After reviewing the CIA’s priorities, Director William Burns recently announced the establishment of a China Mission Center at the spy agency. US intelligence officials, current and former, recently spoke at a conference about the challenges posed by massive Chinese espionage targeting the United States.
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After reviewing the CIA’s priorities, Director William Burns recently announced the establishment of a China Mission Center at the spy agency. US intelligence officials, current and former, recently spoke at a conference about the challenges posed by massive Chinese espionage targeting the United States.
Ian Morton / NPR
It is quite rare for US spies to gather at a conference and talk openly about the most pressing national security threats.
“I have to tell you all, it’s weird, after 27 years of working in the secret service, to see your picture and your bio pop up,” Cynthia Saddy, a retired CIA officer. She was speaking to a ballroom filled with current and former intelligence officials at a resort in Sea Island, Ga. Behind her, a large screen displays a photo of her and a list of high-powered positions she holds at the agency, including chief of staff. General Administration.
A former CIA director, Michael Hayden. William Burns.
“First, you have to go to China. And then, second, you have to go to China. And the third thing, you have to go to China. And he said, ‘Okay, I get it,'” Hayden told.
The American intelligence community focused on the Soviet Union for decades. Then the priority is Middle East terrorism. Now, the intelligence community says, a new era has begun.
“I call this entering the third age of wisdom,” Sue Gordon. In a series of high-profile jobs, she provided intelligence briefings to five of six previous presidents before retiring in 2019 as chief deputy director of national intelligence.
“We woke up from our counterterrorism stupor to realize that the world had gone digital and that we hadn’t focused on all the things we needed,” she said. “The rise of China happened in those years, and now you see we’re talking about great power competition.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping walks past an honor guard in Beijing in September. The US intelligence community, along with other parts of the national security establishment, is increasingly focused on China. China as the main competitor of the United States.
Andy Wong / AP
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Andy Wong / AP
Chinese President Xi Jinping walks past an honor guard in Beijing in September. The US intelligence community, along with other parts of the national security establishment, is increasingly focused on China. China as the main competitor of the United States.
Andy Wong / AP
A CIA Center for China
CIA Director Burns seems to have accepted all this advice. After reviewing the CIA’s priorities, his first big move was to announce the creation of a China Mission Center to focus more on the country seen as America’s main competitor.
David Cohen, are not. 2 officials at the CIA, told the conference that this means more resources will be devoted to China, different parts of the agency will coordinate more closely with their work on China, and Burns will hold a weekly meeting devoted entirely to that country.
“What we realized was that we needed to step up and synchronize our efforts around China,” he said.
This comes as the US-China rivalry heats up on several fronts, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping talking more and more about his country’s growing global influence and what he sees as America’s decline
The US intelligence community wants to know what Xi thinks about Taiwan, where tensions are rising. China’s recent hypersonic missile test seems to have taken the US by surprise. And there’s a race going on for cutting-edge technologies, like artificial intelligence.
Critics say these repeated threatening warnings about China could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, heightening tensions with Beijing and causing the US to overlook other potential flashpoints from Russia. , Iran to North Korea.
David Cohen offered this response: “I will hasten to add that we are the Central Intelligence Agency. We are not the Chinese Intelligence Agency.”
Still, the conference was a living demonstration of how the US intelligence community is pivoting to China.
China’s Massive Intelligence Operations Focused on Technology
Current and former officials say that no country – not even the Soviet Union at its height – spied on the US as comprehensively as China does today.
“They have more people than we can ever dream of. They will collect as much data as possible, put it into a big data warehouse and use artificial intelligence, machine processing to target. destroy us” said Larry Pfeiffer, a former CIA chief of staff. “I mean, it’s scary.”
China pursues traditional espionage targets – government and military secrecy. But Beijing wants more. China is unique in its far-reaching, systematic approach to gathering cutting-edge technology from US companies and universities.
So how should America protect itself?
“Our system is really set up against a nation-state. It’s focused on illegal things, things that have direct application in the military. What we’re seeing now. , and especially with a focus on academia, in commerce,” Anna Puglisic, a former China-focused intelligence official. She currently works at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technologies. “It’s a very, very different threat than we were in the past.”
She says that academia in particular has a shared spirit and is often reluctant to impose restrictions.
“We get a lot of feedback on that because (scholars) will say, ‘Well, this is open research,'” she said. “And that’s right. We don’t want to come from that. But it’s important that our academics have a choice when they share their information and when they don’t.”
China had more than 300,000 students at American universities, far more than any other country, before the COVID pandemic decimated the numbers. Many research in high-tech fields and participate in significant research.
Bill Evanina, who has led numerous government investigations into intellectual property theft, says the US shouldn’t close its doors to students taking top flights from China and elsewhere. However, he argues, universities need to better understand the risks. After leaving government this year, he founded a company that helps schools defend themselves in STEM fields.
“It’s a small percentage of people that we have to care about, the graduate STEM world, where (the Chinese government) is looking to gather research and intelligence that will help the military,” he said. team and their academic world.
A difficult target to spy on
Another key point is that China is notoriously a difficult target for US spying due to its tight internal security and pervasive surveillance.
The US may want to gather more intelligence on China, but it’s hard to make that happen. Paul Kolbe, a former CIA officer who now runs the Intelligence Project at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
“You can’t flip the switch and suddenly there’s a steady stream of Chinese assets, massive inroads into the government’s internal reserve,” says Kolbe. “You have to develop officers who know the language, the culture, and can establish the deep relationships of trust necessary to carry out agency operations.”
US intelligence agencies underwent an overhaul after the 9/11 attacks. Agencies that had looked to the Soviet Union and Russia for decades suddenly found themselves in need of Arabic speakers with extensive knowledge of Islamic extremism.
So where does the CIA recruit these new officers? The ideal candidate would be a fluent Mandarin speaker, with an advanced degree in artificial intelligence – and willing to work for a government salary.
“It’s a unicorn, isn’t it? It’s not easy, but they are out there,” said Cynthia Strand, who retired last year after 35 years at the CIA.
She is currently working at a private company called Lining, which uses artificial intelligence to sort through huge volumes of data, find specific information, then summarize and translate it from Mandarin to English.
“Imagine if you had a large staff of talented interns,” says Strand. “You want to put them on tasks that they can sharpen and learn from, and leave the higher thought work to people who have been training and practicing for a long time.”
She says that human intelligence is still important, but technology continues to evolve.
Strand added: “No one, not a single human, no matter how special they are, can use and understand the volume of data available. Machines can do it wonderfully.” .
It’s just one example of how technology is redefining the engineering industry for a new era – one that’s still here, she said.
Greg Myre is NPR’s national security correspondent. Follow him @gregmyre1.
