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Beijing “floods the zone with buyers” for smuggled American military gear, leading to a 50 percent spike in arms trafficking cases since 2010, Reuters has found.
In its quest to bypass embargoes and obtain the latest U.S. military technology, China isn’t only relying on a cadre of carefully trained spies.
It’s also enlisting a growing army of amateurs.
Their orders come indirectly from the Chinese government and take the form of shopping lists that are laundered through companies with ties to Beijing.
The recruits who buy the weapons and system components for those companies are scientists, students and businessmen, and they appear to be motivated more by profit than ideology. As one U.S. Homeland Security official put it, the Chinese “flood the zone with buyers” - a strategy that significantly complicates U.S. efforts to stop the flow of American armaments to China.
“When you have nation-states that go outside the normal intelligence agencies and open it up to any person … it just exponentially opens the door for bad guys,” said Robert Anderson Jr, assistant director for counter-intelligence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Today, investigations into arms trafficking linked to China have swelled to at least 350 active cases - up by more than 50 percent since 2010, according to a Reuters review of confidential U.S. government records. The total number is likely higher than 350 because the count does not include many cases that began as regulatory inquiries or investigations into other crimes. U.S. officials also say their China counter-proliferation caseload is growing at a faster pace than investigations linked to any other nation.
-A REVIEW OF 280 CASES -
Reuters reviewed 280 arms export and embargo cases brought by the U.S. federal government during the past eight years. (The review didn’t include cases involving Mexican gun smugglers, a crime that’s distinct from those that jeopardize U.S. military forces). Of the 280 cases, 66 - almost one in four - involved China.
A Defense Department report to Congress this year, based on some of these investigations, said China supports its military procurement and modernization with “illicit approaches that involve violations of U.S. laws and export controls to obtain key national security technologies.”
About a third of the cases linked to China involved military aerospace technology, such as the radiation-hardened microchips. Arms traffickers have been caught in the last five years with military-grade gyroscopes and accelerometers, essential for China’s space and missile programs; unmanned aerial vehicle or drone parts; and microwave amplifiers used for weapons guidance and radar jamming.
The United States imposed an embargo on arm sales to China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Under the embargo, anything designed for police or military use has been banned for export to China; “dual-use” items - those that have both civilian and military applications - require U.S. government permission before they can be sent there.
Reuters
