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Alex Joske is an analyst who studies Chinese influence operations and the author of Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World. He now advises clients on geopolitical and foreign interference risks at McGrathNicol. Before that, he was an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a government funded think tank based in Canberra, where his work focused on the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence and technology transfer efforts. Joske won notoriety in late 2018 for “Picking Flowers, Making Honey,” his first report for the ASPI, which detailed an extensive CCP campaign to place thousands of military scientists in foreign universities to covertly secure cutting-edge research and technologies. In 2018, Joske earned his B.A. from the Australian National University. He also studied Chinese at the National Taiwan Normal University. What follows is a lightly edited Q&A.

Q: Some years ago you began focusing on Chinese influence operations overseas and in Australia. Is that how you came to write a book about Chinese spying operations overseas?

A: My background is looking at United Front work and technology acquisition efforts by China, and I’d always had a strong interest in Chinese intelligence services, like the Ministry of State Security (MSS), but had never really focused on them. I had this assumption that it was just too hard to do that; or that all one could do was to wait for a prosecution to come out and read about that. I assumed it was probably impenetrable for researchers like me. 

But then, in the course of studying United Front work, I came across more and more hints about the MSS and leads that showed me that the things I was looking at had a layer of covert and clandestine intelligence operations beneath them. One of my key starting points was the George Soros speech to the World Economic Forum [in 2019], where he talked about how his foundation had been taken over by the MSS back in the 1980s. I looked at the leads that he gave there, the front group that the MSS used to take over his foundation, and it turned out the group was still active, so I started looking into the staff members. They looked like MSS officers. This was a great starting point for unraveling MSS operations and peering back behind the covert veneer.

Let’s start then with George Soros. Tell us how you began looking into his work in China and came upon an effort apparently led by the MSS? 

A lot of people don’t realize that Soros was engaged in China very early. It was really his second philanthropic venture, after Hungary, a fund for the reform and opening of China, which was set up in about 1986. This was quite a special time in Chinese politics. You had lots of young people who had very reformist beliefs near the top leadership, people who wanted to see an economic opening and, to some extent, political reform of the Chinese system. Soros managed to plug into the networks of those reformers. But pretty quickly his group became a kind of pawn in the elite struggle between different factions of the Chinese Communist Party. And the fact that Soros was an American led the Chinese security services to claim, with no evidence, that he was connected to the C.I.A. and that accusation was used to attack [former Premier] Zhao Ziyang, since he’d supported the establishment of the [Soros] foundation. So the solution that was presented to Soros during this challenge was this: since the Ministry of Public Security is going after your foundation, people at the Ministry of State Security effectively said, “We’re their equal in bureaucratic rank and if we come in and basically back your foundation, we can keep some of the pressure off your back.” And that’s what happened. The MSS, through a front group, signed on as the Chinese partner organization to Soros and his foundation and they seemed to be running things on the ground as their own venture. 

Of course, it all collapsed in the lead up to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Zhao Ziyang was pushed out of power and the reformers were in deep political trouble. Soros decided to close his foundation. He wrote to the MSS vice minister, who was his counterpart in China, to make that decision.

When did Soros publish this work that alluded to the MSS links to his foundation?

He’s really been honest about it. He’s written a lot and said quite a bit about this experience. He wrote about it in his 1991 memoir and mentioned it in his Davos speech. There was also a book written by his Chinese adviser at the time, where he basically says, “I was taken to meet this MSS vice minister. He had been a simple correspondent in London and in DC; he spoke really good English. He had all these public facing roles, which were in MSS front organizations.” So it was a great starting point for my research and it also kind of happens to be, chronologically, a nice starting point for that book.

Can you explain how you uncovered the identity of someone you believe to be a key person in China’s spying operations, a man who had worked in the West and had ties to American scholars and diplomats?

Yes. The MSS vice minister handling the case of George Soros and his foundation in China is a guy named Yu Enguang. At least, that’s the name that Soros and many others knew him by. Under that name, he was a Xinhua correspondent in London and in Washington, DC. He’s been officially listed as a deputy head of Xinhua’s international division, so responsible for foreign coverage and correspondence. But he has also been a delegate to the National People’s Congress. He has held many senior roles in social organizations in China. 

Soros has been quite frank about how he knew he was dealing with an MSS officer in Yu Enguang. In his book he says this was actually an undercover MSS officer. And what I found was looking at internal-facing MSS materials was that a guy named Yu Fang kept appearing, a vice minister who almost exactly matched the biography and known details of Yu Enguang. He spoke English. He’s tall, from northeast China, and graduated from Renmin University with a background in journalism. And then I found he had also been a delegate to the National People’s Congress, but his name doesn’t appear with any of the delegates. The only name you get is Yu Enguang. But what sealed it for me were the photos. Unfortunately, they’re not in the book. You have a photo of Yu Enguang in his role as vice president of an MSS front group. And around the same time, a photo of Yu Fang who had just retired from the MSS who looked identical. You can see them even wearing some of the same accessories.

Chinese intelligence agencies have had such a big focus on influence operations and politically driven work… they’re not using crazy technology and really elaborate schemes. They’re focusing on networking and building relationships and doing business transactions.

So there were these spies who had multiple identities, working overseas as journalists, diplomats, even cultural figures. Is that right? 

Yes. It’s really difficult to assess the full extent of this covert side to Chinese engagement with the outside world. But the case studies in the book, like this Soros case, make the point that there’s a lot more than we realize. There are intelligence agencies and people with multiple identities, people who are more than they say they are; people who are proxies and assets for intelligence agencies really have been part of the story of China’s opening up to the rest of the world. And it’s this story that hasn’t been told fully.

Another character in your book is Katrina Leung. Tell us about her story.

Katrina Leung is one of the most written about of these MSS cases. But I thought it hadn’t been fully explained from the Chinese side. There’s a lot of information from the fact that she was prosecuted in the United States. [At the time, Leung, a U.S. citizen, strongly denied spying for China. Her case was dismissed because of prosecutorial misconduct and she is apparently still living in the U.S.] But I tried to tell the story of the actual MSS networks behind her case and how it really went back to the 1980s, when she had been a paid FBI informant, and was also essentially an agent [of China]. The FBI tasked her with building up networks inside Chinese communities in Los Angeles, but more importantly going to China, engaging with the MSS and meeting with Chinese leaders and bringing back intelligence from those interactions. 

Very late in this relationship, the FBI recognized [See: A Review of the FBI’s Handling and Oversight of FBI Asset Katrina Leung]that Katrina Leung had actually been working for the MSS; that they weren’t really in control of her activities in China and she was, at best, playing both sides – if not straight up being an MSS asset first and an FBI asset second. It came up in my research because the same network of MSS officers that were involved with Yu Enguang, and in seizing control of the Soros Foundation, were also handling Katrina [Leung]. For example, the cover entity they would use to travel to the United States to meet and fund her bookstore was essentially the same cover they used to interact with George Soros. To me, the Leung case shows a really interesting aspect of the MSS; that it’s involved in a lot of elite influence operations and high-risk operations, recruiting or sending in people to become FBI informants when they’re actually working for the MSS.

Can you put this in context for us? What is the MSS? Are their operations any different from U.S. spying operations overseas, or operations that emerged from the old Soviet Union?

There are pretty interesting differences in how China operates, the tradecraft they use and the kinds of targets and the pace of operations. The fact that it’s different, and has at times been sloppy in some cases, previously led a lot of Western intelligence agencies to write off the MSS and Chinese intelligence as low priority or as amateur players in espionage and intelligence. There were some good reasons for that assessment, but the Chinese intelligence apparatus has had to really improve its game in the past decade or so. 

Going back to the beginning, Chinese intelligence agencies have had such a big focus on influence operations and politically driven work and this just isn’t appreciated by Western governments. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t rely on advanced tradecraft or the more sophisticated and brazen operations that people are familiar with from the Soviet Union and Russia. But I’ve tried to make the point that they’re not using crazy technology and really elaborate schemes. They’re focusing on networking and building relationships and doing business transactions. And none of that makes it less effective. In fact, it makes it more effective because people didn’t recognize this was such a big problem.

Can you give us a sense of their overseas operations, how big they are and what and how they engage? What are their priorities?

It’s hard to say what the MSS’s priorities are but definitely around the turn of the millennium, it became much more internationally focused. Previously, as with the Soros case, its priority was managing foreigners in China and preventing them from pushing for political change within the country. But this is an organization that easily has over 100,000 employees, and on top of that, a whole network of clandestine assets. So this means that you see the MSS active in all of those areas, stealing technology, pushing political influence operations, trying to penetrate foreign government agencies, cyber attacks and hacking. Many are familiar with the more traditional efforts of harassing dissidents and trying to suppress political freedoms within China and overseas.

Do their operations resemble the type of tradecraft one might associate with the former Soviet Union?

They’ve had a long time to build up their own traditions and methods. Early on, there was important influence from the Soviet Union, which basically provided training and advice to set up the Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence agencies, right from the 1920s into the 1950s. But that’s evolved so much since then, with United Front work in particular, and it’s different from other communist countries. China borrowed the concept of United Front work from the Soviet Union but it really turned it into its own thing and built its own traditions and methods of United Front work that informed the political influence side of intelligence operations. 

There’s so much more integration between business figures and intelligence and security agencies in China, than is widely appreciated. A lot of business figures go out and cultivate these ties because they’re valuable.

What exactly is publicly available about the MSS? Do they have a website, release budgets or give public speeches? Who is in the leadership ranks of the MSS? What can I find in open source work?

There is information but it’s never staring you in the face. The MSS doesn’t have a website. The only member of the MSS whose identity is automatically made public is the Minister of State Security. Even vice ministers won’t be out there publicly. If they are, they might be using pseudonyms. There are no budgets. There are no official numbers on staff sizes. Their officially acknowledged address is more of a front office than where they carry out business. But they’ve become increasingly engaged with the media for recruitment efforts and to raise awareness about state security within China. By design it’s an incredibly secretive agency. And it is under exploited through open source research. My book has relied entirely on open source research. I was tracking MSS officers through the decades, from Yu Enguang in the 1980s to recent days, and this is something you can do with open source research.

What’s the role of the Ministry of Public Security, the other intelligence and police agency?

The Ministry of Public Security is mainly domestically focused, so it carries out regular police functions. But it also has responsibilities for counterintelligence, cybersecurity, political security, suppressing dissent and anti corruption. And all of those things give it an international aspect. So you see MPS officers going overseas for “Operation Fox Hunt.” And there’s the Steve Wynn case, of course, where you’ve got a senior Ministry of Public Security official allegedly tasking this American casino magnate to influence [President] Donald Trump. So no, there aren’t clear dividing lines between the MPS and the MSS. But the MSS is definitely much more internationally focused. And there’s bound to be some tension there [between the MSS and the MPS].

One of the curious, and perhaps troubling, aspects of your work is the suggestion that the MSS was using undercover agents in the U.S. to liaise with former American officials and even supporting a U.S.-China foundation that helped send congressional staffers on trips to China. You mention that a a former U.S. official introduced at a Washington policy event a guy named Lin Di, who you say was an undercover agent for the MSS. What was going on there?

In that case, you’ve got him introducing an undercover MSS bureau chief, Lin Di, to speak at the National Press Club in 2001. And it’s this same bureau chief who was one of the handlers for Katrina Leung, the FBI informant. So Lin was not just someone helping the MSS but an actual, full-on undercover senior MSS officer who really focused on building networks in the United States, and had a lot of success at the time. There’s more that scholars and people who engage with China can do to just be aware of these things and not treat intelligence officers or intelligence connected people as friends in China who are helpful for getting access. Because that’s that’s the pattern that a lot of people fell into, where you had MSS officers or MSS proxies really being helpful to foreigners and presenting themselves as reformists who wanted to help you meet other reformers; who want to show you the direction that China was going to go in through the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. That’s something a couple of people I interviewed who engaged with these undercover MSS offices told me; that they had the impression they were talking to reformists inside the Chinese Communist Party, but these were actually undercover MSS officers who weren’t upfront about their identities.

How confident are you that Lin Di was an MSS agent?

I confirmed through interviews with former intelligence officers that he was an MSS bureau chief at the time. And there’s actually an interesting Guo Wengui angle here [Note: Guo is a dissident fugitive billionaire who has partnered with Steve Bannon]. Guo Wengui once hired Lin Di’s younger brother to work at Pangu Investment, his property development company. And in one of his crazy live streams [Guo] mentions this and Lin Di’s role in the MSS. It’s not information I relied on to make the connection between Lin and the MSS but Guo said the same thing. He said I hired this guy Lin Qiang, and his older brother, Lin Di, was an MSS bureau chief in the 12th and the fifth bureau, which was my assessment as well. The Lins came from this really storied family of top party officials and Qing Dynasty Mandarins.

Do you suspect the U.S. government was aware that Lin Di may have been an MSS agent? 

The question is: Did the US government know these people were MSS officers or had been tasked by the MSS? In the case of Lin Di, at least some people were aware of it. The second question then is, What was done about that? Apparently, there was no intervening in this; they continued to give him visas, and they gave him free rein to give a talk in the National Press Club. Maybe they didn’t recognize it as a priority, or they didn’t see people like Lin Di running espionage operations; they didn’t think they were primarily trying to recruit people with access to classified information. These MSS officers were going around D.C. networking and making friends; it didn’t seem to be particularly driven by an urgent need to recruit people because they had this long term focus on influence and building relationships. Perhaps US intelligence agencies saw this as less pressing, and with all the other cases they had to deal with, it probably fell through. Another explanation is that when you’re running a case and you see an MSS officer interacting with someone, you want to fully understand the situation before you intervene or deliver a defensive briefing. Within US intelligence agencies I think the habit has been to be cautious with that and not give away too much of what they know, because there’s a risk, of course, that when you brief someone that they might actually go back and tell someone in China. And when none of this breaks laws, it can be hard [for the U.S. government] to explain these things to people. They might say, “I’ve known this person for so long. They’ve been helpful to me. They’ve never tried to pitch me. How could they be an MSS officer? You’re just being paranoid. And, I haven’t done anything wrong here.” So it can backfire.

You don’t write about Guo Wengui. He is said to be a successful businessman turned fugitive (See our profile of Steve Bannon “Burning Man”) but also someone the Chinese government accused of working closely with the former deputy head of the MSS, Ma Jian, who was arrested on corruption charges by Beijing. Is that type of arrangement common?

There’s so much more integration between business figures and intelligence and security agencies in China, than is widely appreciated. A lot of business figures go out and cultivate these ties because they’re valuable. In the case of Guo Wengui, he’s alleged to have profited off a relationship with the MSS because they helped him get property deals and go after his rivals and protect his ventures from scrutiny. In the course of my research, I came across dozens of companies that were set up by the MSS. These are front companies directly owned by the Ministry of State Security through different fronts. And one really interesting thing is that in 1998, Jiang Zemin forced the PLA to divest a lot of its business ventures. At the same time, the MPS and the MSS were subject to the same scrutiny. So a lot of these companies that the MSS had set up were split off officially from the agency around 1998. But in many cases, I could still see business figures who kept running these companies after ‘98, engaging with the MSS. So that’s one way they build these relationships. So you have people who are essentially officers in the MSS who’ve kept up that business relationship. And then you see more business figures cultivated and recruited by the Ministry of State Security. That’s one reason they are setting up so many of these front organizations, groups like the China International Culture Exchange Center, which I write about in the book. Front organizations are not just going out internationally, they’re also bringing important people within China into the fold, helping connect them to the Ministry of State Security. They’re creating a pool of people who the MSS can task with jobs, and that includes top business figures.

Does the MSS have business operations overseas?

A really interesting feature of MSS operations is that they’ve really relied on operating on their home ground, bringing people to China and working on them there. So while they have people in embassies, those tend not to really be where you’ll see the most interesting and sensitive MSS operations being run. It’ll often be in China, or by people who are more like illegals; or these business proxies for the MSS. But one interesting thing I came across, but it’s hard to confirm, was that I could see business figures who clearly had relationships with or backgrounds in the MSS 12th Bureau. This is the bureau that was working on the George Soros case, and handling Katrina Leung. I could see people move from the 12th Bureau to top SOE [state-owned enterprise] spots. In one example, I found an employee of the MSS-backed China International Culture Exchange Center and then fast forward to the 2000s and he pops up at the 88 Queensway Group and tied to Sinopec. There’s a similar pattern with Citic Group in Hong Kong, where from the company’s very founding it had a deputy CEO or deputy chairman who came from the intelligence community.

Some years ago, there was scrutiny over China’s efforts to hunt down corrupt officials who had fled overseas. One of the efforts was called Operation Fox Hunt. Some now say these were not really anti-corruption efforts on the part of Beijing, but something else, some type of intelligence operation. Did this come up in your work?

Yes, it is, to some extent, anti corruption, but a lot of it is factional battles. In a way, these are the losers who haven’t got anyone from the Ministry of Public Security or the MSS on their side. But a really interesting feature of Chinese intelligence operations — and it’s certainly something I saw looking at the 12th Bureau [of the MSS] — is that they’re not well delineated. I could find the same person or the same MSS officer involved in everything from espionage to political influence to harassing dissidents or even acquiring foreign technology. Katrina Leung is one example. She initially came onto the FBI’s radar because she was connected to suspected economic espionage efforts by China. And then she became this political influence asset for China and a tool for espionage against the United States. So she really crossed all of these lines that are normally kept separate in Western intelligence agencies. And this is relevant to understanding [Operation] Fox Hunt. It means that it can bleed out, far beyond just anti-corruption. If they’re using this to go after someone, and then they find out this person has political connections in Australia, then they’re in a perfect position to leverage that. The [Chinese intelligence agencies] can use that threat of law enforcement action to coerce these [overseas] individuals to use their political connections [overseas] to China’s benefit.

So are there key takeaways from working on this book, or even recommendations for governments, diplomats and others? 

There’s the scholarly side and the policy side. On the scholarly side, this is such an interesting topic of inquiry and there’s much more that can be done. There are so many other intelligence agencies or parts of the MSS that I haven’t closely examined. Mark Stokes [executive director of the Project 2049 Institute] and LC Russell Hsiao have done work on Chinese military intelligence. And the more we look into it, it’s going to change how we view the history of Chinese foreign affairs work and diplomacy. And scholars need to be more aware of how they’re getting access and information from China, and the different ways of carrying out research on China. With the way U.S.-China relations are going, field work is less of an option. There’s a big case to be made for pivoting towards open source research. And that’s one of my recommendations for governments: open source work is not just reading books and translating media and books from Chinese to English; it can give you real insights into politics, and even some of these hard targets like Chinese intelligence agencies. There are ways to learn about them through open source research that just haven’t been exploited. 

The second recommendation I have for governments would be to do more to counter foreign interference work; to build a strategy around this; not just go after individual cases but to try to understand what China is trying to achieve, and how we can push back against that strategically and bring business communities along with us; protecting people from interference from their rights being harmed. Finally, while countries like the United States and Australia are in a relatively good position to protect against foreign interference, since we have pretty robust democratic systems, media freedoms and strong counter intelligence and law enforcement agencies, that’s not the case in a lot of countries. You can’t say the same about most countries in Southeast Asia or the Pacific Islands or Africa, Central Asia and Latin America. While we’re also trying to come to grips with interference in our own countries, we need to consider what’s happening in the rest of the world and how that impacts our foreign policy. Governments have this habit of thinking, for example, that in the Pacific we are competing on aid, infrastructure and investment. But China is more concerned with elite influence operations and covert activity. And I just don’t think that this has been widely understood and integrated into foreign policy.

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