United States

Tahlia Peterson, who researches global technological competition for the Royal United Services Institute, believes that Beijing has the resources and patience to plant agents as long-term “moles”, spending years working their way up a firm. “China has a vast security apparatus that can be leveraged to that purpose,” she says. “It is likely to happen at lower levels, as junior employees sometimes have more ground-level knowledge, and are more ‘taskable’ as they move their way up.”

The current global energy-security picture is “really bad on all fronts”, says Dan Marks, an energy-security researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank based in London. “It’s something of a perfect storm.”

These are KC 135 planes and one expert that we spoke to from the think tank RUSI said that these are basically critical assets for the US ... Christoph Bergs, this particular expert we spoke to, said that it is a promising sign that these tankers appear to have mainly dispersed across Europe, suggesting that it's a temporary precaution by the US rather than going back to the US."