CIA beefs up China focus with new mission centre

The CIA has created a new office focused on China, in a sign of the Biden administration’s growing efforts to counter what the US intelligence agency’s chief described as its “increasingly adversarial” government.

Announcing the expansion on Thursday, CIA director Bill Burns said the spy agency would be at “the forefront” of “facing our toughest geopolitical test in a new era of great power rivalry”.

“[The China mission centre] will further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government,” Burns added.

The CIA will also launch another mission centre focused on transnational issues and technology, intended to address “global issues critical to US competitiveness” such as climate change and global health.

Since he took up his post this year, Burns has overseen strategic reviews of the agency’s work, identifying China and technology among its top priorities.

The creation of the new mission centres is the latest example of the US government trying to refocus its foreign, security and intelligence-related activities towards tackling China, which President Joe Biden has stressed is the highest US priority.

The changes bring the total number of existing CIA mission centres to 12. These include working groups with a regional focus, such as those dedicated to Africa or the Near East, as well as issues such as counter-terrorism and counterproliferation.

The Biden administration is planning to fold two mission centres created under the Trump administration — dedicated to North Korea and Iran, respectively — into existing regional mission centres in the next 90 days, according to a US official.

Some intelligence experts have privately argued that the CIA and other parts of the intelligence community have not increased their China expertise quickly enough to match the rapid pace of the country’s development.

US intelligence has, for example, historically underestimated the speed of Chinese military development, sparking calls for more resources. The CIA and other parts of the intelligence community are also trying to hire more Chinese language experts, a move that has been hampered by growing difficulty in obtaining security clearances for Americans who have spent significant time living in China.

Burns said in July he wanted to recruit more Mandarin speakers and cyber experts. “[O]ur ability to compete with China . . . depends a lot on having officers working with diplomats who can navigate these societies and, you know, develop and exercise influence better than the Chinese can,” he told NPR.

The focus on China comes as fewer intelligence analysts and operatives are needed to work on Middle East issues, particularly following the recent US withdrawal from Afghanistan. China has also become a bigger priority than counter-terrorism, to which the CIA and other security agencies devoted a huge amount of resources in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks two decades ago.

The CIA is also trying to repair some of the damage done in recent years after Beijing managed to obtain the identity of a number of spies that had been recruited by US intelligence inside mainland China.