Ariane Knüsel manuscript accepted for publication
[email protected] in Cold War Studies Swiss Counterintelligence and Chinese Espionage in the Cold War Article manuscript In 1967, a report by the Swiss Federal Police deplored that Switzerland was often described by the international press as a hub for Chinese espionage. The report argued that counterintelligence measures against China were “particularly difficult” because of the high number of Chinese diplomatic staff. “In addition,” the report continued, “there are the difficulties caused by Chinese language, the, to European eyes, quite uniform external appearance of the officials and their Asian mentality.” 1 As this quote shows, identifying Chinese intelligence agents and their informants, and disabling Chinese intelligence operations in Switzerland turned out to be very challenging for the Swiss police. When it recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on 17 January 1950, Switzerland was among the first Western nations to do so. In September 1950, the two countries established official relations. The Chinese mission in Bern (opened in December 1950) and the Consulate-General in Geneva (opened in 1954) were among the first Chinese missions in Western Europe and became China’s political, commercial and intelligence hubs in Western Europe until the late 1960s.2 This article relies on still classified Federal Police files from the Swiss Federal Archives that were temporarily declassified for a research project,3 to look at Swiss counterintelligence measures against Chinese intelligence operations in the 1950s and 1960s. It will show that while some measures were fairly typical for European counterintelligence during the Cold War, Swiss counterintelligence also differed from that of most other European countries, which affected Swiss efforts to identify and neutralize the intelligence networks the Chinese ran from Switzerland in the 1950s and 1960s.