CIA Director John Ratcliffe wants to rebuild diminished human assets so that the United States can maintain its capacity to collect and process secret information, especially from China. However, he faces major challenges, some of which are imposed by American President Donald Trump.
Earlier this month, the CIA unveiled a new way to persuade dissatisfied Chinese officials to spy for the United States by disseminating Hollywood-quality videos that provide instructions on how to anonymously contact the CIA.
One video highlights the stark differences between the lifestyles of Chinese working-class elites and Communist Party leaders. Another describes how top party officials suddenly disappear – a reality of the anti-corruption purges ordered by Xi Jinping.
The videos, narrated in Mandarin and posted on social networks, are part of a new CIA strategy for remotely recruiting potential foreign agents.
It's a strategy that has already yielded some results in Russia, say CIA officials. The spy agency launched similar videos in 2023 to recruit Russians dissatisfied with the war in Ukraine.
Intelligence officials have announced that people there have contacted the CIA as a result, but they have refused to provide details.
Now, CIA personnel say they have evidence that their messages targeting China are being viewed there, despite heavy internet censorship.
However, the videos also highlight a problem: the CIA needs more spies. Traditional human intelligence tactics are increasingly ineffective, say current and former American intelligence officials cited by The Washington Post.
What to do with more people in the era of electronic espionage
The CIA's success in recruiting foreign citizens to provide vital secrets to the United States has sharply declined in recent years, officials said. Recruiting new agents has dropped by double-digit percentages since 2019, according to a former agency employee. The exact numbers are classified, the American newspaper notes.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who in January, during his Senate confirmation hearing, admitted that obtaining information from human sources "is not where it needs to be," has made changing this trend one of his main priorities of his tenure. But the challenges are significant, officials said on condition of anonymity.
At stake is the depth of the U.S. government's knowledge of urgent threats to security. The most important of these are:
- whether Iran will accelerate its race to a nuclear weapon;
- Russia's next moves on the battlefield in Ukraine;
- whether China will invade or attempt to economically strangle Taiwan.
Information on signals collected by the National Security Agency, including intercepted phone calls, messages, and emails, forms the basis of intelligence collection and contributes at least 60% of the materials in the president's daily briefing, American officials say. But an effective espionage program requires both human and electronic intelligence, as well as other technical sources such as imagery.
Current and former officials and spies say there is no substitute for a well-placed human source to penetrate places where a phone intercept or satellite cannot reach, to confirm fragmented information, or to provide insight into the intentions of enemy leaders such as Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Sometimes, the most sophisticated information comes from a person who allows the National Security Agency to hack computer systems, especially in sensitive locations such as a military headquarters or the Chinese Communist Party leadership.
"Some of our best recruits won't tell you what Xi Jinping thinks. They work in communication departments and have access to those key systems. That's why we target them. The top person we want to recruit at the Chinese embassy in the U.S. is not the ambassador. It's the official who has the codes," said a former senior official of the American intelligence services.
An increasingly challenging environment for spies
However, espionage - both for the CIA and for intelligence services hostile to America - has suffered a major blow due to the coronavirus pandemic. As the streets emptied, in-person meetings disappeared, and social gatherings were canceled, CIA officers had limited capacity to target and recruit new sources. It was difficult to even meet with old trusted sources.
Coordinating spy networks is much more difficult, costly, and manpower-intensive than it used to be.
CIA faces a long-term threat due to a phenomenon known as ubiquitous technical surveillance or UTS. CIA officers and their foreign agents must now navigate an electronic field of surveillance and monitoring devices that constantly test their ability to keep their real identity hidden and conceal their meetings.
Unlike James Bond, real-life spies face hundreds of CCTV cameras in buildings and city streets, mobile phone tracking devices, biometric sensors at border crossings and many more.
It is believed that Beijing alone has over a million CCTV cameras. A former American official who recently visited the city said there were so many cameras on the street that it felt like being in a TV studio. The cameras are often associated with sophisticated facial recognition programs that can simultaneously track millions of people.
Incriminating data can remain online forever, said Glenn Chafetz, a former CIA officer who was the agency's first operational technology chief.
An adversarial intelligence service like China's could discover days, or even months later, that a traitor from within had met with a CIA officer, sifting through large data streams from cameras across the country through sophisticated artificial intelligence filters.
However, the news for the CIA is not entirely bleak. The agency's adversaries must operate in the same sensor-saturated environment as American agents, the newspaper emphasizes.
Increasingly, much of what U.S. intelligence agencies need to know is not secret at all but is available in the form of feeds on social networks, commercial data, and other forms of "open-source" information. But human intelligence, also known as HUMINT, remains a crucial, albeit diminishing, component of the CIA's resource allocation, say current and former agency officials.
China, the main target of the CIA
Ratcliffe has revealed very little publicly about his plans to develop human resources, one of the CIA's core missions involving classified budgets and operations. A person who recently met with the CIA director described him as alarmed by the agency's human intelligence capabilities.
A senior U.S. intelligence official added that the agency's human information collection efforts regarding China, which Ratcliffe has identified as the CIA's main target, "have greatly improved."
Ratcliffe recently appointed a seasoned CIA officer with multiple overseas tours as the agency's deputy director of operations, a key position whose occupant leads the agency's clandestine and covert work.
CIA requested that The Washington Post not publish the officer's name, as he is still undercover.
Some former officials said that the CIA rushed to recruit a large number of officials in China in the early 2000s, making mistakes along the way. Beijing's security services detected the American spy network starting in 2010, executing or imprisoning up to two dozen "moles" working for the CIA, a devastating blow to the Central Intelligence Agency's operations.
Another former CIA officer blamed the long-standing decline in human resources, in part, on headquarters bureaucrats and their aversion to risky operations that could expose the agency.
How Trump Contributed to an Information Leak
Others warn of the unintended consequences of the administrative spending cuts imposed by Trump.
The administration is considering plans to close 10 US embassies and 17 consulates in various countries, a cause for concern for many experienced agents. "Their closure would truly affect our ability to obtain coverage," Miller said.
Worse, the administration's rush to reduce government agency staff could undermine years of CIA efforts. In February, in response to an executive order from Trump mandating federal staff reductions, the CIA sent an unclassified email to the Office of Personnel Management containing the first names and initials of the last names of each employee hired in the past two years.
Former officials have described this incident as a counterintelligence disaster that could blow the cover of dozens of young officers. Many were recruited as part of an effort initiated by former director Bill Burns to enhance the CIA's focus on China.
A former official said the tasks of many CIA employees were suspended following this information leak. It has affected the "entire cadre of junior officers," he said.
T.D.