PRC Espionage: Are Chinese Americans Their Top Recruitment Targets?

The first was a study showing how rare it was for Chinese Americans to actually engage in espionage on behalf of the PRC. The second study chronicled the extremely high number of “China Initiative” cases that resulted in acquittals or dismissed cases. In late February 2022, the Assistant Attorney General Matt Olsen announced the Department was ending the program, with Olsen telling a George Mason University crowd that he had “concluded that this initiative was not the right approach” to combatting PRC espionage and technology theft.

Three months later, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issued a report that dealt in part with the question of whether or not PRC intelligence organizations prioritized the recruitment of Chinese Americans for spying or tech theft. That report, which was mandated by Congress, made a categorical statement about PRC intelligence asset targeting and recruitment strategy:

But is this true? A recent trove of documents released to the Cato Institute via a Freedom of Information Act request leaves the question of whether the PRC targets Chinese Americans as potential agents.

In the world of the American Intelligence Community (IC), the phrase “IC assessment” generally has a very specific meaning: that the conclusions offered in a given IC report were those of the 17 agencies that make up the IC and that the assessment was based on the evaluation of multiple sources of information, including information provided by human sources and “technical intelligence” (usually electronic communications, satellite imagery, or other technological means).

In fact, in April 2020, the Cato Institute filed a FOIA request with the ODNI seeking, among other things, “Any finish[ed] intelligence products regarding Chinese government intellectual property (IP) or technology theft efforts targeting American individuals, businesses or other organizations, including American universities and colleges.”

Thirteen months later, the ODNI responded by revealing that “…a record responsive to your request was located…” but the ODNI needed to be withheld for security reasons. Yet the ODNI cited a specific FOIA exemption (known as Exemption 5) that is often used to withhold information that may be embarrassing to the agency or department in question.

You can then imagine my surprise when I read the May 2022 ODNI report referenced above. Accordingly, in June 2022, I filed a new FOIA seeking the alleged IC assessment on PRC intelligence allegedly not prioritizing Chinese Americans for recruitment as spies.

Over two years later, the ODNI finally responded to the request, providing a series of emails that revealed the IC assessment cited in the May 2022 ODNI report did not, in fact, exist.

It was, according to the emails released to Cato, a conclusion reached through “an iterative process.” But there was no actual hard intelligence – human or technical – to back it up.

Interestingly, the ODNI email release originally sent to Cato was completely unredacted – their FOIA office had sent the unredacted versions by mistake. Two weeks later, they sent the redacted versions and asked that “…if you plan to disseminate the documents further, you consider using the attached versions.”

Cato has elected to partially honor that request by redacting the names, phone numbers, email addresses, and office/​building identifiers on the original, unredacted versions the ODNI sent to us.

However, we are leaving unredacted the full text of the original emails and also posting the redacted versions so you can see for yourself how the ODNI FOIA office has attempted to withhold , via Exemption 5, information that confirms that the May 2022 ODNI report with the IC assessment claiming that PRC intelligence agents do not systematically target Chinese Americans for espionage recruitment does not in fact exist.

So, does that mean that Chinese Communist agents do, in fact, make a special effort to target Chinese Americans as spies or to help facilitate theft of critical, proprietary American technologies?

We don’t know.

What we do know is that in May 2021, the ODNI withheld from Cato on “national security” grounds an actual document dealing with that very question, then a year later published a Congressionally mandated report citing a nonexistent IC assessment claiming that the PRC does not put Chinese Americans at the top of their list of preferred spy candidates.

No matter how you look at it, this is not a “good news” story–not just for the ODNI, but for Chinese Americans working inside or outside of government who perhaps thought that the ODNI’s May 2022 report would finally take the “might-be-a-spy” target off their backs. And with Donald Trump’s return to the presidency on January 20, 2025, I would not be surprised if we see a return of the infamous prior Trump era Justice Department “China Initiative” racially-based “counterintelligence” program.

There’s no question that the Armed Services and Intelligence committees in the House and Senate that directed the production of the ODNI report discussed in this piece should hold public hearings on this issue. And the House and Senate Judiciary committees should investigate the misuse of FOIA exemptions to withhold from public release things federal agencies and departments don’t want you and I to know. It’s a flagrant subversion of the FOIA statute that needs to be punished and ended.