European national security agencies are concerned that China’s spy operations are becoming increasingly large -scale, writes Financial Times.
Western intelligence officers say that China’s best operations are now as good as Russia. “Chinese scouts are on the same level with the Russians,” said the former head of the European CIA department.
The West is alarmed that in Chinese intelligence completely different spying methods are used. If, for example, Russian spies were focused on something specific, then Chinese spies pursue wider goals, from political influence and ending with commercial or technological secrets.
Intelligence can hardly cope with the volume of affairs of espionage in favor of China. The FBI said that it was opening a new investigation of Chinese espionage every 12 hours, and the British agency Mi5 announced an increase in the number of cases by seven times since 2018.
Now employees of European and American special services are actively working on new methods of combating China’s espionage in various fields. According to the former CIA officer Nicholas Ephtimiades, a new paradigm of intelligence activities will be created over time.