THIS IS HUGE!!!!!!

Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz this week with rumors that a vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei (董经纬) defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.

Dong Jingwei supposedly gave the U.S. information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology that changed the stance of the Biden Administration concerning the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Spy Catcher

Dong is, or was, a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), also known as the Guoanbu. His publicly available background indicates that he was responsible for the Ministry’s counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018. If the stories are true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

Dong’s defection was raised by Chinese officials last March at the Sino-American summit in Alaska, according to Dr. Han Lianchao, a former Chinese foreign ministry official who defected after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In a tweet on Wednesday, 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 and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken refused.

Former Pentagon, State Department and CIA expert Nicholas Eftimiades, author of Chinese Espionage: Operations and Tactics, called the report “exactly what it is, a rumor. It happens all the time” in the information warfare between Beijing and anti-communist overseas Chinese. But he called Dr. Han, a pro-democracy activist with the Washington, D.C.-based Citizen Power Initiative for China group, “a straight shooter, not known to exaggerate in any way or form...trusted for his integrity.”

Mollie Saltskog, a senior intelligence analyst with The Soufan Group, who earned a master’s degree in global affairs from Tsinghua University in Beijing, also urged caution, saying unconfirmed reports of defections surface regularly. And more: “While significant and certainly useful for our intelligence efforts,” she added, “one high-level defection will not drastically change our understanding or approach to China. In short, if true, this is potentially significant but not a game-changer.”

The U.S.-China spy war has intensified in recent years. Last year former CIA officer Alexander Yuk Ching Ma was charged with espionage on Beijing’s behalf. In 2020, another former CIA officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, was sentenced to 19 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to give classified information to China. The year before, another former CIA.............