A U.S. journalist told a Chinese Communist Party agent that there was a “former intelligence chief” named Krustofsky (an animated clown), and she believed him.
A U.S. journalist revealed that someone claiming to be from a high-level Communist Party think tank was willing to pay her a lot of money for “information on sources” or “reports on the Biden administration’s policy toward China. She said that the way the Communist Party agents are probing is “astonishingly clumsy and suggests that Beijing increasingly does not understand the U.S. government in the midst of a chilly U.S.-China relationship and a global epidemic.
On Dec. 22, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, a reporter for the online website Axios, revealed that she had been sent a friend request a few weeks ago by a man named Aaron Shen, “who I saw claiming to be the international director of the ‘China Center for Contemporary World Studies’ (CCCWS). ‘ (CCCWS) when I saw that he claimed to be the assistant director of international liaison for the CCCWS, and accepted his request.” The CCCWS is the internal think tank of the “International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China” (IDCPC).
The IDCPC is the “foreign affairs department” of the CCP, and Gady Epstein, China editor of The Economist, recently wrote that the IDCPC’s job is to “win support for the CCP among foreign parties. support” among foreign parties. “As a Communist Party agency, it has considerable authority, and the department works closely with the Communist Foreign Ministry and exchanges insiders with it.”
Beshu Ying recalls, “I started talking to Aaron Shen, both of us having attended Peking University in 2008, and he said he was from Hubei Province, and I told him my hometown was Texas.”
But then, something strange happened.
This Aaron Shen started asking Bei Shuying how to collect “first-hand information” during the outbreak, “and [we were] very confused because of the lack of channels and resources to collect first-hand information.” He said they gave a lot of weight to “authoritative” “sources of information” that might “reflect the real situation and trends in U.S.-China relations.
Aaron Shen then asked Bei to switch to the encrypted Signal software for the call, writing, “If (the source) provides information that truly reflects the reality of the situation and meets our needs, then there is no doubt that (we) will pay generously.”
Aaron Shen also revealed that the information they wanted was about “policies and considerations regarding sanctions against individuals or entities in China, long-arm jurisdiction, or U.S. pressure on allies.
Besuying made up a fake name off the top of his head, “I told him I was about to meet with ‘former intelligence director’ Krustofsky.” The name came from Krusty the Clown from the cartoon “The Simpsons.
He didn’t seem to get it, and continued to send messages asking, “How was your meeting with Krustofsky? Was there anything interesting?”
Beshuying then sent letters to Aaron Shen’s email and LinkedIn inbox asking him who he was and what he was up to, and asking for comment on his behavior, after which Aaron Shen deleted his LinkedIn account.
According to Shuying Bei, this appears to be some sort of attempt by the Chinese Communist Party to gather information about U.S. policy toward China, and Aaron Shen may also be a member of a Chinese Communist Party intelligence agency, only working under the false name IDCPC.
Nadège Rolland, a senior fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, said such snooping by CCP agents is “surprising” and even “shameless. He commented that the deterioration of U.S.-China relations and travel restrictions during the pandemic have left the Chinese Communist Party confused about Washington’s true policies. And their tactics were so dumb that “from the outside, the party-state looks like it’s working professionally, but it probably isn’t.
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