"We have a number of mutual law enforcement concerns whether it be hackers, intellectual property (or) white collar crime," FBI Director Robert Mueller told reporters in a rare press briefing last week.

He added that he had met that morning with Chinese Minister of Public Security Zhou Yongkang -- the latest in a series of meetings he has had over the past year with senior Chinese officials since a trip to Beijing in April 2004.

Lou Riegel, head of the bureau's cyber division, told United Press International that he and an aide had been invited by the Chinese government to Beijing, and that the trip was part of a serious effort to build cooperation with them.

"I'm going to meet with their military, as well as their equivalent of the FBI," he said, referring to the Ministry of Public Security.

The November visit will be the first working-level trip by agents to the Chinese capital, an FBI official authorized to speak for the bureau told UPI.

"Our aim is to utilize these opportunities (for dialogue) to develop a working-level relationship," the official said, "We want to know things like who handles (intellectual property rights) issues; what route should our legal attach� (in the U.S. Embassy there) use to get information to the correct Chinese agencies."

"It's baby steps," said Riegel of the relationship, "We've had difficulty getting to this stage ... but we're slowly making headway."

Riegel said the invitation came as result of Chinese concern about their image as a global center for copyright piracy.

"This invitation was extended because there's an impression that China has (a monopoly) on intellectual property rights theft and that's not the case," he said, adding that they did, however, "have an issue with it."

According to the Motion Picture Association of America, China is a global center for DVD piracy, and 95 percent of the video discs sold there are illegally produced. A recent analysis by the association of the costs of intellectual property theft in the Asia-Pacific region estimated the loss to be half a billion dollars over the past three years.

Riegel said the subject of cyber attacks and hacking "will certainly be broached."

The issue is likely to be a delicate one.

In June, the British National Infrastructure Security Coordination Center warned of concerted efforts to gain access to networks used by the government and companies operating critical in frastructure.

The efforts, employing socially engineered e-mails targeted at specific individuals and delivering Trojan Horse software, were described as having "been underway for some time with a recent increase in sophistication;" and having as their goal the "gathering and transmitting (back to the authors) of otherwise privileged information" like passwords and usernames.

The center cautioned that it is "extremely difficult" to track the attacks back to their true origin, but added that internet addresses and e-mail headers associated with the Trojan e-mails "are often linked to the Far East."

Two months later, reports of similar attacks on unclassified networks run by the Defense Department and its contractors surfaced in the U.S. news media. Again the attacks were said to be sophisticated, in process for some time and to have originated in servers based in East Asia -- specifically China.

Former White House cyber security czar Howard Schmidt told UPI at the time that the fact that the servers were there didn't mean that was where the attacks were coming from. "It could just be that those are easier to hack" into, and take over to launch attacks from, he said.

He also suggested investigators ought to look with skepticism at the trail they were finding, comparing it to a skillful cat burglar who appears to accidentally drop a business card.

"If the attacks are that good, but the trail is so easy to follow, you have to ask why," he said.

Riegel declined to comment. "We have ongoing investigations ... of foreign powers ... relating to intrusions into U.S. agencies," he said.

"I wouldn't say China's even acknowledged that there've been intrusions into the United States (from their country) and nor have we, as the FBI, accused them of that."

He said discussions would touch on "intrusion issues. Intrusions into their systems, intrusions into ours."

Resisting any characterization of the relationship on cyber issues as cooperation, Riegel said, "Dialogue, that's the stage were at, discussions."

"I don't know if it will be successful," he concluded, "It's one step at a time."

But on terror, the co-operation is much clearer according to Mueller.

At his press briefing last week, the director recalled the January incident when intelligence reports indicated that four Chinese nationals who had illegally crossed the Mexican border into the United States were headed to Boston to explode a radiological dispersion device, or "dirty bomb."

"It went up the flagpole fairly quickly," said Mueller, of the enormous media attention the report received after it was leaked following a briefing for state and local officials.

Mueller said that the incident, while it turned out to be a false alarm, was a good test of the real-time intelligence sharing the FBI had developed with the Chinese.

"We got the names (of the four) to our counterparts in China and they put together a task force and very quickly got us information about who these individuals were and as to whether or not they would be involved in this kind of activity," he said.

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