?מהו היקף הריגול הסיני ברחבי העולם

What's the scale of China's espionage across the globe? Beijing is known for using honey traps to build influence in the West and gather intelligence. But just how widespread is it? Joining us with a unique perspective on all of this is Paul Johnstone. He's a former federal agent with the Australian Federal Police and a regional security advisor at Defensive Measures International. Paul Johnstone, thank you so much for joining us. Great to have you on the show. An area often not looked at here is Chinese influence operations or even espionage. And I know you've covered this for years. So talk to us about the scale of this. Do we even know the scale of this? Look, I don't believe anybody knows the full scale because, you know, I've said this before, for every 10 intelligence operatives that the West might have, the Chinese have got a thousand, you know. Who knows what the number really is? But, you know, I predict that they have more intelligence agents in China or spread throughout the world than what we probably have in our military here in Australia because they've got the population. And so they've spread all around the world. Obviously, they've got declared agents at the embassies, but they've also got a lot of agents out there that are undeclared. They're the sleeper cells. They've got people out there who have probably been assimilated into our societies for a long time. And that's not to say that we should be thinking that every person, every Chinese person in the West is potentially a spy, but we have to ask the question, you know, who are they? Are they being influenced? Because a lot of these people unwillingly are being threatened by the CCP because they may have family back in the mainland. So, you know, when it comes to intelligence gathering, it doesn't necessarily need to be a trained intelligence operative. They can, with the way that the CCP works, they can influence students at any university anywhere in the world by simply saying to them that if you don't get this information, if you don't try to obtain this information, you know, it could have great consequences on your family back in the mainland. So that's just at the basic level. I always say to people, I say to my clients, whenever there's a delegation, you can always assume that, say there's a dozen people that are coming to have a meeting or delegation, you can always assume at least three or four of those are what I call vacuum cleaners. And they just, they're sucking up their information. I think also one of the biggest problems that we face is the use of honey traps. When it comes to the espionage world, their ability to be able to trap politicians, business executives, just any person, and then they can use that person for their own influence. And it may be just, they may target that person and keep them in place for many, many years until they're in a position of authority. And then they can actually use that and they'll ring them up and say, hello, remember us. Now it's time to work for us. Because it could be because they've been compromised, they've been blackmailed. I tell a lot of my clients all the time, again, when you travel to China, you must expect that every hotel room you walk into, no matter what rating it is, you're being watched, you're being monitored, you're being surveyed. And people are quite surprised when I tell them this, and I say to them all the time, because people say, what can they get from me? What would they want to be of interest to me? Whatever's on your phone, whatever's on your laptop, even if you're nobody, and they can take something from your phone or your laptop, it might be of benefit to them.