison cell,
days before he was due to be sentenced to a lengthy jail term.

The vice-minister's aide was arrested at around the same time that China's
worst political scandal in a generation was unfolding, though the sources
said the two cases were unrelated.

The political scandal erupted in February when the police chief of
Chongqing municipality, in southwest China, took shelter for 24 hours in a
US consulate. Chongqing's ambitious Communist party boss, Bo Xilai, was
later suspended after it emerged the police chief had been investigating
Bo's wife for murder.

Bo's wife is now being detained on suspicion of poisoning a British
businessman, Neil Heywood, in a dispute over money.
Washington kept an official silence on that incident, but in late April
relations came under even more pressure when blind Chinese dissident Chen
Guangcheng escaped from house detention and sought refuge in the US
embassy in Beijing.

Chen spent six days in the embassy, sparking a diplomatic crisis that was
only resolved when Beijing allowed him to leave the country last month to
take up an academic fellowship in New York.

The exposure of the espionage case could put more pressure on the powerful
Zhou Yongkang, who formally oversees the state security apparatus as a
member of China's top decision-making body, the Politburo Standing
Committee.

The Bo and Chen cases have already raised questions over the effectiveness
of the security establishment which, under Zhou, has become more costly to
maintain than the nation's military.