The Chinese Ministry of State Security has arrested a British spy for operating inside China. The man was posing as a consultant, using it to collect intelligence and recruit a network.
China reported that the individual was neither Chinese nor British, leaving his nationality a secret. The NY Times reports:
China’s top intelligence agency said Monday that it had detained the head of an overseas consulting agency for working as a spy for the British government to collect Chinese state secrets.
The Chinese Ministry of State Security said it caught a consultant with the surname Huang, who collected China-related intelligence and found personnel on behalf of MI6, the British intelligence agency. The agency recruited and trained Huang — who is from an unspecified “third country” — in the United Kingdom and other places, the ministry said in a post on its official WeChat account. The British government equipped the individual with “special spy equipment,” the ministry wrote.
China recently passed a new espionage law, and calling on its population to report spying to the authorities. The spy sent back 17 pieces of information to Britain, including 5 considered secret. The BBC says:
It said that after their recruitment, MI6 instructed them to go to China on multiple occasions and use their job as cover to collect intelligence and recruit other individuals.
It claimed that they were provided with professional intelligence training in the UK and other locations and also equipped with specialist spy equipment to communicate.
China is a very difficult country to infiltrate, due to its homogenous population and surveillance capabilities. Chinese spies, on the other hand, are operating in large numbers in America. Their main role is policing the Chinese community, threatening dissidents abroad if they have family in China.
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