Back To The Future | Why China and the US will continue to squander money on spying

Few human endeavours have such a hold on the public imagination as spycraft. The sheer volume of espionage films and television dramas flowing out of Hollywood every year attests to that. 

The arrest of Jerry Chun Shing Lee – a former CIA officer accused of selling information to Beijing – understandably aroused wild excitement and speculation. Lee was said to have betrayed the CIA’s methods of communication to the Chinese government. Armed with the knowledge, Beijing allegedly killed or jailed some 20 informants working for the American spy agency in China, severely crippling its operation.

Before the mist around Lee’s cloak-and-dagger double life could clear, the world was hit by another sensational story. This time The  Wall Street Journal alleged none other than Wendi Deng Murdoch – the ex-wife of its owner – was a Chinese agent. Quoting unnamed sources, the Journal reported that US counter-intelligence officials in early 2017 “warned Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, that Wendi Deng Murdoch, a prominent Chinese-American businesswoman, could be using her close friendship with Mr Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, to further the interests of the Chinese government”.

Dear China, I am a white guy and not a spy

The intrigue apparently involves building a US$100 million Chinese garden at the National Arboretum in Washington. According to the Journal, this could become a security risk “because it included a 70ft-tall white tower that could potentially be used for surveillance”. The garden is about 5 miles (8km) from the Capitol and the White House.

How much of this is B-movie melodrama is hard to tell. But dramatic as such stories sound, they are just small anecdotes in a long history of espionage and counter-espionage between two major powers. In the grand scheme of things, they hardly matter.