Brother of Ling Jihua Reveals China's nuclear launch code and top secrets to US

Janiz said:

Well, this was a tremendous success of US intelligence. Getting informations from the top of any government, let alone such an important world politics player as PRC, is always something to be proud of for special services. So it was released now (or a month earlier but it didn't get too much attention) to make public appeal that they're working. And they do their job great.
We don't know what was in those documents and Chinese side itself probably doesn't know the full extent of it. It's not wikileaks. We only know more or less of what they informed the press (without too much details also). But we know that many top secret documents were given to Americans. We know that Chinese really didn't want this to happen. We know that US had already anlyzed all of it and put the informations into their working areas. I bet many people's lives were put on the edge of the knife in this situation.
Mr Ling and his family will be a treated as traitors to their nation for decades. They will have a poor life for maybe two or three generations for that (those members who were left in PRC). Mr Ling will have a luxurious life for the end of his days under a strong US secret services protection. But he deserved that looking from US side and it probably was worth every penny. PRC will of course amend and improve in whatever aspect they can but it was surely terrible blow for them. And Mr Ling's case will be surely brouth up in many works for decades the same way as the cold war times spy stories are brought up today.

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I think you didn't read the whole thing through. Mr. Ling Jihua is arrested in China. His brother, Ling WanCheng, held the documents in the US as a threat to the Chinese government that should they arrest Ling Jihua, Ling Wancheng would release those documents to the FBI. So they told China that these documents were taken; the Chinese obviously analyzed what they were and how important they were in order to decide how to respond. It seems that they were indeed quite important in 2012 (the time they were taken) and thus, they kept Ling Jihua safe for over 3 years. Now, they've decided to arrest him, knowing that those documents would be handed to the US by Ling WanCheng. So, why did they arrest Ling Jihua now? The best guess is that 3 years is how long they feel is adequate for those documents to lose their destructiveness.

And the CIA will not protect Ling Wancheng for life; that is a huge undertaking in man hours and talent to protect someone around the clock for decades who was only useful when he still had the classified documents. And to the best of my knowledge, in history, no Chinese defector who gave classified documents to a rival nation has died of natural causes, not even under US protection. It may be over a decade later, but Ling WanCheng signed his death warrant by following through with that threat. Even the US doesn't care what happens to him now, since he has no more access to Chinese documents; they'll just protect him a bit longer maybe another year or 2 before they tell him it's clear and send him on his way.

Make MICE of men.

The news of the information that Mr Li could have released were first reported by a few smalltime media outlets back in December last year. The original sources appeared to be the Chenming and Qianshao magazines.

At this point it is pretty obvious that Mr Li probably does have some state secrets, but having followed the story for the last two months I haven't actually seen anyone credible state what the actual contents of the secrets could include -- nuclear launch procedures, Zhongnanhai security, have been consistently mentioned but I'm a little dubious as to whether these bigger media outlets have done sufficient fact checking in regards to Chenming and Qianshao's original claims.


Remember, Chenming and Qianshao are both anti CCP magazines -- how they would have access to such classified information such as the details of the documents is a mystery to me...

jobjed said:

but not before telling his captors which secrets he passed out.

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Well, I bet he don't know 100% what his brother had handed over to Americans. It's not a work for a single man but few others were probably involved in that and documents were successfully stored for years to make such back-up. Those guys aren't that stupid to handle it from one hand to another, brother between brother on some golf game occasion. There they could talk but not handing over documents. Both of them have their trusted men to that kind of stuff and they knew how it works knowing that they were highly successfull in their lives (one as a politician and the other one as bussinessman). And brother had to have contacts with US services because it's not like he had a phone call to the FBI and said 'It's your lucky day! I have some important documents here regarding PRC's national security matters!'. He had to give them a taste of what he had or maybe he was guided by them for some time. But we don't know that and we won't for sure. It's hard to tell something concrete on secret informations anyway. So take this post with a grain of salt. That's how I would do that. The less you know the longer you live.[

>>>> RESPONSE TOP MODERATION REMOVED. Warning issued. <<<<

manqiangrexue said:

And the CIA will not protect Ling Wancheng for life; that is a huge undertaking in man hours and talent to protect someone around the clock for decades who was only useful when he still had the classified documents. And to the best of my knowledge, in history, no Chinese defector who gave classified documents to a rival nation has died of natural causes, not even under US protection. It may be over a decade later, but Ling WanCheng signed his death warrant by following through with that threat. Even the US doesn't care what happens to him now, since he has no more access to Chinese documents; they'll just protect him a bit longer maybe another year or 2 before they tell him it's clear and send him on his way.

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This guy has been living the high life in China for years, maybe decades. Now he's going to live the rest of his life in the US with practically no source of income and certainly no status.

I'm willing to bet that he'll end up going the way of Lai Changxing and ask to return to China in a decade or two.

Janiz said:

Well, I bet he don't know 100% what his brother had handed over to Americans. It's not a work for a single man but few others were probably involved in that and documents were successfully stored for years to make such back-up. Those guys aren't that stupid to handle it from one hand to another, brother between brother on some golf game occasion. There they could talk but not handing over documents. Both of them have their trusted men to that kind of stuff and they knew how it works knowing that they were highly successfull in their lives (one as a politician and the other one as bussinessman). And brother had to have contacts with US services because it's not like he had a phone call to the FBI and said 'It's your lucky day! I have some important documents here regarding PRC's national security matters!'. He had to give them a taste of what he had or maybe he was guided by them for some time. But we don't know that and we won't for sure. It's hard to tell something concrete on secret informations anyway. So take this post with a grain of salt. That's how I would do that. The less you know the longer you live.With all respect, but we all know what's the punishment for treason in PRC. That's why contacts with secret services are always nasty stuff and anyone sane should stay way of those matters (but many don't understand it still).

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Every country that has their intelligence compromised will operate under the assumption of worst-case scenario. China will assume that EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT passed to the brother was given to US intelligence. Even if that's not the case, and I find that hard to believe, China will assume so anyway.

The Original Report I heard credited a Australian Newspaper as getting the story off a Member of the CCP and that was in Late December. That report claimed that he had been in US custody for about 2 years. So roughly 2013 when he came into US hands. The lag of 2 years would likely have included vetting of his claims by looking for cooperating data from other Intelligence sources. If the data he gave matches with other Intel then his story is likely legit.
The storyline was that he had been given the Information as a "Insurance policy" by his brother who had been an aid to the former Premier and that if anything happened to his brother he was to turn it over to the US.
I know sounds like a mafia movie, apparently his brother's bet was called and it seems their was no bluffing. So in circa 2013 the files (whatever they were ) were handed over and the CCP and Politburo had to go into damage control. The two years between the event and the stories is likely the US government having worked the case and done its best to bury him behind a proverbial mountain of security measures as well as pick apart the cache of goodies. And the Politburo and CCP working to plug the leaks, pin down any other possible "Insurance Policyholders", try to identify the contents of the cache and prevent leveraging it against the party, government and leadership.

PanAsian said:

That's the downside to "to get rich is glorious"! And China always had an overpopulation problem which exacerbates natural societal ills and personality issues. I'm sure some social psychologist somewhere have done a study of how overpopulation worsens egotism and selfishness in people.

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It's more complicated than that.

One has to factor in the effect of not only a large population, but also the effect of having a previously socialist economy by definition, combined with long periods of great scarcity and poverty (which I think is one of the most important factors to keep in mind), then suddenly having all of that changed by the economic opening up and the promotion of capitalism, which was an immense shift in the social norms of the nation.

There aren't too many large populations in recent history which have experienced such major social and economic shifts as the Chinese, and it'll take the Chinese population a generation or so to fully acquaint themselves with the norms and morals of their surroundings.


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In any case, can we not take Ultra's dramatic announcements too seriously? He's now infamous for making big proclamations and condemnations of systems or events and either seeing it as the precursor of doom and predicting China's collapse.
Some of his premises are not too bad, but many of his conclusions and his way of getting to those conclusions are naive and simplistic at best.

TerraN_EmpirE said:

The Original Report I heard credited a Australian Newspaper as getting the story off a Member of the CCP and that was in Late December. That report claimed that he had been in US custody for about 2 years. So roughly 2013 when he came into US hands. The lag of 2 years would likely have included vetting of his claims by looking for cooperating data from other Intelligence sources. If the data he gave matches with other Intel then his story is likely legit.
The storyline was that he had been given the Information as a "Insurance policy" by his brother who had been an aid to the former Premier and that if anything happened to his brother he was to turn it over to the US.
I know sounds like a mafia movie, apparently his brother's bet was called and it seems their was no bluffing. So in circa 2013 the files (whatever they were ) were handed over and the CCP and Politburo had to go into damage control. The two years between the event and the stories is likely the US government having worked the case and done its best to bury him behind a proverbial mountain of security measures as well as pick apart the cache of goodies. And the Politburo and CCP working to plug the leaks, pin down any other possible "Insurance Policyholders", try to identify the contents of the cache and prevent leveraging it against the party, government and leadership.

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Mr Li has been known to have been in the US since media reports in about mid 2015, the question is about what information he may or may not have in his documents.
In that sense, the original magazines of Chenming and Qianshao are the big question marks which hang over this story. It seems like all the news reports are taking the details from those magazines in full faith without considering their reliability.

In any case, I imagine the govt and military would have gone into damage control well before any bluff was called and would have begun changing the necessary parts the moment they realized the documents were missing.