May 10, 2025: Two years ago a Russian espionage effort in Britain ran afoul of local incompetence and mixed signals from the FSB. It all began after the Russian invasion of Ukraine when Russia ordered the revival of its espionage network in Britain. The effort was organized by Jan Marsalek, an Austrian business executive living in Russia to avoid prosecution for economic crimes. Marsalek still had a large number of contacts in Europe and was able to hire six Bulgarian men to carry out pro-Russian and anti-American operations in Europe. This was meant to reduce support for the war in Ukraine. Marsalek’s plan failed and his six Bulgarians were arrested in Britain before they could start their campaign.

Some success was achieved via online efforts, but these were redundant because pro-Russian propaganda was already being spread on the internet by Russian citizens and their western fans. This was not the first Russian propaganda effort in Europe and was the latest one to fail. Since 2022 Russia has spent over half a million dollars trying to establish espionage and propaganda operations in Europe. Not much success, mainly because the European counterespionage organizations were able to detect and disable Russian operations.

One reason the American and European counterintelligence operations were so effective was because of a recent failure of U.S. intelligence. Four years ago the CIA realized that their foreign espionage efforts were crippled because several Chinese Cyber War operations obtained personnel records for most Americans. These data thefts seem to have started a decade earlier when the U.S. government Office of Personnel Management/OPM, had its entire database of detailed records on 22 million current and former government employees, including data on people who had applied for jobs and did not get one, copied by hackers in 2014. Intelligence agencies, especially the CIA, realized that could have a catastrophic effect on American espionage efforts overseas as well as catching spies in the United States. The damage was worse than anyone imagined. The OPM hack was traced back to China although earlier large-scale data hacks may have been the work of Russians or freelancers who knew China would pay a good price for such data.

The OPM hack got everyone’s attention but when it was considered in light of the many other hacking events before and after 2014 that made off with large quantities of personnel data that, taken together, gave Chinese intel analysts a comprehensive picture of the American population. Not just currently but in the future. The Chinese soon had a better database on the American population than any U.S. government agency or commercial firm.

The CIA was one of the first U.S. agencies to discover how damaging that was firsthand. After 2010 the CIA not only began losing a large network of informants and operatives inside China, but eventually in all foreign nations. This was most visible in how the Chinese counterespionage agents would, after 2014, no longer go to great lengths to conceal their efforts as new American agents, including those whose CIA employment was unknown to anyone, even most family members, back home, were identified and monitored by the Chinese secret police as soon as the CIA personnel arrived. But the Chinese always knew and eventually they were flaunting it. This was an intimidation tactic and it worked.

Meanwhile all the United States can do is increase the rate of uncovering Chinese spies posing as academic researchers in the United States, and this appears to be another aftereffect of the new Chinese databases on the American population. These Chinese operatives seek to steal trade secrets or patented material. There have been more of them in the last decade which can be attributed to the improved ability of Chinese agents to determine who will work for them and who cannot. This recruiting is often assisted by Chinese graduate students studying in the United States while also working for Chinese intelligence. One pattern that is becoming evident is the Chinese ability to detect which American academics, researchers and executives are most likely to work for the Chinese, either willingly or after experiencing a blackmail threat.

The United States has been prosecuting and convicting a growing number of Chinese born men and women conspiring to commit or actually carrying out economic espionage in the United States. Some of these suspects are naturalized American citizens but a growing number are Chinese citizens here on legitimate visas. As more suspects were identified, patterns began to appear which revealed the inner workings of known Chinese intellectual property espionage efforts.

These indictments are the result of the United States imposing more restrictions on Chinese officials who come to the U.S. and have contact, for whatever reason, with American academics, researchers and city, state and county government officials. These Chinese have to notify the U.S. government of such contacts. Based on recent FBI investigations and prosecutions, this makes it more difficult to operate their massive espionage program that seeks details of how American patents are implemented as well as trade secrets.

The FBI and CIA again noted several interesting patterns. While many of the returning Chinese students were operating legally, a large number of those new Chinese firms were operating illegally by depending on stolen intellectual property. There were other patterns as well. A lot of the stolen tech seemed to involve Chinese and Americans associated with various Chinese efforts that helped returning Chinese profit from what they had learned in the West. These programs involved establishing hundreds of Confucius Institutes associated with Western universities, including a hundred in the United States. That, plus the aggressive recruiting of Chinese and non-Chinese academics willing to help China mobilize the largest IP theft in history.

China tried to conceal its espionage efforts. Not just denying anything and everything connected to its hacking and conventional spying, but also taking precautions. But as their success continued year after year, some of the Chinese hackers became cocky and sloppy. At the same time, the victims became more adept at detecting Chinese efforts and tracing them back to specific Chinese government organizations or non-government hackers inside China.

China has been getting away with something the Soviet Union never accomplished, stealing Western technology and then using it to move ahead of the West. The Soviets lacked the many essential supporting industries found in the West. These firms were largely founded and run by entrepreneurs, which was illegal in the Soviet Union. Because of that, the Russians were never able to acquire all the many pieces needed to match Western technical accomplishments. Soviet copies of American computers, for example, were crude, less reliable, and less powerful. It was the same situation with their jet fighters, tanks, and warships.

China got around this by making it seemingly profitable for Western firms to set up factories in China, where Chinese managers and workers were taught how to make things right. At the same time, China allows thousands of their best students to go to the United States to study. While many of these students will stay in America, where there are better jobs and more opportunities, a growing number are coming back to China and bringing American business and technical skills with them. Finally, China energetically uses the thousand grains of sand approach to espionage. This involves China trying to get all Chinese going overseas, and those of Chinese ancestry living outside the motherland, to spy for China, if only a tiny bit.

Chinese firms are boldly using their stolen technology, daring foreign firms to try and use Chinese courts to get justice. Instead, the foreign firms tried to muster support from their governments for lawsuits outside China. Naturally, the Chinese government howled and insisted that it’s all a plot to oppress China. This worked for a long time, but many of the victims are now telling China that this conflict is being taken to a new, and more dangerous, level.