WARSAW—On a frigid morning in January, Polish internal security officers entered the Warsaw apartment of a foreign businessman, confiscated photographs, seized his electronic devices, and detained him. The allegations leveled against him were sensational: An ex-diplomat who speaks Polish, he, and a former Polish security official had spied on behalf of a foreign power.
The drama had elements of a classic Cold War thriller, updated for the 21st century. The predatory power was not America—Washington and Warsaw are now allies—nor Russia, Poland’s Soviet-era master. It was China. The businessman was Chinese, a salesman for the world’s largest maker of telecom networking gear, Huawei Technologies Co. And the alleged Polish traitor, detained the same day, wasn’t a soldier but a senior cybersecurity specialist.
