FBI-MI5 Claims About ‘Game-Changing Chinese Threat’ Look Hypocritical, Ironic & Clownish: CIA Vets
18:11 GMT 07.07.2022 (Updated: 19:27 GMT 07.07.2022)
© AP Photo / Matt Dunham
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FBI director Christopher Wray and MI5 chief Ken McCallum issued a rare joint statement on Wednesday calling China the “biggest long-term threat” to the West’s economic security, and accusing Beijing of seeking to steal technology, undercut business and dominate markets. Beijing dismissed the claims and called the US the biggest threat to the world.
Wednesday’s FBI-MI5 joint statement on the Chinese economic “threat” to the West not only looks “hypocritical,” “ironic,” and “clownish,” but worse, is counterproductive, former CIA agents Philip Giraldi and Larry Johnson, and George Szamuely, a senior research fellow at the Global Policy Institute, have told Sputnik.
“What strikes me immediately about this joint performance is the sheer hypocrisy of it,” Giraldi, a former CIA station chief and military intelligence officer who now serves as executive director of the Council for the National Interest, a US-based non-profit anti-war advocacy, said.
“Sure China conducts industrial and political espionage and tries to promote a favorable view of itself but it has global economic and geopolitical interests that demand that type of engagement. The United States and Britain do exactly the same sorts of things when they have national interests at stake. What the UK and US are doing is trying to portray Beijing as a major disruptor of the international systems of rules and restraints that both London and Washington themselves ignore with impunity when it suits them,” Giraldi stressed.
The West has realized that China is outcompeting them economically through its trade agreements and global networking strategies, and is trying to “spin the conversation” with statements accusing Beijing of acting irresponsibly,” the former spy believes.
Timing is Everything
Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department office of counterterrorism official, thinks the FBI-MI5 allegations against China have been trotted out now amid “frustration” in Washington and London “that their effort to enlist China to support Western sanctions on Russia have collapsed.”
“With no carrot to offer China to turn on Russia, it appears the two allies have opted for the stick. China’s espionage and hacking ops have been going on for quite some time. This act is motivated by impotence on the part of the West,” Johnson said.
The statement can also be attributed to the “growing realization” in the West “that the war in Ukraine is not going the way the West hoped and that Russia is prevailing,” Johnson argues. “If anything, this is a further sign of the chaos in the policymaking centers in London and Washington,” he said.
Giraldi believes that the timing of the release is also connected to the political troubles facing Britain and the US, with Prime Minister Johnson announcing his resignation on Thursday in the wake of a series of political scandals, and President Biden facing the lowest approval ratings of any president in living memory amid out of control gas prices, raging inflation and fears of an impending recession.
“When in trouble, always pop out a new threat to rally the public. China is that new threat since the Ukraine proxy war is beginning to lose its appeal as the energy crisis grows,” Giraldi said.
Dr. George Szamuely says that the rare joint address is “part of the Western mobilization against China and Russia,” connected to the long-standing American “anxiety about being displaced by China as an economic and political power,” plus now “combined with an almost open war with Russia.”
Szamuely finds the British spy agency’s decision to join its US counterpart “interesting,” since UK never formally designated China as an “official enemy.”
“But it increasingly has been under Boris Johnson, [with Britain] signing military agreements with Japan, the UK and the United States joining AUKUS, the alliance with Australia,” and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss saying in a recent speech that China was ‘a growing threat’ to British interests in Asia. Wednesday’s joint statement by the US and UK’s top spooks are just another demonstration of the fact that Britain “has now really got on board the anti-China bandwagon of the United States,” Szamuely said.
Clownish and Counterproductive
Whatever the FBI and MI5’s objectives were in making the statement, the former CIA spooks speaking to Sputnik believe they were counterproductive at best and clownish at worst.
“True intelligence professionals do their work quietly, without fanfare. Wray and McCallum are showing themselves to be amateur clowns. All this does is reinforce China’s view that the West cannot be trusted and is an enemy,” Larry Johnson said.
The former spy said statements like this only provide impetus for expanded Russia-China cooperation. “It is a puzzling policy because it only harms US and British national interests. They could have dealt with this threat privately by agreeing on a coordinated strategy,” he suggested.
Johnson characterized Wray’s description of the Chinese challenge as ‘immense’ and ‘breathtaking’ as empty talk, particularly in a situation where the FBI is currently “spending more time and effort persecuting political opponents of Biden” and “behaving like the old Stasi or KGB,” than defending America against foreign adversaries.
13 November 2021, 18:28 GMT
“As a former intelligence officer, I am reflexively skeptical of claims of ‘breathtaking’ or ‘immense’ Chinese illegal activity and threats without evidence to back up those assertions,” Giraldi said. “McCallum and Wray have provided no such evidence and their bluster should be dismissed as little more than the latest political smokescreen sent up to bolster the fortunes of the foundering governments in Washington and London that seem to have lost the art of diplomacy and are instead relying on innuendo against their perceived enemies.”
“And, of course, there is the irony that this anger expressed by the UK and US will be counterproductive as it will only serve to drive China and Russia closer,” the former spy added.
Dr. Szamuely agrees, characterizing the policy hinted at with the FBI-MI5 through their joint performance as “an absolute absurdity.”
“I mean, if you want to drive a wedge between Russia and China, you would do the exact opposite. You would support one or the other, but not oppose both. You could either befriend Russia, as Trump initially intended to do in 2017, and then try to isolate China that way. Or, on the contrary, you could befriend China and turn [it] against Russia. But you can’t antagonize both and hope to separate them…And in fact, all their policies of trying to cajole China into joining sanctions against Russia have been an embarrassing failure. All they’re doing now is just continuing to antagonize China, which is only helping the Chinese to decide that the fight that Russia is waging in Ukraine is China’s fight as well,” the observer concluded.
