Dan Sabbagh
An unexpected connection on LinkedIn. An offer of work from a headhunter, most likely a young woman, based in China. The chance to earn perhaps £20,000 part-time writing a handful of geopolitical reports for a Chinese company peppered with “non-public” or “insider” insights. Payment in cryptocurrency or cash preferred.
It may seem obvious, on this telling, that something about this approach would be amiss. Nevertheless, China’s powerful ministry of state security (MSS) still considers it worthwhile to deploy recruitment consultants to try it – leading MI5 to warn repeatedly about their activity online.
In 2023, the MI5 chief, Ken McCallum, said Chinese agents were approaching Britons on LinkedIn on an extraordinary scale, 10,000 over the preceding two and a half years, seeking political, industrial, military and technological secrets.
A fresh campaign aimed at politicians and parliament has led the spy agency to act again. An espionage alert was issued on Tuesday via the offices of Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons speaker, and his Lords equivalent: a single slide, after the repeated efforts of Shirly Shen and Amanda Qiu to contact MPs, peers, their staffers, economists, thinktankers – anybody who might become a source.
In the curious manner of British intelligence, there was no publication of the security advice from MI5 or the Home Office. But the agency knew its briefing note would leak once it was emailed out to parliament. Republishing it in the media helps the wider public better identify interactions with a fraudulent intent.
The alert will have the effect of flushing out more information from in and around Westminster, though that is not MI5’s primary purpose. The agency wants people in public life to recognise that just because interactions on LinkedIn are not as toxic as on X or Facebook, it does not mean they are without risk.
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