The FBI has issued an alert warning that Chinese intelligence agents are harassing, stalking, and trying to bribe people in New Jersey.
The special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Jersey office, Jim Dennehy, says the objective of most of these Chinese operations is “to bring people back to China in order to basically shut them up, and to have them pay for criticizing the Chinese government.”
But it’s not just Chinese dissidents being targeted. Dennehy said the Chinese agents are targeting political and human rights activists, journalists, and even religious groups. Sometimes the Chinese agents do it on their own and sometimes they hire people to do their work for them.
Occasionally, the Chinese hire private investigators “who might be unwittingly able to help surveil or to monitor or even to be part of the harassment campaign against these victims.”
“Sometimes they show up at their front doors, sometimes it’s harassing phone calls, and the FBI working with a lot of our local and state partners as a way of combatting this,” Dennehy said.
There have even been times when Chinese agents have shown at people’s homes “with firearms in order to intimidate and harass, and these victims are hiding in their own homes, under couches, because they don’t want to be seen or actually kidnapped.”
