TECHINT Germany arrests 3 suspected China spies

[Bogeyman]

Germany's Federal Prosecutor has said three German citizens were arrested for alleged involvement in providing Chinese secret service with information on state-of-the-art machine parts for ship engines.



The German Federal Prosecutor's office on Monday said three German nationals were arrested under the strong suspicion of having worked for Chinese secret service.

Prosecutors believe the three may have been involved in research projects that could be useful for China to expand its maritime power.

What are the allegations?​

The three suspects, Herwig F, Ina F. and Thomas R, were arrested by officers of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in the western German cities of Düsseldorf and Bad Homburg.

The defendants' homes and workplaces were also searched.

The charges relate to espionage "at a point in time that cannot be precisely determined before June 2022."

Thomas R. is said to have acted as an agent for an employee of the Chinese secret service MSS.

It is alleged that he obtained information about innovative technologies that could be used for military purposes.

Prosecutors believe he used Herwig F. and Ina F., who were running a company in Düsseldorf, to obtain the information.

The company served as a way to contact and work with German scientists and researchers.

The couple agreed on a deal with a German university on behalf of a Chinese partner on state-of-the-art machine parts for the operation of powerful ship engines that could be used in combat vessels.

The pair are alleged to have violated German Foreign Trade and Payments Act.

Chinese state authorities are said to have financed the project. One of the accused was allegedly in further negotiations about other research projects for the Chinese navy.

Prosecutors allege the individual bought a special laser from Germany, with payment from the MSS, and exported it to China without authorization, despite the item being subject to the European Union's Dual-Use Regulation.

Last week police arrested two men in the Bavarian city of Bayreuth on suspicion of spying for Russia and seeking to undermine German support for Ukraine.

Soon after news of the arrests, police in the UK said two men had been arrested there on suspicion of passing on sensitive information to China.

How has Germany responded?​

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said on Monday that Berlin was monitoring a significant threat posed by Chinese espionage in business, industry and science.

"We look very closely at these risks and threats and have clearly warned and raised awareness about them so that protective measures are increased everywhere," she said in a statement.

Faeser added that the potential use of German innovative technologies for military purposes was "particularly sensitive."

Justice Minister Marco Buschmann tweeted his congratulations to prosecutors for their success."

"This shows once again that we must be vigilant," he said.

The arrests come just a week after Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited China to press Beijing on its support for Russia's wartime economy and to raise issues of intellectual property theft.

Germany arrests 3 suspected China spies – DW – 04/22/2024

Germany's Federal Prosecutor has said three German citizens were arrested for alleged involvement in providing the Chinese secret service with information on state-of-the-art machine parts for ship engines.

www.dw.com

 

[Merzifonlu]

Why would China, which can make turbofan jet engines for fighters, need to spy on ship engines, which are much easier to produce?

 

[Afif]

Why would China, which can make turbofan jet engines for fighters, need to spy on ship engines, which are much easier to produce?

I mean, some of the high end Chinese technologies only started to mature recently. See WS-15, it is still in the test phase. On the other hand are Germans are the leading entity in marine engine technologies. There is still a lot that PRC can gain by spying. @Nilgiri probably could tell More on this.

 

[Bogeyman]

Why would China, which can make turbofan jet engines for fighters, need to spy on ship engines, which are much easier to produce?

What do you think? @Anmdt

 

[Nilgiri]

Why would China, which can make turbofan jet engines for fighters, need to spy on ship engines, which are much easier to produce?

"Easier to produce". There are significant QC, materials RnD and production methods that are of great interest to China in anything to do with gas turbines.

Jet engines are nowhere near the complete apex, there is significant overlap with the gas turbine field (and other gas turbines have advanced apex that are not applicable to jet engines so much similarly, given different operating conditions).

Example: bearings, tooling and specific tooling intellectual property that are crucial parts of reliability, availability and basic economics of part production. The Germans are very highly advanced here and also have experience, for example, of Chinese IP theft/coercion from the automotive sector to begin with. It's not like China was not already producing decent cars when they did so, the IP tree is simply huge for all the 1% advantages that add up in economics and tiers of performance.

China is still very reliant on the west (IP payment/license wise) on gas turbines. Its why any military turbofan doesnt suddenly change the raw amount of IP China licenses/pays for larger gas turbines....or why Germany alone exports the levels it does in this sector compared to China, especially factoring in the higher and highest tiers here.

 

[Bogeyman]

AfD politician’s aide arrested on suspicion of spying for China​

Man worked as assistant to Maximilian Krah, top candidate in European parliament elections, say prosecutors


An aide to a German far-right politician standing in the European elections in June has been arrested on suspicion of spying for China, German prosecutors have said.

The man, named only as Jian G, was accused of sharing information about negotiations at the European parliament with a Chinese intelligence service and of spying on Chinese opposition figures in Germany, federal prosecutors said.


The suspect was arrested on Monday night, hours after three German nationals were arrested on suspicion of working with China’s ministry of state security to hand over technology that could be used for military purposes.

Last week, German authorities arrested two German-Russian nationals who were allegedly spying on behalf of Russia, scouting out military bases – including US posts used for training Ukrainians in the operation of Abrams tanks – with a view to carrying out explosive attacks on them.

On the website of the European parliament, Jian Guo is listed as an accredited assistant to Maximilian Krah, an MEP and the far-right AfD party’s lead candidate in the EU-wide elections. He is a German national who has reportedly worked as an aide to Krah in Brussels since 2019.

The suspect “is an employee of a Chinese secret service”, prosecutors said. “In January 2024, the accused repeatedly passed on information about negotiations and decisions in the European parliament to his intelligence service client. He also spied on Chinese opposition members in Germany for the intelligence service.”

The suspect was arrested in Dresden, eastern Germany, on Monday and his homes were searched, they added. The accused lives in Dresden and Brussels, according to the broadcasters ARD, RBB and SWR, who broke the news about the arrest.

The AfD described the allegations as “very disturbing”. “As we have no further information on the case, we must wait for further investigations by federal prosecutors,” Michael Pfalzgraf, a party spokesperson, said.

The case is likely to fuel concern in the west about aggressive Chinese espionage.

On Monday, Germany arrested three German nationals suspected of spying for China by providing access to secret maritime technology.

China’s foreign ministry on Tuesday rejected reports of Chinese espionage in Germany, saying such “hype” aimed to discredit China.

A ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, said at a press conference that China had always adhered to the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and it hoped the “relevant personnel” on the German side would abandon their cold war mentality.

According to German media, the two cases are not connected. The head of the domestic intelligence agency said the first round of arrests on Monday could be “just the tip of the iceberg” of spy rings operating in the country.

In Britain on Monday, two men were charged with handing over “articles, notes, documents or information” to China between 2021 and 2023. Police named the men as Christopher Berry, 32, and Christopher Cash, 29, who previously worked in the UK parliament as a researcher.

AfD politician’s aide arrested on suspicion of spying for China

Man worked as assistant to Maximilian Krah, top candidate in European parliament elections, say prosecutors

www.theguardian.com

 

[Anmdt]

What do you think? @Anmdt

Why do we think of ship engines but not the submarine engines? China has access to certain technologies linked to marine engines for decades (through commercial engines that have been license built in China with certain parts have been delivered from the origin). But they lacked technology on certain line of engines that are used for specific applications: Submarines, high power to volume ratio main engines.

 

[Bogeyman]

‘Honeypots’ and influence operations: China’s spies turn to Europe​

Brest is a rainy industrial port, pounded by the Atlantic, that is home to the French navy and its submarine nuclear deterrent. It has also witnessed a remarkable number of weddings in recent years between female Chinese students and the seamen who work at its naval bases.

“How should we evaluate such relationships?” a concerned parliamentarian asked the head of France’s nuclear submarine forces at a closed-door hearing at the National Assembly in Paris.

“Honeypots”, where an agent seeks to romantically entangle their target, are a staple of racy spy thrillers. They are also a marker of how China’s espionage operations have expanded in Europe, culminating last week in a spate of highly public arrests.

Three German citizens were detained on suspicion of trying to sell sensitive military technology to China. Police also swooped on a staffer for a German far-right member of the European parliament who was accused of working covertly for China. British prosecutors, meanwhile, charged two men with allegedly spying for Beijing, one of whom was a parliamentary researcher. While Admiral Morio de l’Isle reportedly warned French lawmakers about the Brest weddings in 2019, current and former intelligence officers said the latest incidents were more typical of China’s espionage efforts in Europe.

In particular, they were examples, as one official put it, of Beijing’s “exquisite seeding” of operations that patiently seek to cultivate political influence and shape European attitudes towards China. This has become increasingly important to Beijing as European policymakers come to see China, and its strategic relationship with Russia, as a security threat, and not simply a source of economic opportunity. “The Chinese are doing more [espionage], and western intelligence are getting better at spotting it,” said Nigel Inkster, a former director of operations at the Secret Intelligence Service, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, otherwise known as MI6.

“In contrast to the US, China’s intelligence agencies have [so far] been less active in Europe. But as European attitudes have begun to harden [towards China], we can expect to see more . . . influence operations.”



China’s foreign ministry last week dismissed the latest round of spying charges — which broke soon after German chancellor Olaf Scholz returned from a three-day trip to China, Germany’s biggest trade partner — as “hype”. With President Xi Jinping due to visit Europe next month, Beijing is more sensitive than usual about espionage allegations.

“The intention . . . is very obvious, which is to discredit and suppress China and undermine the atmosphere of China-EU co-operation,” the ministry’s spokesperson said. But in a rallying call to the country’s spy agencies, Chen Yixin, minister of state security, said on Monday that China must organise a “powerful offensive”. Its agencies must carry out special “counter espionage operations” to “resolutely dig out” and “eliminate traitors”, Chen said in Study Times, the Communist Party school’s official journal.

Western intelligence agencies and security analysts said Chinese spying activities, particularly those led by its civilian espionage body, the Ministry of State Security, were real. More worryingly, there are signs they may intersect with Russian networks that have penetrated Europe’s political extremes. “China and Russia have common goals that they jointly promote when this serves their interests. Both are seeking to undermine the position of western countries,” Finland’s Security and Intelligence Service warned late last year.


Founded in 1983, China’s MSS is a civilian secret police service that the US has described as a combination of the FBI and the CIA. Its reach extends throughout Chinese society, with the agency responsible for counter-intelligence as well as political security for the communist regime. It has also been accused of wide-ranging espionage and influence operations abroad, along with the theft of foreign intelligence and technology.

Unlike its more centralised western counterparts, the MSS bases some of its spying operations out of competing provincial centres, according to western officials. The Shanghai bureau typically leads on US espionage, while Zhejiang has tended to focus on Europe.

One central MSS agent in Europe in recent years, Daniel Woo, pushed Frank Creyelman, a former Belgian senator, to influence discussions in Europe on issues ranging from China’s crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong to its persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Woo is also said to have been the Chinese contact for other far-right politicians who have shown close sympathies with Russia, including acting as election monitors for Moscow’s sham referendums in occupied Ukraine.

“China and Russia are playing from the same authoritarian playbook: sow doubt about democracy and gain influence among any groups that challenge existing political divisions, through a slow drip-drip of action,” said Dan Lomas, assistant professor in international relations at the University of Nottingham. “The aim is to create discord,” he added. “Russia and China are not creating the issues; they are self-created by democracies. Rather, the approach is to pick off the scab of these issues by fomenting support among extremist groups.”



The scale of China’s spying operations in Europe is potentially vast. In 2019, the EU’s foreign service reportedly warned that there were about 250 known Chinese spies in Brussels, compared with 200 Russian agents. More recently, the British parliament’s intelligence and security committee warned late last year that the size of China’s state intelligence apparatus, “almost certainly the largest in the world, with hundreds of thousands of civil intelligence officers”, had created “a challenge for our agencies to cover”.

“China’s human intelligence collection is prolific,” it said.

By contrast, Britain’s MI6 and its domestic counterpart M15 have a combined staff of about 9,000, according to the most recent data available. In addition, China runs sprawling cyber operations, which cross international boundaries. Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, warned in January that China could deploy hackers that outnumbered his own agency’s cyber-personnel by “at least 50 to one”.



Intelligence officials and analysts said one reason for Europe’s increased focus on Chinese espionage was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This had expanded the aperture of agencies, which had shifted focus from state-led threats to counterterrorism since 2001. It has also led to more cross-agency co-operation.

“The shock of the invasion has led to national partners, who don’t always co-operate, actually co-operating,” said one western official. “Combining data creates better data sets and allows more connections to be made.” China’s economic power and geopolitical weight mean that European policies towards China will remain more nuanced than towards Russia.

“There is always a debate about whether China represents a security threat or an economic opportunity,” Lomas said. “That debate will continue so long as China remains an economic powerhouse that plays by the international rules of the game.” Yet that debate may be shifting. Late last year, Italy formally broke with China’s signature Belt and Road infrastructure initiative.

Last week, Brussels raided the offices of Nuctech, a Chinese security equipment supplier, under new anti-foreign subsidy powers. At the same time, as European intelligence agencies work together more, Chinese and Russian espionage networks may be tacitly doing the same. Adam Ni, publisher of newsletter China Neican, said Europe’s far-right groups might provide fertile ground. While many European groups would not work for foreign spies, some may willingly co-operate with Moscow and Beijing.

“They want to emulate some aspects of the model of Russia and China,” Ni said. “There is a tendency to . . . agree with them on an increasing range of topics.” Filip Jirouš, an intelligence analyst at the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation think-tank, agreed and pointed to specific figures such as Ladislav Zemánek, a far-right Czech scholar and politician who is listed as a contributor to the Kremlin-sponsored Valdai Club and is subject to sanctions in Ukraine. Zemánek writes for the Budapest-based China-CEE Institute, which is run by the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of European Studies.

The director of the institute and head of China-CEE is Feng Zhongping, who is a former senior figure at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think-tank that western scholars believe is an MSS front. As China and Russia, Jirouš wrote recently, “continue to align, individual co-optees will more likely work for both authoritarian states. And as alt-right movements become more mainstream — and mainstream political parties become more alt-right — the risk of PRC [People’s Republic of China] intelligence influencing European politics through Russia-cultivated networks will continue to rise.”


Contacted by the Financial Times, representatives for CASS said the China-CEE Institute did not engage in political activities, pursued objective and independent academic opinions and complied with Hungary and EU law. CASS had no affiliation with the MSS or China’s “United Front” social influence activities, they said, and Feng left CICIR several years ago. They said Zemánek was only an occasional contributor.

Zemánek, when asked for comment by the FT, said: “The spirit of McCarthyism has been revived, our fundamental rights are under attack.” He said journalists should “should focus on investigating the US influence over Europe and their interference in our affairs rather than helping the Americans to create division between countries”.

‘Honeypots’ and influence operations: China’s spies turn to Europe

Arrests in Germany and UK point to growing scale and ambition of Chinese espionage operations

www.ft.com