American journalists as spies

On Sept. 20, 2014, agents of the Shanghai State Security Bureau of the Ministry of State Security first contacted me in a bid to recruit me as a spy, requesting I pass US state secrets to them in exchange for cash payments, write reports mining my “Washington D.C. social network” of US government officials preferably “in the State Department and the National Security Council” on hot button contentious issues of US “government strategic thinking.” This is not something to play with. The Chinese cast a wide net for western intelligence, and it can – and does – get a person arrested. In many cases, the US has already picked up the overtures to potential candidates. My first inclination, which turned out to be wise, was to contact US spooks. On June 22, Kevin Patrick Mallory, 60, a contractor for the CIA and other U.S. government agencies, was arrested for “gathering and delivering defense information to aid a foreign government” and “making material false statements” to the U.S. government, according to his arrest affidavit filed in Virginia federal court last week. He, potentially, faces the death penalty. “The people who recruited Mallory are the same people who tried to recruit you,” said Peter Mattis, an analyst for the Jamestown Institute who specializes in the Chinese intelligence services. “The Shanghai State Security Bureau of the MSS are particularly aggressive towards recruiting Americans,” he said during several interviews in recent days. “The MSS comes to people like you. You said no, a friend of mine said no, but Mallory said yes. They have a high volume model of casting a wide net to see whoever they can reel in. If they get one in ten or one in 20 to bite, that works for them.” “In March and April, Mallory visited Shanghai to meet with an individual (hereinafter PRC1) who represented himself to Mallory as working for a PRC think tank, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS),” wrote special agent Stephen Green of the FBI Counterintelligence Division in a June 21 affidavit and arrest warrant for Mallory filed in Virginia federal court. “Since at least 2014, the FBI has assessed that the Shanghai State Security Bureau (“SSSB”), a sub-component of the Ministry of State Security (“MSS”), has a close relationship with SASS and uses SASS employees as spotters and assessors,…The MSS can be described as an institution similar to the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency (“CIA”) combined under one intelligence directorate responsible for counter-intelligence, foreign intelligence, and political security,” said FBI counterintelligence division agent Green.