◆ SpookStack

-L pee Cee SECR ET Il, DEVELOPMENTS IN HOIS OPER ATIONS When the People's Republic of China (PRC) first established a diplomatic presence in the United States in the early 1970s, it immediately began laying the groundwork for exploiting the intelligence opportunities which direct access to Americans offered. The FBI in turn, also began to take advantage of the opportunity to observe Chinese intelligence activities at a rather close range. This observation revealed early on that the PRC hada particular appetite for any and all information about one small segment of the U.S. population: the Chinese-American community. Over the years, the PRC has expanded its resources in the United States from me diplomatic establishment and several dozen individuals to five diplomatic establishments and forty trade offices, and also more than forty thousand diplomats, officials, visitors, students, etc. During this period, Chinese clandestine intelligence operations also grew markedly in both quality and quantity. FBI investigation of these activities has demonstrated time and again that these intelligence operations have a single common element -- they are aimed at developing or exploiting the intelligence potential of Chinese-Americans. So pervasive has this phenomenon been, that years of investigation have unearthed only several PRC covert intelligence operations in which one of the central figures has been a person of other than Chinese origin. Furthermore, sources who have attended intelligence planning meetings run by PRC officials have advised that those officials usually only ask two questions when discussing how best to obtain a covert item from a targeted company or department: is there an ethnic Chinese there? If so, does this person also have any relatives in the PRC? If the answer to both these questions is affirmative, then the PRC officials become quite confident of their Prospects of obtaining the desired item. SECR ET - at. Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/07 : CIA-RDP87M00539R000901190016-2 _ Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/07 : CIA-RDP87M00539R000901190016-2 _