Black. Bloated. Ominous. A bevy of Chinese-built sports utility vehicles driving among the US Presidential motorcade has highlighted a secret struggle between the two nations.
“They’re talking about the spying,” President Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way back from Beijing. “Well, we do it too. We spy like hell on them, too.”
A sleek, armoured limousine is passe in the world of geopolitical fashion.
Modern world leaders must accessorise.
An entourage of black-suited beefcake with mirrored glasses and shoulder-holsters is old hat.
All the cool autocrats roll with sensor turrets, anti-drone microwave pulse weapons, GPS jammers – and beyond-top-secret encrypted communications.
Not to mention your own listening devices.
President Donald Trump’s enormous Beijing motorcade was a case in point.
All purred through the evacuated streets of China’s capital with blinking red-and-blue lights peeking out through shiny silver grills.
Some SUVs had strange (but stylishly sleek) black containers loaded on roof racks.
But a few caught extra attention with their big, black roof extensions.
It’s anyone’s guess what they contained.
Emergency medical equipment. Protective shelters. Heavy weaponry. Electronic warfare devices.
But that’s where the mystery starts.
They were built by the Chinese company Hongji.
It markets itself as a camper-trailer manufacturer
And according to The War Zone blog, the US Secret Service says it was not the operator of these heavily laden vehicles. Nor would it say if they belonged to the Chinese Government or another US agency.
Several of the previously unseen vehicles took station in President Trump’s motorcades to tour Chairman Xi Jinping’s new Forbidden City (elite Communist Party leadership compound), and travel to and from Beijing airport.
But their present hints at an underlying electronic battle to eavesdrop (and block) one another’s communications during the high-stakes summit.
And it was clearly a subject front and centre on President Trump’s mind.
Shadow war
“He talked about attacks that we did in China,” President Trump said of his conversations with Chairman Xi.
“Y’know, what they do, we do too.”
The Presidential motorcade probably didn’t have enough battery power to launch a full-scale cyberattack. Instead, it most likely projected an electronic and digital shield to blind prying eyes, deafen listening ears and confuse robotic infiltrators.
But the invisible international battle of coders, AI filters – and even good-old-fashioned meatbag spies – was no doubt waging around them, unabated.
Beijing has a reputation for covert cyberattacks.
In 2019, the Signals Directorate (ASD) concluded that China was behind a cyberattack on Parliament House in Canberra and on the nation’s three largest political parties.
It’s also accused of being behind the cyberattack group Volt Typhoon, which is constantly attempting to sabotage national infrastructure – such as power grids, water supply and traffic networks. Others seek to break into university, government and corporate systems to steal their research.
But not everything is AI, or even electronic.
Mind games reign supreme.
Information is power. Accessing that information is part of the modern game of thrones.
But so is distorting it.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe last year launched an unusually public effort to recruit Chinese officials as spies. The video campaign was “aimed at recruiting Chinese officials to steal secrets,” Director Ratcliffe said.
He added China was “intent on dominating the world economically, militarily, and technologically.”
But the campaign was launched amid one of Chairman Xi’s many purges of his Chinese military leadership. Chief among the accusations were corruption – and foreign espionage.
It was more likely to stoke paranoia and fear than ever open up new lines of communication.
“Our agency must continue responding to this threat with urgency, creativity, and grit, and these videos are just one of the ways we are doing this,” Ratcliffe said.
Of hearts and minds
Did President Trump take a naughty peek at Chairman Xi’s notes?
The claim went viral on social media last week, all based on a single short video clip.
The two leaders are sitting next to each other at a banquet table.
Chairman Xi stands up, and steps away.
Trump leans over and opens a dark-covered folder for a quick glance inside.
It looks damning.
Then you find other perspectives on the same move.
It’s his own folder. It’s even boldly emblazoned with the Presidential crest of the United States.
But don’t let truth get in the way of a good piece of slander!
And that’s the insidious nature of propaganda in the social-media age.
Especially as President Trump is already embroiled in allegations of illegally spying on his own citizens and closest allies.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are getting facial-recognition smart glasses to identify suspects on the streets, in stores, and on public transport. Elon Musk’s defunct Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) gained access to a treasure trove of personal citizen information across a swathe of Federal departments.
And Denmark is outraged over a clumsy effort last year to infiltrate Greenland’s 56,000 population with secret agents.
“[This] worries me a lot because we don’t spy among friends,” Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said. “It is worrying if they have the approach that they must now obtain intelligence in Denmark and Greenland, obviously with the aim of finding a way to drive a wedge.”
The act itself has provided a credibility gap for foreign influencers to leverage.
But, to President Trump, espionage is all part of the game.
And he’s confident he holds the trump card.
“I told him [Xi]: ‘We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about and you’re doing things to us that we probably do know about.’”
