China's Ministry of State Security, the main civilian spy service, carried out the operations by setting up a Chinese translation service in Hawaii that represented itself as a U.S.-origin company.The ruse led to classified contracts with the Navy and NSA to translate some of the hundreds of thousands of intercepted communications gathered by NSA's network of listening posts, aircraft and ships.
NCIS agents discovered that the translation service, which officials did not identify by name, had conducted contract work for the National Security Agency facility at Kunia, an underground electronic intelligence post some 15 miles northwest of Honolulu that conducts some of the U.S. intelligence community's most sensitive work.
The Chinese have also aggressively recruited Chinese-American agents. The story highlights another instance in which political correctness is used against us:
China's intelligence service used intelligence officers and supporters to identify Chinese Americans with access to secrets who would be approached and offered free visits to China, often to meet relatives. The Chinese would then use the visit to attempt to recruit the Americans as spies.
Chinese-American ethnic groups in the past have denounced the U.S. government for singling out Asian Americans as spy targets, accusing counterintelligence officials of racism. But the Chinese recruitment program shows that Beijing actively seeks to develop spies through such ethnic targeting.
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