Don't know if this is the same Spytalk website but interesting none the less.
Chinese Defector Mystery Deepens Beijing’s sketchy report of Dong Jingwei’s appearance at a spy-catcher seminar only adds suspicion that top counterintelligence official fled to U.S.
Matthew Brazil and Jeff Stein
22 hr ago
Where is Dong Jingwei? Widespread rumors that China's top counterintelligence official had defected to the United States last February reached a fever pitch over the weekend, propelled largely by unfounded reports in anticommunist and pro-Trump circles that Dong had brought with him evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic had originated in a leak from a virology lab in Wuhan, not from an animal source.
The Wuhan lab leak theory has not been proven. The vast majority of researchers believes the virus leapt from an infected animal to a person, probably via Wuhan’s “wet market,” where both live and butchered meat is sold, but definitive evidence has yet to be found. The controversy has been further exacerbated by Chinese secrecy, which has aided the campaign by pro-Taiwan and Donald Trump allies to deflect blame for the spread of the pandemic away from the former president and onto Beijing.
The magnitude of the rumors about the supposed flight of Dong, 57, the number two official in the Ministry of State Security, along with his daughter Dong Yang, from Hong Kong five months ago appears to have rattled Beijing. Within 24 hours of SpyTalk’s June 17 story on the billowing controversy, China’s officially sanctioned media reported that Dong had appeared at a MSS seminar on the mainland where he “urged the country’s intelligence officers” to crack down on enemy spies, according to an account in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. But the reports did not say where the seminar took place, nor did they include photos or video of Dong’s supposed appearance, further raising suspicions about his status.
China is loathe to admit an official’s defection. “The CCP has never admitted any defection of its MSS officers,” Dr. Han Lianchao, a former Chinese foreign ministry official who defected after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, told SpyTalk in an email on Monday. “For example, Yu Qiangsheng, who was a department-level MSS official…defected to the U.S. in 1985, but China never admitted his defection, even today.” Yu’s defection led to the FBI’s arrest of Larry Wu-tai Chin, a longtime Chinese mole in the CIA. Beijing denied any knowledge of Chin and called reports of him being their mole ”fabricated by American anti-China forces,” Han said.
Dong “was last seen in public in September 2020,” Han told SpyTalk last week. Dong’s photos have been deleted by the Chinese search engine Baidu, according to some Chinese-language news reports abroad.
The absence of any photos of Dong at the supposed June 18 seminar is doubly suspicious, Han said, because Beijing has not been shy about publicizing his public meetings before. In 2018, party officials posted a photo of him in Germany, along with his boss Chen Yixin, attending a high level Sino-German security meeting. “Therefore there’s no excuse for not posting a recent photo of Dong to refute the rumor,” Han said.
In a June 16 tweet, Han, citing an unnamed source, alleged that China’s foreign minister Wang Yi and Communist Party foreign affairs boss Yang Jiechi demanded that the Americans return Dong. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken refused, Han alleged.
“My tweet about Dong Jingwei came from a source from China,” Han told SpyTalk on Monday, “and I used it to make a point that rumors are flying all over China today because the CCP’s digital dictatorship has totally stopped the free flow of information.”
Former Pentagon, State Department and CIA China expert Nicholas Eftimiades says it’s telling that “Beijing has made no flat denial and hasn't produced Dong publicly. So there is no clear indication of what's happening.” But he disputed Han’s account of Chinese censorship on the matter. “Chinese social media shows no sign of being scrubbed of comments about Dong,” he said. “It's full of comments about this situation.” Which leads him to suspect that reports of Dong’s defection may be false.
“If Dong really did defect, the CCP would squelch public discussion,” Eftimiades told SpyTalk. While its report of Dong attending the June 18 spy-catchers’ conference “doesn't seem to ring true,” he added, there’s also “no sign of face-saving”—producing him in public—”in anticipation of the [party’s] 1 July CCP centenary."
The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 and took power in 1949 after a century of civil wars and foreign occupation, including the Japanese conquest that began in the 1930s and ended only with Tokyo’s surrender to the U.S. in 1945.
Beijing has not officially knocked down the rumors, and Washington is remaining mum, as is customary in defector cases.
f the defection of Dong—a rough equivalent of the FBI’s deputy director—is real, shock waves would be felt in every corner of the Ministry of State Security, added Eftimiades, author of Chinese Espionage: Operations and Tactics.
"The Chinese side is likely taking normal damage control action, such as pulling officers and agents out of places they shouldn't be and assessing what harm is done should Dong tell the American all he knows,” Eftimiades said. “But his access was probably limited to counterintelligence matters and didn't include a wider range of secrets.
“But Beijing might have a much bigger problem on its hands,” he added. “Did Dong just decide to defect, or has he been an intelligence asset for some period of time?" U.S. officials rarely confirm the reported defection of Chinese or other adversary officials, and for good reason.
Grim Fate of Traitors China’s modern history is full of examples of traitors being brought to account by assassination, particularly during the revolution that triumphed in 1949. Today, a minor book and film industry in China celebrates such revolutionary justice, and unofficial outlets such as "Iron and Blood," a military-oriented website, occasionally boast of the successful assassinations of defectors. One site posted a colorful screed about the supposed revenge mission against Yu Qiangsheng, whose defection to America led to the 1985 arrest of Larry Wu-tai Chin. A lower key Chinese account claimed that Yu was tracked down in South America two years after his defection, by a hit team of five MSS agents, who drowned him in the ocean. That account claimed that the mission commander was promoted afterward to an important position.
In 2015, the Obama Administration warned China in August 2015 to cease their covert operations to track down another defector, Ling Wanzheng, who had sheltered in the U.S. China’s erstwhile communist ally Russia is notorious for tracking down and assassinating defectors.
A Western former intelligence official who served several tours in China told SpyTalk that previous major defections have caused earthquakes within the leadership and party apparatus, to include the downfall of senior communist officials. The last such incident was the attempted defection in 2012 of Wang Lijun (王立军), then head of the Public Security Bureau in Chongqing, China's largest city. In that mysterious episode, Wang spent 30 hours at the U.S. consulate in Chengdu detailing widespread Chinese corruption, but was refused asylum. Wang was “never heard from again,” a former official whose responsibilities were focused on Chinese espionage, told SpyTalk. The same official said that in a previous failed defection—he was unwilling to be more specific—Beijing’s “reaction was pretty severe, both against MSS cadre (several executed) and against us.”
In 2017, the New York Times reported that China’s security forces “systematically dismantled CIA spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.” The nongovernmental organization Human Rights in China wrote that Wang's defection attempt "was nothing short of a big bomb that sent shock waves through the Beijing political circles. The person who took a direct hit,” it said, was “Wang’s former boss, Bo Xilai (薄熙来), the party secretary of Chongqing and aspirant for a seat in the Politburo’s nine-member Standing Committee."
Bo Xilai is now in prison, and his rival, Xi Jinping, runs China.The former Western official further remarked that Xi Jinping himself could be at risk if Dong’s rumored defection turned out to be true. As a result of his so-called anti-corruption campaign and other moves to eliminate rivals, Xi “has developed powerful enemies inside the party,” in spite of his popularity among ordinary people.
Gordon G. Chang, a conservative Chinese American author and columnist who’s been predicting the collapse of the CCP for 20 years, told the pro-Trump NewsMax site on Saturday that Dong’s defection, if true, could "even lead to the fall of the Communist Party."
U.S.-China spy wars, normally rather low key and esoteric affairs, have turned radioactive, energized by the crosswinds of each side’s internal politics and intensifying global competition. It’s not likely that the l’affair Dong Jingwei will go away soon.
Imagine “the humiliation” for China “if he suddenly pops up in the American media,” said Eftimiades. “They may be gambling the U.S. won't allow him to go public, but it would be quite a humiliation for them if he did. And the likelihood is that, if the U.S. does have him, that information will eventually leak and become public.”
SpyTalk Conributing Editor Matthew Brazil is the co-author, with Peter Mattis, of Chinese Communist Espionage, An Intelligence Primer. SpyTalk Editor-in-Chief Jeff Stein earned an M.A. in China Studies from the University of California at Berkeley.
ThankQs for the link and article !
Found in an email I got:
“UPDATE on Chinese defector, and some intriguing context
By Mike Huckabee
Gordon Chang, expert on China and author of THE GREAT U.S. - CHINA TECH WAR, appeared on TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT Monday to speak further on the likelihood that Dong Jingwei, the 57-year-old head of counterintelligence for the Chinese Ministry of State Security, had flown from Hong Kong to California on February 10 and defected to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, bringing with him a treasure trove of secret information.
Chang reiterated that he thinks the story is true.
China is denying that this happened, of course, and both BEIJING DAILY and the Hong Kong publication SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST have reported that Dong is in China doing whatever spooky things he normally does in the land of Chinese spooks, such as giving presentations at spy-catcher seminars.
Chang does not believe their reports, as “China has every reason in the world to parade this guy in front of the cameras. That would squelch all sorts of rumors that are damaging to the regime. Now, China hasn’t done that, and that to me says that we have him, and that he, in fact, defected.”
RELATED READING: Info from Chinese defector might change the course of history
Incidentally, the SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST story makes reference to the “new anti-espionage regulation released in April” that applies to “not only Chinese government departments, but also social groups and businesses, supplemented with lists of Chinese entities that are assigned counter-espionage responsibilities.” This onerous new law has received very little press in the United States, so I’m taking the opportunity here to describe it. Under this law, once entities been designated by the government, they’re required to watch for and prevent foreign espionage activity. They must “vet and train personnel, particularly ahead of foreign trips, after which they must be debriefed about any national security issues.” This law treats even universities and private businesses as if they’re “sensitive government agencies.”
More on this soon, but for now, back to the Chang interview. Tucker brought up the fact that the media are suddenly changing their tune on the origin of the virus, as if they knew...somehow...they could no longer get away with spouting their original fairy tale about bat soup. And Chang noted what seems to be a similar shift of opinion among officials of the Biden administration. This story out of Australia mentions that same shift as evidence that the defection probably happened.
Chang said this could be due to any of a number of things, perhaps political pressure, but he thinks it’s because they now have evidence of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Even more important is the information that the Chinese military was working with that lab as part of its bioweapons program.
As for China intentionally releasing the virus, Chang believes this scenario is possible but unlikely, given that they didn’t yet have a vaccine. He thinks it was a mistake, and that China “wasn’t able to contain it.” On the other hand, he noted that while foreigners typically believe the leak was accidental, Chinese nationals are more likely to think it was released on purpose. They know their government all too well.
We came across another report from that same Australian news outlet that provides a lot of context for this alleged defection. It says that no “convincing” photo of Dong has been released since last September, and the one that’s purported to be him isn’t persuading anyone. This story also includes some intriguing background on Dong’s daughter.
All we’d seen in the press about Dong Yang was that she’d been studying at a California university, but now there’s more: She’s reportedly the ex-wife of Alibaba executive Jiang Fan. Alibaba, an international tech firm, has been in the crosshairs of the CCP in recent months. The company is being scrutinized for alleged “antitrust” and “corruption” issues. Jack Ma, Alibaba’s CEO, “disappeared” for several weeks earlier this year.
Since that time, Ma has reportedly “embraced supervision.” (Ah, there’s a euphemism for you.) And he rarely appears in public or makes public statements. The CCP appears to be cracking down in general on billionaires and academics. Interesting case in point: at the same time we were hearing denials of a nuclear accident of some kind at the China Taishan power plant, one of its leading nuclear scientists, Vice President of Harbin Engineering University Zhang Zhijian, reportedly “fell” from his building. No details were given.
Another billionaire, the chairman of a Chinese high-tech firm, got in hot water and was ordered to “keep a low profile” after publishing a historic poem as part of a media campaign. This poem was critical of an ancient emperor. In China, criticism of emperors is banned on social media, as it could be interpreted as criticism of their current leader-for-life, Xi Jinping.
(Wow, you thought censorship on American social media was bad! On the other hand, this story gives us a peek at just how bad it can get, and almost certainly WILL get if we don’t weaken the power of Big Tech.)
Another billionaire, this one in agriculture, lost control of his business after being arrested over a minor property dispute. He’s since been charged with “seeking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
So our speculation is that this kind of crackdown by the CCP might have had some impact on Dong’s daughter, considering her ties, and might even have something to do with the defection. Just a hypothesis. We’ll see if anyone else makes this connection.
I’ll leave you with the words being (falsely?) attributed to Dong from that seminar, as they relate to the way China is cracking down on business moguls and, ironically, might even describe what Dong himself has done by defecting: “In particular, some individuals are willing to be ‘internal traitors,’ secretly colluding with foreign spies and intelligence agencies and hostile forces to engage in anti-China activities. Individuals ‘act behind the scenes’ and send funds to hostile forces through illegal channels to support anti-China activities. These ‘traitors’ and behind-the-scenes gold masters’ have severely endangered the country’s political security. They will eventually be nailed to the pillar of shame in history.”
Translation: we need to keep this man, and his daughter, safe.
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In that connection (remember her driver)
https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/dianne-feinstein-tahoe-compound-for-sale/