As after-action reporting from President Donald Trump’s two-day whirlwind visit to the People’s Republic of China continues, one of the lesser-noticed details was what the US delegation had to leave behind on the tarmac in Beijing. Photos and video showed protocol gifts and every item acquired during the visit piled next to Air Force One before takeoff. The reason, according to current and former intelligence officials, is that the Chinese are known to embed tracking devices and microphones in gifts, lapel pins, and credential badges given to foreign officials.
The China Summit Aftermath: You Can’t Keep the Gifts
As the after-action reporting from US President Donald Trump’s two-day whirlwind visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) piles up, one of the lesser-noticed news items is what the US delegation and others traveling on Air Force One were required to leave behind on the tarmac in Beijing. Stills and video of protocol gifts and every other single item acquired while in the PRC piled up next to the presidential aircraft have generated some commentary along the lines of “doesn’t binning all those ceremonial gifts somehow offend the Chinese? Was that a good idea?
The answer is that the US side has the right to be offended. The Chinese are infamous for using almost any kind of item that they hand over to you as a method of tracking and spying on those they have “gifted” them to.
As one long-time PRC analyst told me, “if the Chinese knew that some American politician who was visiting Beijing was a believer in the practice of baby-kissing, they would always park a pram with a small child in it close to that official. And they would make sure the baby and the mother were both trained in how to slip some small tracking device and microphone into his pocket.”
According to one reporter who was in the White House press pool, “before boarding Air Force One, White House staffers and reporters had to surrender various items collected during the trip, including staff burner phones, credential badges, and lapel pins issued by China. Those traveling on Air Force One threw those objects in a bin at the bottom of the plane’s stairs.”
In the security and intelligence world, this is called “electronic hygiene.” You make sure that you are not taking anything on a US Government aircraft that can give the Chinese a wedge into your secure spaces because once they are inside, it is next to impossible to get them out,” said a retired intelligence officer from another NATO member state.
“We tried to get our security people to adopt the same procedure on our government aircraft that visited the PRC, but were unable to force the other agencies and departments involved to comply,” he said. “Most of those affected have regretted not taking that step ever since.”
Dump the China Gifts: Long Time Practice
These practices would surprise no one who has ever been in the press pool on any US Government mission to a nation that has what could be rated as a hostile intelligence service. Leaving anything that could be a listening or tracking device behind is the time-honored practice.
Back in 2018, Bill Gertz of The Washington Times was in the press pool for an official visit by then US Defense Secretary James Mattis. In a column written after his return, he described the procedures and restrictions that everyone on board the aircraft was required to follow.
Mattis and the ten journalists in the press pool were traveling aboard a US Air Force (USAF) E-4B nuclear command plane. This is a militarized and hardened version of the Boeing 747 commercial airliner.
Per established procedure, he and the other journalists were prohibited from bringing anything on board that had been gifted to them in the PRC. But they were also forbidden from carrying any electronic devices (i.e., mobile phones, laptops, iPads) back onto the aircraft that had been taken off the aircraft when they arrived in Beijing.
“If you have been in the PRC carry any of those kinds of devices – particularly if you have connected to the internet while you were there – your mobile, laptop, whatever, is now a Chinese spy machine,” said the same intelligence officer.
As Gertz described, “the E-4B is one of the most sensitive aircraft in USAF inventory.” Referred to sometimes as the “Doomsday Plane,” they are critical platforms for nuclear command and control systems used by the military and civilian authorities to communicate during any nuclear crisis or conflict. Almost all that functionality is therefore mirrored on board Air Force One and any compromising of those systems on the presidential aircraft would be equally catastrophic.
Level of Effort
As Gertz pointed out at the time, the Chinese spare no effort or expense in trying to compromise anyone or any system connected to the US Government. “Chinese intelligence and security organs employ up to 15,000 electronic spies to spy on foreigners in China,” he wrote at the time.
“High-profile visits by foreign officials like Mr. Mattis are high-priority intelligence targets for the Chinese, who, in addition to electronic spying, also engage in large-scale human surveillance.” This presence is everywhere in the PRC, particularly in the capital, Beijing.
For example, all around the edge of Tiananmen Square, you will see these fold-up small stands where the “merchants” are selling postcards, refrigerator magnets, key chains, etc. If you have ever bought anything from any of them, congratulations – you have met a member of the secret police.
At the time of Gertz’s article, the White House issued a report on the size and operations of the PRC Ministry of State Security (MSS). At the time, the MSS employed an estimated 40,000 intelligence officers in overseas postings and more than 50,000 secret police spies within the PRC.
That 90,000-strong MSS spying force is then multiplied in its effectiveness by “tens of thousands” of Chinese military intelligence officers, according to the same report. A special Pentagon organization that was relatively new at the time, the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), also concluded in 2018 that “the scale of the [Chinese economic] espionage continues to increase.”
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two consecutive awards for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
