China, Iran, and North Korea are the target of a fresh recruitment effort by the US Central Intelligence Agency seeking informants.
On Wednesday, the organization posted messages in Mandarin, Farsi, and Korean on social media, providing consumers with secure contact information. This most recent attempt comes after an enlistment drive for Russians following the CIA-deemed successful invasion of Ukraine.
A CIA spokesman stated in a statement, “We want to make sure individuals in other authoritarian regimes know that we’re open for business.”
The recruitment letters requested people’s names, locations, and contact information. They were posted on the dark web and on social media sites like X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Telegram, and LinkedIn.
Users were instructed to use trustworthy encrypted Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or the Tor network, an anonymous web browser that is frequently used to reach the dark web, to contact the CIA via its official website. The instructions were quite detailed.
“I can’t remember any sort of recruitment effort like this, using YouTube or social media in this way, at least in Korean. It seems like they’re basing this off the success they had in Russia – but I would question how effective this will be considering most North Koreans don’t have access to the internet,” said Mason Richey, associate professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul.
According to Professor Richey, the US might be pursuing North Korean dealers who shadily cross the border into China in order to gain access to VPN networks.
Given the stringent surveillance measures that three countries use to quell dissent, US intelligence views North Korea, Iran, and China as “hard targets” when it comes to collecting intelligence.
“This effort represents just one way in which CIA is adapting to a new global environment of increased state repression and global surveillance,” the spy agency’s statement continued.
However, Professor Richey cast doubt on the usefulness of any intelligence that the effort could obtain. “I suppose you have to assume the CIA knows what it’s doing, but you do wonder how many of these discontented people are close enough to power and close enough to the places where important decisions are made,” he said.
“It does, at the very least though, throw some sand in the gears of these counter-intelligence operations,” he added.
