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forms information about all their foreign acquaintance, including any non-U.S. officials that the applicant knew or had relationships with in the past. They also had to list their foreign travel, family members, police encounters, mental health, and credit history. For good measure, Chinese hackers obtained the confidential medical histories of government employees by hacking into the computers of Anthem and other giant heath care companies. If the Chinese intelligence services consolidated the fruits of these hacking attacks it would have a searchable database of almost everyone working in the American defense and intelligence complex. From this database, it could track individuals with high security clearances vulnerable to being bribed, blackmailed or tricked into cooperating. No one doubted that the Chinese would use their cyber capabilities to take advantage of weaknesses in foreign computer systems. General Hayden said of the massive theft of intelligence personnel records: “those records are a legitimate foreign intelligence target.” He added, “If I, as director of the NSA or CIA would have had the opportunity to grab the equivalent in the Chinese system, I would not have thought twice.” If that opportunity did not arise for the NSA or CIA during Hayden’s tenure, it may have been because no insider in the Chinese intelligence services provided US intelligence with a road map to it.

Cyber espionage was not the Chinese Intelligence Service only powerful resource in the intelligence war. To get both electronic intelligence and human intelligence about the United States, China also had a highly-productive intelligence sharing treaty with Russia. It was signed in 1992 after the Soviet Union was dissolved. Although the terms of this exchange remain secret, defectors from the Russian KGB and SVR reported that Chinese intelligence received from Russia a continuous stream of communication intelligence about the US in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Russia’s intelligence resources during this period were formidable. They included geo-synchronous satellites, listening stations in Cuba, sleeper agents and embassy-based spy networks. Presumably, this relationship further deepened under President Putin’s regime. Putin asserted in his speeches in 2014 that Russia and China continue to share a key strategic objective: countering the United States’ domination of international relations, or what Putin terms, “a unipolar world order.” China’s President Xi Jinping expressed a very similar view, saying in 2014 in a thinly-veiled reference to the United States, stating that any American attempt to “monopolize” international affairs will not succeed.

Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has been the major supplier of almost all of China’s modern weaponry. It licenses for manufacture in China avionics, air defense systems, missile launchers, stealth technology, and submarine warfare equipment. To make these arms effective, it also provides China with up-to-date intelligence about the ability of the United States and its allies to counter them. While such intelligence cooperation may be limited by the reality that China and Russia still compete in some areas, there is no reason to assume that they do not share the fruits of their cyber and conventional espionage against the NSA. After all, the NSA works to intercept the military and political secrets of both these allies. Moreover, NSA secrets might are a form of currency in the global intelligence war.

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