A new strategy is launching this month by the CIA to persuade unhappy Chinese officials to spy on for the sake of the United States. Specifically, he created two Hollywood -level videos featuring divisions within the government of President Xi Jing and offer instructions on how to communicate with the CIA.

Specifically, one video highlights the enormous inequalities in wealth between the working class of China and the elites of the Communist Party. Another depicts how top party executives disappear suddenly. The videos, narrated in Mandarin and published on social media, are part of the new CIA’s new strategy to recruit potential foreign agents.

This is a strategy that has already worked fruit in Russia, CIA officials say. The espionage service posted a similar video in 2023 aimed at recruiting Russians who were unhappy with the war in Ukraine. CIA officials say they have evidence that their messages addressed to China are projected there, despite strict censorship on the internet.

But the videos also highlight the serious problem that the CIA faces, its need for more spies. Traditional tactics of human espionage, more and more, do not work, they say now and former US intelligence officials. The recruitment of new agents has been reduced by double -digit rates since 2019, a former official said.

“We all know that the collection of human information is not where it should be,” said CIA Director John Ratclifis, while hearing his appointment to the Senate in January.

Current officials and former spies say there is nothing that replaces a well -positioned human source to infiltrate places where a telephone surveillance or a satellite cannot reach, confirm fragmentary information or provide information on the intentions of opponents.

The espionage – both for the CIA and for hostile intelligence services – has been hit by the Coronovan pandemic as CIA officers at that time were limited to their ability to target and recruit new sources. Even with reliable long -term sources, the meeting was difficult.

The CIA faces a long -term threat from a phenomenon known as the ubiquitous technical surveillance or otherwise UTS. The CIA officers and their foreign agents now have to navigate to an electronic system of surveillance and monitoring devices that question their ability to keep their true identity and secrets secret. The incriminating data can live on the internet forever, said Glenn Chafez, a former CIA officer who was the first head of the service’s commercial and business technology.

“You have to be perfect now, to be a secret … Perfect forever, before any business, during the business and forever afterwards,” Chafez said.

Increasingly, many of what US intelligence services need to know are not secret, but they are made public in the form of social networking flows, commercial data and other forms of “open source” information. However, human intelligence, or Humint, is still a crucial, though shrinking, piece of pie, said now and former officials.

But the news for the CIA is not all unpleasant. The opponents of the service must operate in the same environment with the operating sensors and the American agents. “This is even more difficult for the Chinese and the Russians because they are constantly arrested,” said a recent retired CIA officer.

However, the sloppiness in the government’s rush to cut government agencies may have undermined years of work by the CIA.