China Is Said to Detain Official Who Spied for the US - New York Times

BEIJING â€" In what could be the biggest intelligence breach in China in years, the Chinese government detained a security official early this year who had been passing information to the United States, a person with knowledge of the case said Friday.

The official is believed to be an employee in the Ministry of State Security, China’s main intelligence agency. The United States and Chinese governments have not given any hint publicly of the discovery of the spying suspect. If the case were to be brought into the open, it could become another point of friction in a year of sharp diplomatic tensions between Washington and Beijing.

The official was detained around the same time that the Communist Party was dealing with a fragile moment in relations with the United States. In February, a former Chinese police chief drove to the United States Consulate in Chengdu to present evidence linking the wife of a Politburo member, Bo Xilai, to the murder last year of a British businessman. The police chief, Wang Lijun, was escorted to Beijing by officials from the Ministry of State Security after spending one night in the consulate. One week later, Xi Jinping, the vice president and presumed next leader of China, embarked on a prominent five-day good-will tour of the United States that was hosted by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

It is unclear what kind of information the detained Chinese official gave to the United States and whether that information has compromised any operations by the Chinese government. Recently, news of the spying suspect’s detention had been circulating quietly, without confirmation, in some foreign intelligence circles. A spokesman for the American Embassy in Beijing declined to comment.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, visiting Oslo, declined to comment on the reports of an espionage arrest, as did officials at the State Department and White House in Washington.

A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivities, said the arrest came amid a series of investigations begun after the revelations in the Bo affair. The investigations, authorized by China’s top leaders, have expanded beyond Mr. Bo to the Ministry of State Security itself and now include allegations of improper use of the security services and corruption, the official said. It was not clear that the espionage case was related in any way to the other investigations.

“There is clearly some very intense stuff going on with the security ministry,” the official said. “It’s hard to tell exactly, but it’s clearly maneuvering going on after Bo.”

Early this year, senior Chinese officials imposed a foreign travel ban on scholars at an important research center based in Beijing that some analysts say has ties to the Ministry of State Security. The ban on overseas travel within the center, the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, was related to an intelligence breach, said one person who has contact with the institute’s scholars, and could well be a direct result of the discovery and detention of the official suspected of spying.

The detainee could be charged with treason and tried; the charge carries a maximum penalty of death.

The detention of the official was first reported by Chinese-language news organizations outside the mainland that sometimes dispense rumor as fact. One report dated May 27 said the suspect was the secretary of a vice minister in the Ministry of State Security.

Reuters reported Friday from Hong Kong that an aide to a vice minister in the Ministry of State Security had been arrested between January and March this year on suspicions that he had been passing intelligence to the United States for several years. Reuters cited an anonymous source who said the aide had been passing on “political, economic and strategic intelligence.” The aide was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and spoke English, Reuters said the source told it. The vice minister has been suspended and is being questioned, too.

David Wise, the author of the 2011 book “Tiger Trap: America’s Secret Spy War With China,” said that Chinese intelligence is “a very hard target.”

“If in fact the C.I.A. had a mole inside the Ministry of State Security, that would be a pretty big deal,” Mr. Wise said. “It would open a window on Chinese intelligence operations worldwide, and first of all what they’re doing against the U.S. We might be able to identify their operatives and find out what the Chinese government role is in cyberwarfare, which has never been proven.”

The last time a prominent turning of a Chinese official by the United States was made public was in 1985, when Yu Qiangsheng, a senior security official, defected and revealed that a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, Larry Wu-Tai Chin, had been selling secrets to the Chinese. Mr. Chin committed suicide in prison while awaiting sentencing.

There have been sharp twists in diplomatic relations between the United States and China this year. Just two months after Mr. Wang, the police chief, showed up at the American Consulate, a persecuted Chinese activist and self-trained lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, escaped from guards keeping him under house arrest in his village and made his way to the grounds of the American Embassy in Beijing. Mr. Chen was brought into the embassy right before a round of the semiregular Strategic and Economic Dialogue between the two nations, and diplomats from each country negotiated hurriedly to resolve Mr. Chen’s fate. Last month, Mr. Chen flew to the United States with his family to start a fellowship at the New York University School of Law.

Mrs. Clinton, referring to the recent diplomatic crisis over Mr. Chen, said in Oslo that while the United States and China often disagreed, they had many mutual interests and that President Obama’s administration was determined to cultivate a positive cooperative relationship on a host of economic and security issues.

“The goal for our relationship with China is to ensure that we defy history,” she said. “It has never happened that an established pre-eminent power and a rising power have been able to find a way to not only coexist, but cooperate. We intend to make history with our relationship with China.”

Steven Lee Myers and Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.