The CIA earlier this month unveiled a new gambit to persuade disgruntled Chinese officials to spy for the United States: a pair of Hollywood-quality videos that play on divisions within President Xi Jinping’s government and offer instructions on how to anonymously contact the CIA.

One video highlights the vast wealth disparities between working-class Chinese and Communist Party elites; another depicts how top party officials suddenly disappear - a real-life occurrence in Xi’s anti-corruption purges. The videos, narrated in Mandarin and posted on social media, are part of a new CIA strategy for recruiting potential foreign agents from afar.

It’s a strategy that has already borne some fruit in Russia, CIA officials say. The spy agency in 2023 released similar videos aimed at recruiting Russians disaffected by the Ukraine war. Intelligence officials said that people there had contacted the CIA as a result, but they declined to provide details. CIA officials say they have evidence their messages aimed at China are being viewed there, despite heavy internet censorship.

But the videos also highlight a problem: The CIA needs more spies. The traditional tactics of human espionage, increasingly, are not working, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say.

The CIA’s success in recruiting foreigners to share vital secrets with the United States has declined sharply in recent years, the officials said. Recruitment of new agents has dropped by double-digit percentages since 2019, one former official said. The precise numbers are highly classified.

“We all know that the human intelligence collection isn’t where it needs to be,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe said at his Senate confirmation hearing in January.

Ratcliffe has made reversing the trend one of his top priorities at the CIA. But the spy chief’s challenge is a difficult one, said the officials, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters.

The potential intelligence gaps are not widely appreciated outside government national security circles. At stake is the depth of the U.S. government’s knowledge about urgent security threats: whether Iran will sprint to a nuclear weapon; Russia’s next moves on the battlefield in Ukraine and whether China will invade or try to economically strangle Taiwan.

Signals intelligence gathered by the National Security Agency, including intercepted phone calls, texts and emails, is a bedrock of intelligence collection and contributes to at least 60% of articles in the president’s daily brief, U.S. officials say. But an effective spy program needs both human and electronic intelligence, as well as other technical collection, such as imagery.

Current officials and former spies say there is no substitute for a well-placed human source to penetrate places a wiretap or satellite cannot reach, confirm fragmentary information or provide insight into the intentions of adversarial leaders such as Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Sometimes, the most exquisite intelligence comes from a human asset enabling the National Security Agency’s ability to hack computer systems, especially in sensitive places such as a military headquarters or Chinese Communist Party leadership. “Some of our best recruits aren’t going to tell you what Xi Jinping thinks,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official. “They work in communication departments and have access to those key systems. That’s why we target them. The top person we want to recruit in the Chinese Embassy in the U.S. isn’t the ambassador. It’s the code clerk.”

Spying - for both the CIA and hostile intelligence services - took a big hit from the coronavirus pandemic. As streets emptied, in-person meetings evaporated and social gatherings were canceled, CIA case officers were limited in their ability to target and recruit new sources. Meeting even trusted longtime sources was difficult.

“That was something we’re recovering from,” said Susan Miller, a former five-time CIA station chief who retired last year after 39 years with the agency.

Running networks of spies is much harder, more expensive and more manpower-intensive than it used to be.

The CIA faces a long-term threat from a phenomenon known as ubiquitous technical surveillance, or UTS. CIA officers and their foreign agents must now navigate an electronic gantlet of surveillance and monitoring devices that challenge their ability to keep their true identities hidden and their meetings covert.

James Bond merely had to outwit a few henchmen, meet a contact and get away in his gleaming sports car. His real-life counterparts contend with batteries of CCTV cameras in buildings and on city streets, cellphone-tracking devices, biometric sensors at border crossings and more.

Beijing alone is believed to have more than 1 million CCTV cameras. One former U.S. official who recently visited the city said there were so many cameras on the street it felt like being in a TV studio. The cameras are often paired with sophisticated facial recognition programs that can simultaneously track millions of individuals.

Incriminating data can live forever online, said Glenn Chafetz, a former CIA officer who served as the agency’s first chief of tradecraft and operational technology. A hostile intelligence service such as China’s could discover days, or even months, later that a traitor in its ranks had met with a CIA officer by running big data feeds from cameras across the country through sophisticated artificial intelligence filters. “You have to be perfect now, in order to be clandestine ... perfect forever, before any op, during the op and forever after,” Chafetz said.

Increasingly, much of what U.S. spy agencies need to know isn’t secret at all, but out in the open in the form of social media feeds, commercial data and other forms of “open-source” intelligence. But human intelligence, or HUMINT, is still a crucial, if shrinking, slice of the pie, current and former officials said.

Ratcliffe has disclosed little in public about his plans to shore up human intelligence, one of the CIA’s core missions, which involve highly classified budgets and operations. One person who met with the CIA director recently described him as alarmed by the state of the agency’s human espionage capabilities.

“Under Director Ratcliffe, CIA is laser-focused on its core mission of recruiting spies and collecting foreign intelligence to ensure President Trump and his national security team have a decisive advantage against any organization, terrorist, or nation that threatens harm to America,” a CIA spokesperson said.

A senior U.S. intelligence official added that human intelligence collection against China, which Ratcliffe has said is the CIA’s top target, “has greatly improved.”

Ratcliffe recently chose a veteran CIA officer with multiple foreign tours to be his deputy director of operations, a powerful post whose occupant runs the agency’s clandestine and covert work. The CIA requested that The Washington Post not publish the officer’s name because he is still undercover.

The news for the CIA isn’t all grim. The agency’s adversaries have to operate in the same sensor-soaked environment that U.S. operatives do. “It’s making it more difficult for the Chinese and Russians, too, because they keep getting caught,” said one recently retired CIA officer. Ratcliffe’s predecessor, William J. Burns, established a UTS Center to grapple with the challenge of omnipresent surveillance. But the puzzle remains unsolved, former agency officials said.

“Today’s digital environment poses as many opportunities as it does challenges,” a CIA official said. “We’re an adaptable agency, and it is not beyond the ingenuity or creativity of our officers to develop ways in which we can navigate just as effectively or more effectively in complex environments.”

Miller, who ran CIA espionage operations around the world, said that the advent of ubiquitous surveillance has forced a focus on quality over quantity.

“I’d rather have one good agent who will work quietly and won’t come to the attention of the [adversary] services than 20 mediocre ones,” she said. “It’s not fair” to the mediocre agents, either, Miller said. “They could land in prison for something inconsequential. We’re more picky now.”

Some former officials said that the CIA moved too rashly to recruit large numbers of officials in China in the early 2000s, making errors along the way. Beijing’s security services rolled up the network of U.S. spies beginning in 2010, executing or imprisoning as many as two dozen CIA assets in a devastating blow to the agency’s operations in the country.

Another former CIA officer blamed the long decline in human intelligence in part on bureaucrats at headquarters and their aversion to risky operations that could blow up in the agency’s face. Others warn about more recent unintended consequences of the Trump administration’s government belt-tightening.

The administration is considering plans to close 10 U.S. embassies and 17 consulates overseas, leaving some veterans worried. “Closing them would really affect our ability to get cover,” Miller said.

Worse, sloppiness in the administration’s haste to trim government agencies potentially undermined years of CIA work. In February, responding to a Trump executive order mandating a downsizing of the federal workforce, the CIA sent the Office of Personnel Management an unclassified email containing the first name and the first initial of the last name of each employee hired over the last two years.

Former officials described the lapse as a counterintelligence disaster, potentially blowing the cover of dozens of young officers.

Many were hired as part of an effort begun under Burns to increase the CIA’s focus on China.

One former official said that many of the probationary employees had their assignments put on hold as a result of the leak. It affected “the entire junior officer cadre,” he said.

previous coverage

• John Ratcliffe, Trump’s CIA pick, pledges not to politicize spy agency