CIA makes recruiting push for spies in China

(WASHINGTON) -- The CIA is stepping up its recruiting efforts in China, releasing two Mandarin-language videos that appeal to government officials who might be open to partnering with the American spy agency.

The videos, published on the CIA's YouTube and X accounts, follow fictional men who presumably belong to the Chinese Communist Party, one a senior official and the other a junior staffer, as they work daily with classified information. Their Mandarin voiceovers say they have seen colleagues and friends "disappear."

"I must have a backup plan," one protagonist says. By the end of both videos, the officials are shown reaching out to the CIA via the dark web, following Mandarin instructions handed out by the CIA to do so securely.

"[We're] ensuring that folks know that CIA is open for business," a CIA official told ABC News. "Here's where to reach us."

CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a statement that the approach represents the agency's "creativity" in its China espionage strategy.

"No adversary in the history of our Nation has presented a more formidable challenge or capable strategic competitor than the Chinese Communist Party," he added.

The videos follow a similar effort undertaken by the CIA in Russia in 2023, when it released Russian-language productions in which characters decide to spy on the CIA's behalf.

The CIA official told ABC News the agency is continuing the effort after its Russia series yielded positive results, but the official could not provide details about partnerships that might have developed from the outreach in Russia.

The CIA, which leads human intelligence efforts in the U.S. intelligence community, said the videos are a modern approach to its mission of gathering intelligence from spies around the globe.

"In today's world of UTS, we can't recruit sources the same way that we did 20 years ago, probably the same way you did 10 years ago," the CIA official said, referring to the acronym for universal technical surveillance.

"And as part of this, we have to go where the people go -- that's online," the official added.

Emily Harding, the director of the Intelligence, National Security and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the CIA may find success by appealing to people in China disaffected by political or economic conditions.

"The gains of our collective efforts are indulged by a select few," the junior CCP member says in his Mandarin voiceover. "So, I must forge my own path."

"One of the main reasons that people do spy against their country is [the] ideology piece," Harding noted, conceding that "China is a particularly hard target."

"They have a robust surveillance state that makes it very, very hard to maintain contact with an asset," she said.

The CIA's online gambit wouldn't broadly affect international relations, Harding said, since the United States and China are known to spy on each other -- and recruit spies.

When U.S. government layoffs began under President Donald Trump earlier this year, China was "very aggressively reaching out to places online … to put out feelers like, 'Hey, if you have a clearance, come talk to us,'" Harding said.

One of the two CIA productions ends with the Mandarin text of a Chinese proverb that translates roughly in English to "Fortune favors the bold."

In Mandarin, it reads as "Heaven helps those who help themselves."

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