The Chinese, Iranians and Cubans are among the other foreign spies attempting to infiltrate U.S. secret systems and American establishments overseas, said Joel Brenner, the head of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive.

“I don’t mean to suggest that the Chinese are alone in this. The Russians are now back to Cold War levels in their efforts to (extract intelligence information from) the United States,” he said at a forum of the American Bar Association.

“They are sending over an increasing and troubling number of intelligence officers into the United States,” he told reporters later.

Brenner, who reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, said “the Iranians and Cubans are also significant” threats among the “140 foreign intelligence services that try to penetrate the United States or U.S. organizations abroad.

“The job is not getting easier,” he said. “And for many of them, we are their number one target,” he said.

Asked what the Russian intelligence was particularly interested in securing from the United States, Brenner said, “What every intelligence agency on the planet really wants is the high level intentions of the leadership of other countries.

“And the Russians are no different than anybody else in that respect,” he said.

“They have been reeling from being one of the world’s great superpowers to being something very different and trying to build themselves up and show that they are going have to be dealt with like a major. It is part of their agenda here.”

U.S. spy chief McConnell has just recommended to the National Security Council to move counterintelligence — the business of identifying and dealing with foreign intelligence threats — from a lower to a “top priority” in the national intelligence priorities framework, Brenner said.

If the recommendation is implemented, it is “going to make a real difference every single day to counterintelligence analysis,” he said.

To highlight the extent of the Chinese espionage network in the United States, Brenner cited the case of Chi Mak, a U.S. citizen born in southern China accused in court of attempting to smuggle out information on a secret technology to make U.S. submarines silent.

Chi Mak had worked as a contractor on the U.S. Navy’s quiet electric drive, the technology designed to suppress the signature emitted by U.S. submarines and surface warships.

Chi Mak, whose trial is underway in California, admitted under questioning that he had been passing information to the Chinese since 1983 and that the technologies he had compromised included the power distribution technology for the Aegis cruiser’s radar system, Brenner said.

“The compromise is not small potatoes,” he said. “It shortens by years the technological advantage of the U.S. Navy. It degrades the Navy’s deterrent capability in the Taiwan Strait.”

China on Thursday denied involvement with the engineer and called allegations of Chinese espionage “groundless.”

But Brenner maintained that the Chinese intelligence threat was real.

“The Chinese have mounted a very capable long term full court press against the United States,” he stressed.

Brenner said there was also a concerted effort by China to send over graduate students to the United States in a bid to bring back critical information.

“That is part of the full court press,” he said. “They put people in jobs over here and not asked them for information for 20 and 30 years and then they watch their careers. They are very patient, they come from old cultures which tend to be much more patient than we are.”

Brenner also spoke about the vulnerability of U.S. electronic networks to hackers and risks faced from deployment of equipment whose components and software were produced overseas.

“Unknown or sketchy provenance raises the risk that a foreign government or organization could program vulnerabilities into our most sensitive information systems,” he said.

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