REUTERS/Bing Guan
The FBI is having trouble ferreting out foreign governments’ secret police stations—and their efforts to stalk, harass, and silence diaspora populations in the U.S.—partly because many in those communities don’t trust the agency, a senior counterintelligence official in the agency said on a Wednesday call.
“There is sometimes a trust issue with those communities because they’re victimized by the intelligence services and the police in their home countries such as in Iran and China, and sometimes they’re not willing to come forward and tell us that this is happening because there’s a lot of propaganda—especially from China—that if they come forward and talk to the FBI, we’ll turn them over to the MSS,” the FBI official said, referring to a Chinese intelligence agency.
The official said the agency is working on building up trust with these communities. “We are doing a lot of outreach, and part of that where we’re explaining [is] these cases are priorities for us. Transnational repression is illegal, and we want people to come to us and we will protect them.”