Know more about China's dreaded spy agency 'MSS'

New Delhi: The Ministry of State Security (MSS) is one of the most powerful and most active Chinese intelligence agencies. Its main objective is to keep track and neutralise “enemies” of the Communist Party of China. Patterned after the former Soviet Union's KGB, the MSS aims “to control the Chinese people to maintain the rule of the Communist Party”. The modus operandi of MSS is unique too - its most successful spies are agents stationed throughout the world posing as ordinary citizens. Considered to be one of the strongest and largest intelligence agencies in the world, it is responsible for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations. The precursor of the modern MSS was the Central Department of Social Affairs (CDSA), the primary intelligence organ of the Communist Party of China (CPC) before its accession to power in 1949. The CDSA operated from the communist base area of Yan'an in Shaanxi Province in northern China during the 1937–45 Second Sino-Japanese War. The CDSA was thoroughly reorganized in the summer of 1949. It ceased to exist in name, and some of its most prominent officers were transferred to senior positions in the new Ministry of Public Security of the CCP Central Revolutionary Military Affairs Commission (after the founding of the People's Republic of China renamed the Ministry of Public Security of the Central People's Government). After an extended transition during which segments of the former CDSA came within the purview of the People's Liberation Army, it was fully re-established as an organ directly under the Communist Party Central Committee in 1955, now with the new name Central Investigation Department (CID). The MSS was established in 1983 as the result of the merger of the CID and the counter-intelligence elements of the Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China. One of its longest-serving chiefs was Jia Chunwang, a native of Beijing and a 1964 graduate of Tsinghua University, who is reportedly an admirer of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Chinese intelligence agents, probably under the control of the MSS, have achieved success in penetrating the U.S. Intelligence Community in the past. In the 1980s, Larry Wu-Tai Chin (Jin Wudai), a translator for the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, was arrested and charged with espionage in the service of the PRC. He had been recruited in 1944 while stationed in China as a U.S. Army officer and went undetected for four decades. More recently, in 2003, Chinese-American Federal Bureau of Investigation source and Republican Party fundraiser Katrina Leung was arrested and accused of being a double agent for both the FBI and the Chinese government, although she was acquitted of charges of copying classified information, and convicted only of tax charges and of lying to the FBI. In March 2009 former MSS operative Li Fengzhi told the Washington Times in an interview that the MSS was engaged in counterintelligence, the collection of secrets and technology from other countries, and repressing internal dissent within China. The internal repression, according to Li, includes efforts against nonofficial Christian churches and the outlawed Falun Gong religious group, plus censoring the Internet to prevent China's population from knowing what is going on outside the country. Li emphasized that MSS's most important mission is, "to control the Chinese people to maintain the rule of the Communist Party".