Chinese nationals have illicitly tried to access U.S. military installations and other sensitive areas some 100 times in recent years, raising the issue of espionage.
The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that these incidents range from individuals claiming they were just following GPS to get to restaurants that are actually on bases to speeding through checkpoints to scuba divers. Since we know that the America-hating Chinese Communist Party planted half a dozen illicit police stations in the U.S. and infiltrated all major U.S. institutions and levels of government, the risk of espionage is very real.
[WSJ:] Chinese nationals, sometimes posing as tourists, have accessed military bases and other sensitive sites in the U.S. as many as 100 times in recent years, according to U.S. officials, who describe the incidents as a potential espionage threat.
The Defense Department, FBI and other agencies held a review last year to try to limit these incidents, which involve people whom officials have dubbed gate-crashers because of their attempts—either by accident or intentionally—to get onto U.S. military bases and other installations without proper authorization. They range from Chinese nationals found crossing into a U.S. missile range in New Mexico to what appeared to be scuba divers swimming in murky waters near a U.S. government rocket-launch site in Florida.
The incidents, which U.S. officials describe as a form of espionage, appear designed to test security practices at U.S. military installations and other federal sites. Officials familiar with the practice say the individuals are typically Chinese nationals pressed into service and required to report back to the Chinese government.
Chinese nationals will claim to be tourists with reservations on bases and will provide seemingly scripted stories, WSJ noted. One recent example was a group of Chinese nationals claiming to be tourists who attempted to “push past guards at Fort Wainwright, Alaska,” claiming hotel reservations on the base. Fort Wainwright is the base for the Army’s Arctic warfare-focused 11th Airborne Division.
WSJ, citing U.S. officials, had another example of suspicious activity: “There are repeated cases in which Chinese nationals have been found taking pictures at a U.S. Army range, according to people familiar with the matter. They often start off at nearby White Sands National Park, where visitors like to barrel down the sand dunes on rented slides, but then leave that area and cross into the adjacent missile site.”
One 2020 incident at the naval air station in Key West led to three arrests. Back in 2019, a Chinese woman received eight months’ jail time after unlawful entrance to then-President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
There haven’t apparently been any espionage charges for any of these incidents, WSJ explained. But, the paper added, “two Chinese diplomats were expelled from the country on suspicions of espionage after they improperly drove, with their wives, onto Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek, Va., a highly sensitive U.S. military facility where U.S. Navy SEALs train” in 2019.
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said in May that the CCP has infiltrated almost every country in the world, including America. Back in March, Anthony Shaffer, previously a CIA-trained intelligence officer and Donald Trump campaign national security advisor, mentioned the pervasiveness of CCP infiltration and said, “[I]nstitutions of the United States government, to include the White House, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, were paid millions of dollars to essentially defer to China.”
Chinese espionage is a very real and present risk.
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