A retired US general has revealed that he was bugged by Chinese spies with a device hidden in a name tag given to him at a conference.
Lieutenant General Anthony Crutchfield wore the ID unaware his every movement was being tracked while he was serving in the Indo-Pacific.
Lt Gen Crutchfield drew on his experience to illustrate how ‘someone is always collecting on you’ — whether it be a supermarket or a nation state.
Chinese state surveillance of UK targets has reportedly included hiding a listening device in a teapot given to a civil servant departing Beijing and planting a tracking device in a government car.
Lt Gen Crutchfield revealed another use of spyware which was later detected by his counter-intelligence operatives.
He said: ‘There was a time when I went there [China] and I spent a few days there and I was a three-star general.
‘They knew that I was a three-star general and I went to a conference and when I came back from that conference my counter-intelligence people said, “Sir we need to see everything that you took.
‘We want to see your bags, everything.”
‘They did their assessment, they took apart my name tag that I had, you know the little name tag you have saying my name is whatever?
‘When they peeled that apart, there was a chip that knew my every move, knew when I was coming, when I was going, knew where I was.
‘So you can’t be naive with those kinds of things and they’re happening to us – I don’t want to sound paranoid – but it is happening to us.’
Lt Gen Crutchfield, now holding a senior position at Boeing, would have been a valuable surveillance target for Chinese spies.
He served in the US Army for more than 34 years, commanding units at virtually every level, with his last assignment before retiring being as deputy commander of the vast US Pacific command.
Lt Gen Crutchfield’s brief involved directing joint military operations in the Asia Pacific, encompassing 52% of the Earth’s surface.
The area is the largest US geographical combat command on the planet, stretching from New Zealand to northern China.
The region includes Taiwan, which Beijing has vowed to ‘reunify’ with and continues to target with aggressive military activity and bellicose rhetoric.
The former Apache pilot did not go into specifics about the eavesdropping incident as he used it as an example of how the digital world allows entities to gather data about people at every step.
He said: ‘Understand, that throughout your life, certainly with social media and connections that we have today, someone, whether it’s for criminal purposes, or for business purposes, someone is always collecting information on you. If you do the supermarket thing online, someone is collecting information on what you like.
‘In the case of marketing, which can be good or bad, depending on which side you are on, they are looking at the things you like to present those things to you at another point in the future.
‘That’s collection, that’s intelligence that’s used for marketing.’
The general’s revelation, made in Spycast, the podcast for the International Spy Museum in Washington DC, follows on the heels of warnings from the UK about the scale of Chinese government espionage and cyber hacking.
Cabinet minister Pat McFadden said on Monday that the country is one of the biggest online threats, along with Russia, North Korea and Iran.
The FBI has described the authoritarian Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party as a ‘grave threat’ to America’s economy and democracy.
The bureau has described confronting the threat as its top counter-intelligence priority.
Previous reports of Chinese state espionage include one of a listening device hidden in a teapot given as a gift to a UK embassy worker leaving Beijing. The spyware, which is not believed to have collected any private information, was found when the pottery was smashed after the recipient took it home to Britain, according to the report in September 2023.
An insider told the Sun the device was only found when the ‘very lovely’ teapot broke as someone did the washing up.
In another case a tracking device is said to have been found in a UK government car after intelligence officials stripped back vehicles in response to growing concerns over spyware.
The sweep revealed at least one SIM card capable of transmitting location data, a serving security source told the i. Chinese officials dismissed the report, in January 2023, as ‘groundless and sheer rumour.’
The country’s embassy in the UK has previously denied any notion that the state is responsible for cyber attacks.
A spokesperson said: ‘We reject the use of information and communications technology to jeopardise the critical infrastructure or steal the important data of other countries, or conduct activities that undermine their national security and public interests.’
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