CIA Expands Recruitment of Informants in China, Iran

The CIA is reaching out to unhappy Chinese citizens with a message. We're open for business. The intelligence agency is doubling down on recruiting informants inside China, Iran and North Korea. The CIA posted videos Wednesday across all the major social media platforms and the dark web with instructions on how to contact the agency securely, a spy agency trying to seize on the growing discontent inside China. David Cohen, CIA deputy director, told Bloomberg that there are plenty of people who have access to information and do not like where Chinese leader Xi is taking the country. Referring to Chinese citizens, Cohen added, there's a path to helping their own country by working with us. This comes as the agency has been trying to rebuild its spy network in China following a major setback. About a decade ago, the CIA rolled up, China rolled up a lot of CIA operations in China. A dozen or more CIA sources were arrested or worse executed. Have you rebuilt? Yeah, we've made progress and we're working very hard over recent years to ensure that we have a strong human intelligence capability to complement what we can acquire through other methods. A month following the remark, Beijing charged a Chinese national for allegedly providing information to the CIA. Back to the CIA's recruitment efforts, driving the push is the need to understand Xi Jinping's decision making. On the military side, the U.S. Navy is preparing for a potential war with China. The deadline for war readiness is within three years. The same timeline Beijing has suggested it might decide to invade Taiwan. Cohen said the CIA is also recruiting Chinese nationals living overseas through methods like walk-ins at U.S. embassies. He noted the agency has a growing body of China experts around the world, which helped to develop relationships with friendly countries and warn them about threats from Beijing. He said it's similar to how the U.S. trained experts on the Soviet Union during the Cold War. For more UN videos visit www.un.org