China Gets Spooked! – Part 3

In the dark sea of international espionage, China’s preparations for the Beijing Olympics keep making waves. We previously discussed China’s spying and infiltration efforts against groups it considers hostile to its interests, as well as China’s widespread economic espionage. Today’s Taipei Times carried a piece by J. Michael Cole, who was involved with security for the Athens Olympics. He writes that the Beijing Olympics will involve “a whole new, genre-defining level” of security. What will be different about Beijing, moreover, is that the security will be targeted not just at terrorism, but at:

“enemies of the Games” as varied as Chinese Muslims, US Christian groups, human rights advocates, environmentalists, Tibetan independence supporters, critics of China’s role in Darfur’s genocide in the making — in all, anyone, state-based to nongovernmental, that dares criticize Beijing.

Mr. Cole is less concerned with China’s own spying, since this is nothing new. Instead, he worries that China will exploit the normal international security cooperation for all recent Olympics in order to use foreign intelligence services as its proxies.

The consequences of this decision will be that intelligence services the world over will become proxies of the Chinese apparatus, whether they like it or not. Beijing will send what are known as “trace requests,” or requests for information on suspected individuals to its sudden international allies, who will look into their database, perhaps launch investigations of their own, and whatever information is found will find its way back to Beijing. Through this process, flags will be affixed to the files of countless individuals who will either be barred from entering China or, if they do, face the risk of imprisonment.

In the name of cooperation, in the spirit of the Games, various intelligence agencies will thus become complicit in repression. Terrorism will be redefined, if only temporarily, as anything that opposes the authoritarian practices of the government in Beijing. Unless the world’s security services take the moral path — a very unlikely possibility, sadly — those will be Games for individuals who have given in to tyranny.

The marathoners will run, the swimmers will swim and the cyclists will cycle, but around them, cheering, will be the architects of a repressive regime and an army of hollow men, leaning together.

This is a very real concern.

For example, last month the US Federal Bureau of Investigation announced it is “offering its expertise to Chinese authorities who will provide security for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.” This even as the FBI is simultaneously fighting Chinese espionage in the US! According to Thomas Fuentes, assistant director of the FBI’s Office of International Operations, “There are tremendous issues of security as to who’s entering the country and what backgrounds they may have, whether they intend violence at the Olympic Games for any variety of reasons.”

Let us hope that the FBI indeed only provides the Chinese government with information on violent threats. It would be inexcusable if US taxpayer money were spent to supply the authoritarian regime in Beijing with information on American citizens who are nonviolently exercising their basic human right to free expression. If it turns out otherwise and the FBI helps China spy on peaceful US citizens, there will be an uproar like nothing else from liberals, conservatives, and moderates alike.