Chinese shipbuilding boss gave CIA aircraft carrier secrets, reports claim
June 22, 2018 Leave a comment
One of China’s most senior shipbuilding executives, who has not been seen in public for nearly two weeks, has been charged with giving secrets about China’s aircraft carriers to the United States. Sun Bo, 57, is general manager of the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation (CSIC), China’s largest state-owned maritime manufacturer, which leads nearly every major shipbuilding project of the Chinese navy. Most notably, Sun headed the decade-long retrofitting of the Liaoning, a Soviet-built aircraft carrier that was commissioned to the Chinese Navy’s Surface Force after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The ship arrived at the CSIC’s Dalian shipyard in northeastern China in 2002. Work on the vessel was completed in 2012. Today CSIC heads the construction of so-called Type 001A, China’s first home-built aircraft carrier, which is said to be modeled largely on the Liaoning. The company is also spearheading the construction of numerous Chinese Navy frigates, latest-generation destroyers, and numerous other vessels. Earlier this year, it was announced the CSIC would build the Chinese Navy’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
As the second most senior official of China’s largest and most important shipbuilder, Sun has supervised all of the company’s projects during the past two decades. But Sun effectively disappeared after June 11, when he made his last known public appearance at a CSIC event. On June 17, a brief notice posted on the company’s website stated that Sun had been placed under investigation for “gross violation of laws and [Communist] Party [of China] discipline”. The brief notice said that the probe of Sun’s activities was led by China’s National Supervision Commission and the Communist Party of China’s Central Commissariat for Discipline Inspection, but provided no further details.
It has now been reported by multiple Chinese news websites that Sun is under investigation not simply for graft, but for far more serious activities involving espionage. Specifically, it is claimed that Sun was recruited by the United States Central Intelligence Agency because of his supervisory role in China’s aircraft carrier building programs. He is believed to have provided the CIA with information about the decade-long retrofitting of the Liaoning. More importantly, there are reports that Sun gave the CIA blueprints and other technical specifications of the Type 001A, which is currently under construction at a top-secret facility. The Hong Kong-based English-language news website Asia Times said on Thursday that, given the sensitive nature of the charges against Sun, it is unlikely that the Chinese government would reveal the outcome of the investigation of the CSIC executive.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 22 June 2018 | Permalink
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Trump’s Twitter feed is ‘gold mine’ for foreign spies, says ex-CIA analyst
July 3, 2018 by Joseph Fitsanakis 4 Comments
All intelligence agencies, explains Bakos, build psychological profiles of foreign leaders. These profiles typically rely on information collected through intelligence operations that are “methodical, painstaking and often covert”. The final product can be crucial in enabling countries to devise strategies that counter their adversaries, says Bakos. But with Trump, covert intelligence-collection operations are not needed in order to see what is on his mind, since “the president’s unfiltered thoughts are available night and day”, she claims. The former CIA analyst points out that President Trump’s tweets are posted “without much obvious mediation” by his aides and advisors, something that can be seen by the frequency with which he deletes and reposts tweets due to spelling and grammatical errors. These unfiltered thoughts on Twitter offer a “real-time glimpse of a major world leader’s preoccupations, personality quirks and habits of mind”, says Bakos.
Undoubtedly, she argues, foreign intelligence agencies are utilizing President Trump’s tweets in numerous ways while building his personality profile. The most obvious ways are by performing content analysis of his tweets, which could then be matched against information collected from other sources about major US policy decisions. Additionally, foreign intelligence agencies could identify media sources that the US president seems to prefer, and then try to feed information to these sources that might sway his views. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia may have done so already, claims Bakos. The US president’s views, as expressed through Twitter, could also be compared and contrasted with the expressed views of his aides or senior cabinet officials, in order to discern who he agrees with the least. It is equally useful to analyze the issues or events that the US president does not tweet about, or tweets about with considerable delay. One could even derive useful information about Trump’s sleeping patterns based on his tweets, says the former CIA analyst.
Bakos does not go as far as to suggest that the US president should abstain from social media. But she clearly thinks that the US leader’s use of social media is too impulsive and potentially dangerous from a national-security perspective. She also laments that, throughout her career in the CIA, she and her team “never had such a rich source of raw intelligence about a world leader, and we certainly never had the opportunity that our adversaries (and our allies) have now”, thanks to Trump’s incessant social media presence.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 03 July 2018 | Permalink
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Analysis, Donald Trump, intelligence analysis, Nada Bakos, psychology, social networking, Twitter, United States