Category: China

Just think these are just two spies they caught, there are likely many more that have not been detected yet:

Two former Chinese military officers have been arrested for allegedly eavesdropping on communications from fighter jets near a South Korean military base and leaking classified material related to South Korea-U.S. military exercises, police said Tuesday.

One of the suspects, a Chinese national in his 60s, was arrested on suspicions of benefiting the enemy and violating a law on the protection of communications secrets after allegedly making multiple visits to South Korea on a tourist visa and tapping communications between fighter jets and air traffic control towers from a hotel near an airport in the southwestern city of Gunsan, according to the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police. (……….)

Meanwhile, the second suspect, a 45-year-old ethnic Korean with Chinese nationality, was arrested on suspicions of benefiting the enemy and violating a law on the protection of military bases after allegedly recruiting a South Korean woman working at Camp Humphreys, a key U.S. base in Pyeongtaek, some 60 kilometers south of Seoul, to obtain classified material related to allied exercises.

The man allegedly concealed his identity while running a U.S. military supplies store near the base and engaged in the acts from November 2021 until last May as a retired PLA officer.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but this shows that even the friendly Korean guy in the Ville may actually be a Chinese intelligence agent.

There is a great article over at Small Wars Journal that explains the 12 different grey zone strategies that the Chinese Communist Party is currently using against the U.S. For those that follow this issue closely, the tactics will not be surprising, though I have to admit I wasn’t aware of the smuggling of agro-weapons to threaten the U.S. food supply with. Anyway the first tactic of algorithmic cognitive warfare should be very familiar to ROK Drop readers:

While the West treats media and influence as mere public relations, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) integrates strategic cognitive communications at a structural level. Reorganized into the PLA Information Support Force and historically anchored by the political warfare units of Base 311, these specialized operators execute what Beijing terms the “Three Warfares” (psychological, public opinion, and legal warfare). As outlined by researchers at the Project 2049 Institute in their specialized reports on PLA political warfare and the Global Taiwan Institute in their strategic briefs, these entities deploy industrial-scale digital networks, bot ecosystems, and tailored disinformation engineered to inflame Western partisan divides and paralyze political decision-making.

Small Wars Journal

I recommend reading the rest of the article at the link. However, due to the political partisanship in D.C. I don’t see how the author’s recommendations will ever get implemented outside of a major Chinese provocation forcing a whole of government and society approach in response.