Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Chinese Defector Reveals Beijing’s Secrets

U.S. intelligence is debriefing brother of former presidential aide, translating documents

3 comments:

Chiu ChunLing said...

"The defection was triggered by the arrest of Ling’s brother, Ling Jihua, a former presidential aide who secretly obtained some 2,700 internal documents from a special Communist Party unit he headed until 2012. The unit was in charge of storing and archiving classified documents.

"Ling Jihua then gave the documents to his brother, who owns a $2.5 million residence in Loomis, California, near Sacramento. The classified documents were transferred between the brothers as a safety measure: They were intended to be used as leverage to dissuade Chinese authorities from taking action against Ling Jihua.

"According to the officials, Ling Wancheng, the defector, kept the documents for safekeeping and was directed to release them to U.S. authorities in the event Ling Jihua were arrested."

Something about this story strikes me as a little off. The scheme seems to be something that couldn't possibly work in favor of Ling Jihua or his brother, rather than just make the CCP really mad instead of only a little bit peeved with some lesser misconduct. I'm not saying it would be impossible for someone to be stupid enough to think this scheme would work, but I suspect it's unlikely. The biggest problem is how to actually use the document horde as leverage and survive, rather than either keeping it completely secret or immediately running to the CIA with it at the first sign of trouble. There's no apparent room in this plan for letting the CCP know you have it and giving them a chance to back off before you seek protection, since that would certainly result in being tortured to death for the documents' location.

And there are ways to do that using pre-distributed encrypted documents, as Snowden did. Again, could just be that the Lings are dumb-ass yokels who don't know any better...but I wouldn't bet on it.

Paul said...

Good thing clinton is no longer Secty of State or the chinese would know what we do.

Unknown said...

Remember, government is lying until proven otherwise.
Every letter and punctuation mark is place there to support the government's goal.