MI6 chief thanked China’s state news agency for “Free advertising” after he posted a James Bond parody video in response to a statement he made last year that Beijing was the spy agency’s “highest priority.”
Richard Moore, codenamed C, chimed in after Xinhua posted a remarkable four-minute video in English featuring a pair of suspected British spies, James Pond, and an apparent Marvel universe recruit, Black Window.
Xinhua said the video, titled No Time to Die Laughing, was leaked into footage of a secret meeting between British spies and their American counterparts. It features a smartly dressed duo entering a country house and beginning to discuss a dossier on Chinese spy tactics, with canned laughter running everywhere.
In response, Moore tweeted, “Thank you for your interest (and the unexpected free publicity),” and posted a copy of the speech he gave in November that prompted an unexpected response from Xinhua.
In his speech, the MI6 chief said that a rising China had become the spy agency’s top priority for the first time in its history, telling Beijing that it risked “miscalculating out of overconfidence. ”About Taiwan.
It was one of several direct comments directed at Beijing, traditionally an area where British ministers and officials have tread carefully, including a warning about the spread of Chinese surveillance technology, which Moore says was used to “target the Uighur population in Xinjiang “.
Agents in the video thank M, the Bond film nickname for the head of MI6, for exaggerating the Chinese threat. “You know what’s pathetic, using China’s debt trap and fictitious data trap to secure our huge budget for next year,” says Pond, holding up a glass of champagne to toast the agency’s success.
In his speech, Moore said that China was asserting control over smaller countries, putting “people hooked” in Africa and elsewhere by forcing them to take onerous loans in exchange for building vital infrastructure or taking control of their data. to supply essential services. .
Another presumption in the Xinhua video is the claim that it is not China that is tapping phones around the world, but the United States. Pond, described as “Agent 0.07”, learns from a call with a fictitious CIA agent that the Americans are monitoring his phone.
“Hey, Pond, my advice is not to buy a Huawei phone,” advises the US agent. It’s clear to Pond that his phone is being tapped. “It is obvious that now he is shocked and moved,” says Black Window in an aside to the camera.
“Being the enemy of the United States is dangerous. But being a friend of the United States is fatal, “concludes Pond, without much subtlety, before the conversation returns to a defense of the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei. The American tells him that there is a back door in Huawei’s software to enable covert surveillance.
Unexpectedly, this sparks a strong defense of Huawei by Black Window, which seems to have shifted out of place: “You have to stop this backdoor nonsense. If there was any shred of evidence, you would have made headlines. “
In June 2020, Britain announced that it would remove Huawei’s kit from its 5G phone networks by 2027 after intense pressure from the Trump administration, claiming the technology was a potential security risk.
However, the CIA character refuses to back down, insisting: “There is no 100% safe and clear mobile phone on this planet, otherwise David Cameron and [Angela] Merkel would have bought one ”, naming former political leaders perhaps to avoid too direct a link with Boris Johnson, the current UK prime minister, who already faces other difficulties related to his mobile phone.
www.theguardian.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism