By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

While the world’s attention will be focused on running, jumping, swimming and other athletic events in China next month, another contest will unfold beyond the fields of play: the great game of nations, or espionage.

The games amount to a job fair for would-be defectors, at least when they’re played in the West, with U.S. security services standing by to receive them. And when the games are in hostile territory, like China, the host nation’s spy services are busy targeting foreigners of note.

“You are prepared” for defectors when the games are on the home court, says Harry B. “Skip” Brandon, a former top FBI counterintelligence official. “You want to know who’s going to be there, whether there’s anybody of interest.”

The same, of course, goes for China’s secret services, with the games in Beijing — not that anyone outside of North Korea would want to defect there.

But athletes generally don’t have state secrets to offer anyway, Brandon notes.

In any event, athletes who want to abandon their country are more properly called “asylum seekers,” Brandon says. When they’re ready “to jump,” a small team of immigration officials will be there to interview them. The FBI and CIA will be kept informed.

But it will be almost impossible for an athlete from, say, China or North Korea to seek asylum at the Beijing games.

The United States would be courting a diplomatic disaster if it accepted any Chinese national and sheltered him at the American Embassy. China would also never let him (or her) get on a plane.

China has already announced it won’t accept requests for asylum from North Koreans during the games, and has asked other countries to follow suit, according to a South Korean newspaper.

Some Cubans didn’t wait for the Olympics to jump. Seven of its soccer players, in Florida for warm-up games in March, walked away.

Three showed up a few days later in L.A. Galaxy uniforms.

In recent years, in fact, sports agents are much more likely to be wearing cloaks and daggers than the FBI or CIA. Baseball scouts, especially, have drawn the wrath of Major League officials and the scrutiny of U.S. law enforcement for overstepping their bounds.

But in the good ol’ days of the Cold War, secret services both East and West were busy at the games, according to some sources.