The US President Donald Trump has been briefed earlier this month that China sought to pay non-state actors to attack American forces in Afghanistan, a report on CNN quoted a senior US administration official.
The intelligence, which will be declassified by the Trump administration, was provided to the President in his daily brief on December 17, the official said.
NSA Robert O’Brien discussed the information with the President that same day, the official told CNN.
The allegations involving Chinese operatives in Afghanistan are being handled very differently by Trump officials than the those involving Moscow earlier this year, according to the report.
The US “treats this intelligence with caution, but any intelligence or reports relating to the safety of US forces is something we take very seriously,” said the official.
China’s foreign ministry has condemned the allegations and its spokesman in a media briefing said it was “completely nonsense and completely fake news.”
He claimed that “China never initiated a war to others, let alone funded non-state actors to attack other countries.”
Earlier, Afghan authorities had claimed that they have exposed a Chinese intelligence network operating in Afghanistan for at least six months, under which the Chinese spies maintained contacts with Haqqani network and Afghan Taliban.
Afghan authorities claimed that the officials of National Directorate of Security (NDS), the equivalent of CIA in Afghanistan, conducted a major operation in Kabul, which resulted in the detention of about 10 Chinese intelligence agents.
They said that the Chinese network operated for several months in the “interests of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in order to promote Beijing’s geopolitical influence in the region.”
According to Afghan media, Chinese spies regularly met, including with field commanders of various Taliban factions, recruited sources of information among the Taliban, and also, according to some sources, among al-Qaeda terrorists.
President Ashraf Ghani had been briefed about the detentions and has authorised First Vice President Amrullah Saleh, a former chief of the Afghan intelligence agency, to oversee the investigation and engage the Chinese in view of the sensitivities involved.