Is espionage on the rise?

There’ve always been spies among us. That college friend who says they work at State but never posted their Flag Day snaps to LinkedIn? Suspicious. Or the neighbour who’s really curious about what you do in that embassy all day? Interesting. 

Whether it’s King Zimri-Lin’s vast Mesopotamia spying network 3,800 years ago, or ✌️consultants✌️ pinging us on LinkedIn with too-good-to-be-true jobs today, espionage always makes for blockbuster material, and it’s been a busy week, starting with…

1. How they recruit

The classic framework for why folks turn is ‘MICE’: money, ideology, coercion, and/or ego.

For a money example, look no further than Germany, where it turns out the Kremlin only had to pay a few useful idiots €100 per vehicle to blow up 270+ exhaust pipes and make it look like the work of a hawkish party Moscow didn’t like, all while polarising Germany.

For ideology (with a bit of money and ego), look at what the CIA just did this week, dropping its latest Mandarin-language YouTube video titled “Save the Future”.

Aimed at disillusioned officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) amid President Xi’s sweeping purges, it frames cooperation with the CIA not as a betrayal, but a way to “take control of your own destiny” and protect your family from a corrupt system.

The curious thing about this campaign is how it’s almost the inverse of the CIA’s earlier big PLA drive when it plied ambitious officers with cash to help bribe their way up — rather than hunker down from — a corrupt system.

Will it work this time? CIA boss John Ratcliffe argued similar ads worked last year, but he’s going to declare success either way: the mere existence of an ad and victory lap is already enough to pour gasoline on Xi’s flaming paranoia, helping rattle China’s elites.

But while you can see how Xi’s aggressive purges might leave insiders more open to a CIA off-ramp, you can also see how the CIA’s last China ending (CIA sources getting rounded up and shot) would leave any insider locked shut. And yet… if you’re worried your own paranoid boss might purge you anyway, maybe you take another look at that off-ramp?

2. What they want

Estonia just dropped its annual intelligence report, offering a perfect example of how spooks prioritise: it dedicates five of its seven chapters to Russia! And that makes sense when you recall Russia has attacked Estonia multiple times.

It also explains why Estonia’s intel has long had cult followings across the West: eg, Estonia’s legendary Russia analyst (and current ambassador to Israel) Andres Vosman just went viral with insights on the Kremlin, whether obsessively monitoring its own people, dreading the fallout from returning veterans, or deepening its own dependence on China.

The Estonian report also highlights that, yes, friends spy on friends! It gives the example of North Korean operatives actively gathering info across Russia and China, the regime’s closest (only?) partners. Why? The target cities (China’s Dalian and Shenyang, Russia’s Blagoveshchensk) are just over the border, suggesting a focus on:

• a) managing and exploiting DPRK’s own worker diaspora, and
• b) stealing nearby defence tech (the DPRK has science & tech ✌️attachés✌️ there).

Btw, speaking of stealing defence tech, Google just released a grim report on how state-backed hackers are now targeting employees right across Western defence supply chains.

3. When they get caught

As of this week, a 54-year-old squadron leader in the Greek air force is now in detention for allegedly leaking NATO secrets to China. Seems his handlers first pinged him on LinkedIn with a consulting opportunity, then met him in-person near a NATO summit.

The military bigwig then made an undeclared trip to China in 2024, where Beijing’s MSS seems to have sprung the trap — maybe of the honey variety, though it could just as easily be the mere threat of publishing pics of him secretly meeting MSS operatives.

Either way, he allegedly caved, did some training on how to send classified docs via an encrypted device, and started earning €5,000–15,000 per leak via a debit card linked to a Hong Kong-based payments provider. Greek intelligence seemingly got a CIA tip-off, and has made a surprising amount of detail public here, as has Paris this week in charging…

• four guys for using a satellite dish at an Airbnb to intercept secrets for China, and
• another for wearing video-recording glasses on a fighter jet assembly line in Cergy!

There’s sometimes leverage in managing these cases quietly, but all the publicity here suggests Western capitals are signalling for a) locals not to be stupid, and b) rivals to know there’ll be increasingly steep costs ahead.

Intrigue’s Take

We’ve barely scratched the surface of a single week here, dear Intriguer. We could’ve added Australian intelligence recruiting a foreign imam to infiltrate extremists in Sydney, or the Turks arresting two alleged spies for Israel, or the American who just got three years for trying to leak info to China from a base in Germany, or even the Canberra bakery assistant facing charges she was helping China’s communist party track a local diaspora.

But the point is it’s everywhere. And former French intel operative ‘Jack Beaumont’ once described to us what it’s like to have your eyes opened to that fact: it’s like how after going scuba diving for the first time, you can never un-see what’s beneath the waves.

Anyway, it’s only going to get more pervasive as our world gets more spooked. And while we all tell ourselves we’d never betray our country, anyone working in a sensitive area should remember there are entire teams out there with legit tech, tradecraft, and tenacity, whose literal only job is to test that assumption in every possible way.