Form A Special Unit To Face Security Challenges From Beijing, CIA Director Calls Threats From The Chinese Government

Direktur CIA William Burns. (Wikimedia Commons/East Asia and Pacific Media Hub U.S. Department of State)

JAKARTA - The United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) announced the creation of a new unit focused on China, and the national security challenges it poses, as the most important threat facing Thursday local time.

The China Mission Center (CMC) was set up to address the global challenges posed by the People's Republic of China across all mission areas of the Agency, the CIA said in a statement.

CIA Director William Burns stressed that the threat came from the Chinese government, not the people, that the aim was to unify the work of spy agencies in China.

"The CMC will further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, the increasingly hostile Chinese government," William Burns said.

In addition, Burns said the CIA would continue to focus on aggressive Russia, provocative North Korea and hostile Iran.

Separately, a senior CIA official compared it to the agency's strict focus on Russia during the Cold War and its concentration on counter-terrorism after the 9/11 attacks. No such unit that explicitly focuses on China has previously been formed.

In the first months of President Joe Biden's administration, relations with Beijing deteriorated over deep differences on many issues, including human rights, Hong Kong and the South China Sea. But top officials from the two countries met this week to improve communications and set the stage for a virtual meeting of the presidents at the end of the year.

The China unit is one of several reshuffles resulting from the broad review the agency launched last spring, said the senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Other moves include merging the Iran Mission Center set up by the Donald Trump Administration into a broader Middle East unit and merging a Korea-focused unit with a broader East Asia-Pacific unit, the official said.

Burns said the CIA also created a position for a Chief Technology Officer as well as a new office called the Transnational and Technology Mission Center. This unit, the senior official said, would allow the agency to focus more on issues such as global health, climate change, humanitarian disasters and disruption caused by new technologies.

The senior official added that the CIA is also keeping a close eye on the mysterious disease "Havana Syndrome" which affects many CIA diplomats and staff.

"With its autocratic model aggressively seeking to export and rapidly expanding technological capacity, China poses a major challenge to the United States and the future of democratic values," said Democratic House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, welcoming the CIA director's move.