Beyond the Lines | China’s unseen wars: A balloon between Biden and Beijing

The American ‘balloon’ in the Cold War In May 1960, the two superpowers, the US and Soviet Union, prepared to meet at a summit in Paris to discuss the situation in post-war Germany. On Mayday, an event impacted relations between the two. American pilot Francis Gary Powers took off from a base in Peshawar in Pakistan, bound for Norway. Powers decided to take his plane high above the Soviet airspace, travelling around 2,900 miles of Soviet airspace. Above the city of Sverdlovsk Oblast, the Soviets spotted the American plane and fired an S-75 Dvina (SA-2 Guideline) surface-to-air missile. The American plane, struck by the missile, crashed in the Ural Mountains, but Powers ejected safely. Unable to hide their embarrassment, the American government immediately declared the loss of a civilian research aircraft of NASA, but the discomfiture of the Americans turned to humiliation when the Soviets produced the captured pilot and parts of the U-2’s surveillance equipment, including photographs of Soviet military bases. American President Eisenhower then justified brazenly that such flights were a necessary element in securing national defence, and that he planned to continue them. The Soviets were also deeply involved in espionage activities but Eisenhower’s refusal to apologise despite acknowledging it was a spy flight resulted in the Soviets walking out of the Paris summit. The Cold War took on a new meaning after that. That was a quick end of the US-Soviet détente that Khrushchev and Eisenhower had promised to bring in. …the Chinese balloon in the New War Years later, the superpower actors have changed, but their roles and motives remain similar. The sight of a Chinese spy balloon hovering over American territory provoked the Americans to scramble an F-22 and shoot down the balloon. The Chinese Foreign Ministry argued that it was a civilian weather balloon that veered off course and entered the US airspace. The balloon incident triggered angry reactions from the American government and ultimately resulted in Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, calling off his visit to China. It was a rerun of the script of 1959. There was one difference though. In 1960, Gary Powers was captured by the Soviets and spent three years in prison before returning to the US in exchange for a Russian spy caught earlier by the US. In the case of the recent Chinese balloon incident, there wasn’t a human involved. Moreover, the purpose of a balloon was to hover long enough to not only take pictures but also locate communication devices, capture messages, identify signals and send the recordings to China. Did it have an intent to capture national security related transmissions too? Perhaps. During the cold war era, the use of surveillance warfare was restricted amongst the superpowers and by the superpowers on scrutinised, lesser states to snoop on their rival’s influence in the monitored country. For example, the US government used the CIA in India to monitor Soviet influence among Indian politicians, the defence establishment and policymakers. But information acquisition ideas of US intelligence agencies were an outcome of “technological enthusiasm,” a phrase coined by a historian of technology, Thomas Hughes. Thus, American intelligence agencies were dependent largely upon their technological expertise. However, they were hampered by an inability to weld technology driven espionage with the larger cause of unconventional warfare. The 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers exposed this overt focus on technology which ignored the potency of combining technology with human intelligence. In 1953, a combined American and British intelligence operation involved the digging of a tunnel under Berlin to tap into Soviet army landline communication cables beneath the streets of the Soviet sector of Berlin. What the Americans didn’t know was that the secret of this tunnel had already been revealed to the Soviets by a British spy — George Blake. The Soviets allowed the tunnel to run for years and provided the Americans with trivial information known as ‘chicken feed’ to mislead them. The use of human resources to develop effective counterintelligence negated American emphasis on technology and engineering in espionage. There was a saying that while America won the Cold War, the Soviets won the spy wars! How to Wage Asymmetric Warfare: The Chinese Way This brings us to the Chinese thinking on asymmetric warfare. In the 1980s, the Chinese were picking holes in the American system using organic resources. Larry Wu-tai Chin, who had been a longtime translator for the CIA, laid hollow the CIA’s pomposity by embedding himself in the American system and passing on secrets to the Chinese government for over thirty years! When he was arrested and convicted in 1986, a chastened American government grumbled about Chinese intent. After the fall of the Soviet Union, China was welcomed into the world stage by America and its allies. In the 1990s, China decided that given its deficiency in technology, it would use the opportunity accorded to its economy by its Western patrons to develop industrial espionage and steal secrets from Western corporations. The US passed the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 to deter Chinese ambitions. However, unlike the Soviet Union which was feared and kept at a distance throughout, an underrated Chinese intelligence managed to crawl into machines and slick back offices of corporations and develop a significant corporate espionage capability. It then combined corporate espionage with military ambition to target two aims simultaneously: (a) establish its status as an economic superpower and (b) actively pursue global military superpower goals. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Chinese intelligence built up a mechanism, driven largely through human intel, to pilfer sensitive corporate and trade data from companies in countries such as the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the United States. Embedded moles targeted global companies to build low cost imitations and acquire a competitive advantage for state run Chinese firms. From Corporate Espionage to Military Tools: Dominate and Control As China grew into a powerful economy, bolstering its ability to stitch snoop technology with corporate human intel, a new layer was added to the latter: it was the shaping of a public narrative sympathetic to China. Students, diplomats, businessmen, journalists and politicians across the world were a part of the larger espionage strategy that China adopted. Chinese students proceeding to study in the West are provided financial support by the government especially not only in the areas of science and technology, but also in areas of communication, political science and journalism — because shaping a narrative involves the social sciences as much as technology helps in building sophisticated hi-tech embeds. Over the years, China has adopted a combination of tech-based corporate espionage capabilities within its military strategy to rewrite future rules of conflict. On 6 April 2022, a US cybersecurity firm found that Beijing’s state backed hackers broke down power grids in Ladakh in India. As part of the cyber espionage plan, China was collecting information on India’s critical infrastructure for possible sabotage in future. In October 2020, in an unusual power outage, Mumbai experienced a blackout, which derailed its suburban train services and hospitals. Months later, it was found that a China-linked hacker group, “RedEcho,” had breached the Indian power sector, causing the outage. Besides the power sector, Chinese hackers targeted two Indian ports and allied infrastructure. These are China’s testing grounds to build a capability where it can shut down critical infrastructure in India. Worrying possibility but a real one! At a time when the discourse in international forums is about the possibility of China invading Taiwan, Beijing has sidestepped the discourse to employ infiltration through unconventional means. Will China switch to a Cold War type of an approach involving spying, sabotage and monitoring of opponents to pre-empt American moves in the Indo-Pacific? Maybe more. We are likely to witness China’s prolific use of multiple platforms across land, sea and air to pervade into the information space of US policymakers and defence leadership, global multilateral institutions, Indian decision-makers on infrastructure and policy and even the Philippine fishing industry. The use of unscrewed underwater vehicles under Indonesian waters and similar vessel in the seas around India’s Andaman Nicobar Islands or the use of an airship in 2019 sailing across north America and relevant hotspots on earth at over 60,000 feet reflects intent, capability and willingness to execute multi-platform espionage technology space. Who Moved My Balloon? Integrating the surreptitious means into an overt action such as using military grade-laser against a coast guard vessel in the Philippines or a high-profile military action against India in Ladakh or Arunachal Pradesh reflects Chinese use of technology in conjunction with its geopolitical ambitions. There were supposedly multiple balloons over the US — ten in all, four of which were shot in 8 days. Suddenly, there are news of balloons over Japan and other parts of North America and snooping airships in other places, including India. Those espionage missions that are caught find themselves in an unenviable limelight, and those that don’t continue to function merrily. For every Larry Chin caught in 1986 after thirty years of spying, there are those continuing to exist in the system forever, undetected. The Chinese narrative, run through its unofficial advocates across the world, is an effective parallel ecosystem that survives and flourishes below the radar. Who will address that hyper power balloon? A marriage of espionage technology, military and economic muscle, human intelligence and clandestine advocacy embedded in democracies in rival countries is Beijing’s recipe to expand its global power status. A solitary balloon deflated doesn’t necessarily puncture the biggest balloon the Chinese government is aiming to build up, which is their chronicle on earth. The writer is the author of ‘Watershed 1967: India’s Forgotten Victory over China’. His fortnightly column for FirstPost — ‘Beyond The Lines’ — covers military history, strategic issues, international affairs and policy-business challenges. Views expressed are personal. Tweets @iProbal Read all the Latest News, Trending News,  Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.