1,000 Spies for Every 10 From the West: Ex-Military Officer Lifts the Lid on CCP Spy Tactics
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It could be something as ordinary as a stray USB stick left in a carpark, or an innocent chat with an attractive new social media “friend,” but these seemingly benign interactions are actual tactics used by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spies.
That’s the warning from an intelligence expert who says for every 10 people employed by Western security agencies, the CCP intelligence network has about 1,000—likely because it uses members of the Chinese diaspora abroad.
Paul Johnstone first joined the Australian Defence Force (ADF) in 1985 and later the Australian Federal Police.
He made his first trip to China in 1987 and worked there training Chinese police in the early 2000s—a time when, he says, “We thought that China was going to be our friend and they were going to be more open, [a] more democratic kind of way of thinking.”
But that hasn’t come to pass, and he now describes the country as “a threat to our sovereignty, our future ... China is the greatest threat to humanity ... and this is what concerns me, that people in this country [have] got their eyes closed.”
Lost USBs and Trojan Horses
He tells of one incident when he was working as a licensed security consultant to an American pharmaceutical company with an office in Queensland, which owns patented stents used in heart surgery.While meeting with executives on the company’s security procedures, he asked if they had visited China and, if so, whether they had taken their laptops.
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When they said they did, Johnstone cautioned them that the CCP probably had at least half of their intellectual property. Nowadays, politicians visiting China or Taiwan are even told to use “burner phones” that can be disposed of after they leave the country.
Johnstone then asked whether any Chinese delegations had visited the office, and was told that several had.
He then inquired whether, after the delegations left, any USB memory sticks were found lying around on the floor of the carpark. The pharmaceutical executives, shocked, replied that indeed they had found three or four.
“If you find a USB on the ground, you pick it up, [and] you’re going to be thinking, ‘I wonder what’s on this?’” Johnstone explains.
“You‘ll put it in your computer and you’ll think, ‘This is interesting.’ But meanwhile, it’s a Trojan horse [a form of malware that installs itself onto a computer and sends data, undetected, to a third party].”
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The Harmless ‘Group Photo’ and IP Theft
The firm also had a sterile area where manufacturing took place, where photography was supposedly forbidden. But upon enquiring further, Johnstone was told that the Chinese delegation had taken photos in that room.“They said, ‘We tried to tell them not to take photos [but] they [claimed] they didn’t know the language, ’Oh, we don’t understand.'”
Of the 11 people on that delegation, at least 3 were unlikely to be employees, Johnstone estimates, but instead were from Beijing’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), the regime’s principal spy agency.
The LinkedIn ‘Honeypot’
Johnstone’s revelations come just days after MI5 warned British politicians the CCP’s intelligence services were posing as recruiters to target people who work in Parliament—just weeks after the collapse of a case against two British nationals accused of spying for Beijing.Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the U.K. House of Commons, circulated the alert to MPs and warned that Chinese state actors were “relentless” in their efforts to “interfere with our processes and influence activity at Parliament.”
He also listed two female headhunters known to use LinkedIn profiles to “conduct outreach at scale” on behalf of the CCP.
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Screen grab of Amanda Qiu's Linkedin profile as MPs have been warned by MI5 over suspected Chinese espionage via recruitment headhunters. Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle sent an espionage alert claiming the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) has been trying to contact individuals in Parliament through two recruiters named as Amanda Qiu from BR-YR Executive Search and Shirly Shen of Internship Union. Issue date: Nov. 18, 2025.
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Johnstone says there have been “a number of cases” of attempts to honeytrap people in Australia.
“Government officials have been targeted. Defence personnel have been targeted. [There have been] three or four occasions where I’ve been targeted because they knew that I had a defence background, and they probably knew I had a military intelligence background too. So they will try to recruit you where they can if you’re of benefit to them.”
That’s prompted Johnstone to warn Australians to be more circumspect about what they share online.
“These days with LinkedIn and social media, everybody spills their guts,” he says. “In the West, we have this tendency to just share information freely, openly, where in a lot of these other countries, our adversaries, they don’t share it as much.”
Johnstone revealed many some Chinese agents had poor tradecraft (espionage skills), recounting an experience in Tiananmen Square where he was followed by men wearing belts with obvious MSS logos on it.
But he noted there were some who were “very, very good, and in particular with honey traps.”
“There’s a dating site called Asian Dating ... If you [say you’ve] got a military background, or police background, or even if you put a photograph of yourself in a uniform ... I guarantee you will have a large number of very beautiful women from China and also Hong Kong, in particular [responding].
“They'll use these young, gorgeous girls from Hong Kong ... because a lot of foreigners now are aware that going to mainland China is dangerous, but [think] Hong Kong is still okay.”
Surprisingly, the aim, he says, is much broader than stealing government, military, or commercial secrets.
“They’ve tried to lure me a number of times to write papers on Australia’s opinion about, for example, the Winter Olympics in China,” Johnstone says.
Governments Engage, Locals Distrust
He says it’s time Western countries, including Australia, woke up to the threat. South-East Asian and Pacific countries, which have a more overt CCP presence, take a much less benign view, he says, despite their governments’ determination to accept Beijing’s money.“I go to Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, the Solomon [Islands]. What are the locals saying? They hate them,” Johnstone claimed.
But Australia has made the mistake of relying too much on China as its major export market, he warns.
“When you put all your eggs in one basket, like we have for too long ... They control the narrative. They control you. The [Liberal Party] Morrison government and [Peter] Dutton, they called the Chinese out. Nobody does that now. [Foreign Minister Penny] Wong doesn’t do that,” Johnstone said.
He pointed to the current government’s diplomatic position on Beijing: We'll cooperate where we can, disagree where we must, but engage in our national interest.
“They'll say it’s quiet diplomacy, which is just a cop out. They don’t want to lose that trade, because [then] the economic side of things is going to go downhill real quick. So what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to play both [sides] at the same time, which is not going to work, not when you’re dealing with the CCP.”
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