Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer Book Discussion

right well thank you everyone for for coming today really delighted to be holding this discussion on a I think a self-evidently important topic and this is a great reason to be to be discussing this we're here obviously to highlight promote discuss this this great new book which just came out on Tuesday I believe the third was the official launch date and this is about a topic which is incredibly relevant important but as the authors discuss understudied and and underemphasized so i don't want to waste too much time here with a big long intro i will only have an intro so i can highlight the work of aruna next to me who has been doing really fantastic reporting for The Wall Street Journal on the same topic and I'm going to quote from one of her stories from April this year because it sets us up nicely we're in a piece co-authored with her colleague Dustin Volt's she the first sentence says Chinese spies are increasingly recruiting US intelligence officers as part of a widening sustained campaign to shake loose government secrets current and former US officials say China has also grown bolder and more successful in traditional spy games including targeting less conventional recruits and she quotes the now infamous statement by Christopher Rea the FBI that no country poses a broader more severe intelligence collection threat than China they're doing it through Chinese intelligence services through state-owned enterprises through ostensibly private companies through graduate students and researchers through a variety of actors all working on behalf of China and finally and this is one of my favorite quotes from the piece by Rob Joyce he says Russia is the hurricane it comes in fast and hard China is climate change long slow pervasive I hope and I suspect that all of the three people in this stage here will have disagreements both on some of these statements between each other about this issue of Chinese espionage about what we think we know about organs like the Ministry of State Security the MSS what some of the myths are that we that we believe that it that aren't true so without further ado I'm going to turn it over to the two authors Peter Madison and Matt Brazil what we're gonna do is we're gonna turn it to them for 20-25 minutes they're gonna walk us through the book main findings how it was organized how this beautiful partnership came about and then I will moderate a discussion here with all three of them on these issues and then we'll save some time for Q&A I will plant the seed now that the Q&A period is primarily if not solely about actual questions so as you're thinking of the long discursive comment you want to make I'd ask that you email it to us instead of using precious time here we really want to want to hear everyone's questions so we can hear about them so be thinking of tight tight questions to ask when we get to the Q&A period and with that I will turn it over to Matt and Peter first thank you very much Jude and CSIS for for hosting us today and thank you also to to Glenn Howard and the Jamestown Foundation as well as Glenn Griffith and the Naval Institute press for for believing in the project and carrying it forward a quick disclaimer since I am in a in a government position I am I am speaking here solely in a personal capacity I've taken leave to be here I'm off the clock so my views are are my own and do not represent the congressional executive Commission on China its staff or any of its members so if you're going to quote what I say I hope you'll at least acknowledge that this is being said in a personal capacity and does not represent any of the people with whom I'm either work for or so I'm associated I I hate to sort of downplay expectations for the book it's not it's not a gripping spy thriller and that's that's my intent it is meant to be a bit of a bit of a reference guide and a primer an introduction and we were we made a number of choices that I think were rather conservative and what we what we chose to include and the standards by which we why we chose cases or the or the entries in part because there's a real need I think to demystify Chinese intelligence and not say oh there's this you know 5,000 year history or 3,000 years depending how you want to count it you know this that invoking since has a sort of mystical embodiment of intelligence operations but let's start from the things that we we can see and that we know and and sort of build from build outward from there this is a this is a starting point not not the final answer and in that respect we tried to sort of sketch out in our introductory essay so what what took place in the development of Chinese Communists the intelligence from its origins inside the party in the 1920s to sort of where we are where we are today and why the Chinese intelligence services and hand methods would look the way they do for the need to demystify I think there's no further way no better place to start than the idea that's been kicking around for a very long time a lot of grains of sand approach to intelligence sometimes called a mosaic approach or or any of a host of kind of tentacle-like metaphors for describing what what the Chinese doing or what the intelligence services are doing and it got passed around by a little anecdote saying that if the grains of sand on a beach are into any of the information products that you want one to gather the Russians would have a submarine surface in the middle of the night asbestos team would come ashore they'd pick up a few buckets of sand they'd go back to the submarine and be gone by Dawn the United States would you know Park a satellite in geosynchronous orbit pick up all sorts of signals maybe throw in some masts and sensors along the approaches to the beach and then you know go from there the Chinese on the other hand would send a thousand bathers and when they left they take out their towels and their beach baskets and India and China would know more about it than anyone else there's a slight problem with that with that analogy most notably that national security information isn't a public beach right you don't get to send a thousand bathers you can't even get a thousand Americans onto the onto that public beach or onto that beach in a very easy way because of the security clearance process so but this view because it has a nice catchy little story and sort of gained purchased and gathered around and it had a few problems with it you know the first was that they said the Chinese intelligence services basically did not use tradecraft you know they didn't they didn't use traditional methods of recruiting sources or handling sources or you know maintaining the relationship between case officers and agents and the passage of information through you know covert communications through dead drops and other things now they're they're certainly distinct differences in styles but that's not really true and it never has been the second was that amateurs formed the core of what Chinese intelligence did and I think Matt's gonna speak a little bit to this but in a lot of these cases and if you go through if you go through the book and you look at sort of the hard the hard espionage cases you don't see you don't see amateurs leading the way when the intelligence services are there it's a third point that I think is important about this is that it conflated basically any Chinese entity with being Chinese intelligence so when people said Chinese intelligence acting this way Chinese intelligence meant something very very different than what it means when we say Russian intelligence or US intelligence and the rough equivalent and be saying if we you know when we say US intelligence we tend to mean the US intelligence community specifically or maybe even a handful of sort of core agencies within that intelligence community but when people are using Chinese intelligence they were pretty much saying any Chinese person connected to the PRC who does anything that looks like collecting information or technology or or or influence that's a pretty broad definition and it certainly isn't a cognate when we if we were to say you know US intelligence and started saying oh actually we include both and JPMorgan and every hedge fund and anything that an American does abroad could our friends at The Wall Street Journal you know they must be intelligence because that's how we're doing it you know the system is set up differently but that's the wrong way to do it and again that speaks to why we chose kind of a conservative approach about what we what we included the other the other downside of this is that it it creates the notion of every Chinese person as a potential spy and whatever you think of that proposition that's not really a it's not a practically useful way for assessing risk it doesn't help you understand what parts of the system are doing what things and you know has a notable feature of you know not really being true to say that the Chinese intelligence services have had more success recruiting Chinese people or ethnic Chinese nationals abroad you know that part you can you can see but to say that that's been solely the focus or that that's where they were really putting all of their effort I don't think accurately captures accurately captures the history so I'll just sort of sum that sum that up with saying yeah the Chinese intelligence services have always had tradecraft you know we said Bernard versico case for example the Larry would hide chin case is a these are great classic cases that are that are detailed there's a case officer agent relationship there are third country meeting points there are third country places for dropping off dropping off data for a courier to pick up there are people going to borders and getting whisked across and not having stamps in their passport so they can go go have meetings this is traditional and classic tradecraft and Larry butai chin case runs from sometime in the late 1940s to 1985 so that encompasses a pretty long history of of Chinese intelligence I'd also make the point that for years what we've seen from from the Chinese intelligence services is that the scope scale and potential impact you know because of China's role in the world because of the security situation in East Asia because of the future of Taiwan because of a whole variety of of things it's that scope scale and potential impact of Chinese intelligence operations that was a real that was a real threat and it wasn't necessarily the operational sophistication that however is changing and I think you know you could look at the periods that's covered and covered in the book and see you know fairly sophisticated sort of revolutionary period of intelligence the middle years of the PRC not necessarily being all that great and more recently an emerging sophistication that is on par with a world-class intelligence service and I'd atribute that to to to two things the first is that when the Ministry of State Security was created in 1983 it basically was a bunch of survivors from purges or rather a handful of survivors of the three purges of Chinese intelligence and a lot of police officers who were told one day that you now work for an intelligence service not exactly the best way to train people or to give them a lot of skills so again should we really be surprised that people who aren't trained for foreign intelligence have better luck with people who they can communicate with directly and more readily and have sort of shared sort of cultural references and I don't I don't think it's particularly surprising but beginning in the 1990s and I think Matt and I were fairly significant beneficiaries of this the Ministry of State Security and the PLA actually started some major publication projects to talk about the Revolutionary history of Chinese intelligence and to sort of bring out the literature and say look this is what we did and in one of the biographies that we cited of Lee kinome the author talks about a meaning that they had in the early 1990s with the Minister of State Security who said look you need to write this book because our people don't know their history they don't know what they're a part of and we need you know we need to build that esprit de corps of the service so that we understand that they're joining sort of a long and glorious and you know that there's some along associated with with being a ministry to state security professional and the forward to that book is written by the ministry of state securities general office and it explicitly says this book is is for you to study and to sort of see the history of leakin all in this case and you know what are the lessons for you and the modern era of and for the practice of intelligence the other thing that the Ministry of State Security did is the is essentially instituting a new training program they realized that if you were relying on college graduates who had majored in languages or in computer science you didn't necessarily have the professional skill set that you would hope that they would have when they graduated and there seems to have been an effort begun sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s in different parts of the MSS to start recruiting people earlier and younger to say look if you're interested in this career here are the things that you should do here's the way you should study languages here's the assistance we can offer so that they spent their time in school much more productively in a more focused way to bring those skills into the service and I've heard some reports that haven't I can't entirely confirm about creating different kind of internship programs so that young officers would get time in companies so that if they were passing themselves off as professional business people that they would actually look and talk and sound like a professional business person unfortunately you know as some of the pitches that are discussed and I think chapter six illustrate you know business people don't have sort of private meetings in their hotel rooms you know they do it in the lounge or in the bar so not entirely successful but it is you know for those of you who have bumped in to a younger generation Ministry of State Security officer there is a much greater degree of sophistication more language skills an ability to interact that was not there 20 or 10 years ago 20 years ago and certainly not 30 years ago the other reason I would say that there's been a big change in the sophistication particularly for the ministry of state security but also to some extent for the pla they saw they saw the sir movement into cyberspace and the storage of digitization of data and its storage as a real opportunity and I'd like to I'd call this a dreadnought moment in signals intelligence and close and technical operations because previously if you wanted to pick up signals you had to have an industrial like infrastructure you had to have you had to have satellites you had to have dishes you had to have a global network you had to have computing power to do decryption because it had gone long the encryption had gone long beulah beyond what a human being could could readily uncover and that was a that was a huge capacity from which China was largely cut off for most of the for most of the PRC's existence and it was only in the in the late 70s and early 80s that had started to get access to some of this but it was still you know hot you know fairly far behind but what this what this offered and I think the PLA wrote about it well and the MSS actually did it well was to see this opportunity and and to invest in creating sort of a public and private infrastructure centered around a handful of sort of MSS bureaus particular that created an ecosystem for both the defense and the offense and therefore you had interchange you had contractors you had you had the benefits of the private sector with the the ability to keep people focused and on target in government and I think this is one of the reasons why while everyone was yelling about the PLA and sort of appearing in the mid to late 2000s you know breaking into places and running off with a lot of data no one had actually figured out when the minute where the Ministry of State Security was and that attribution came much later largely because they were they were much more successful than than most of the PLA was and this this movement I think is important also for close and technical operations you know the idea of getting a bug inside someplace you had to get it in you had to find a way to to cap sure communications you had to find a way to exfiltrate the data you know it's a complicated process and it meant that you know for the bug that was discovered inside the US State Department in 1999 you actually had to be able to take a photograph of the wooden sideboard in the conference room you had to know the quality of your picture to recognize the wood grain and the true color of it so that when you recreated it for when you came back in that you actually had it accurately captured you had to have the skills to create the batteries to fit in that kind of constrained space you had to have a microphone you had to have a an exfiltration plan for getting that data out and to say it and to try to save your batteries so that they weren't just running and using up your energy while it was in the building and in this big shift is in a sense the artisanship and craftsmanship that went into those devices was the skillset that that a handful of countries really had to do well the Chinese didn't necessarily have those same experiences in large part because when they did it domestically they controlled the environment and for many years they had outlawed technical surveillance countermeasures so those were only in the in the hands of the government not and not in the hands of anyone else so that but when you look at what it looks like today you know using code the artisanship is in is in the is in the software code not in the delivery device for that you know it's a USB Drive it's you know yes you can come up with ways to hide it and there's some skill and the heart in that but it is a very different set of skills and it's much easier to teach where we are now today than where we were before this this dreadnought moment if you will in signals intelligence and last my last point before turning it over to Matt I think is that it's very important to understand the institutions that are involved you you know intelligence officers for the Ministry of State Security for the PLA they're part of large bureaucracies right and bureaucracies work in particular way agree ways they reward particular behaviors and you know they may or may not have you know they may or may not be as centralized as we as we tend to think the Ministry of State Security for example in a few reading some of the cases in the book you see some some tradecraft that is quite effective and quite useful and you also see some boneheaded things that you wonder like well why would we take the Ministry of State Security seriously and the you know one of the answers and why it's important to understand the institution is that the Ministry of State Security itself is a central ministry thirty-one provincial units and dozens and dozens of local state security bureaus all of these organizations hire on their own so should we really be surprised that the Shanghai State Security Bureau hiring the graduates of Shanghai universities look slightly different than say the onwe State Security Department should we really be surprised that given the sort of the breadth and variety of what's a place in China that that an organisation that is this diverse would look sort of look all over the mountain and you it brings up an important point where you can't just say that oh there's sophistication here and there's not sophistication here and use that to judge what the services but you wouldn't get to this point if you didn't sort of understand that organizational makeup understand a bit of that history of how people came up and may have been police officers first and then intelligence officers and that we're really back getting back to a generation of people that have been intelligence officers first rather than rather than something else well thank you very much and I also would like to thank the Jamestown foundation and the people who sponsored us to complete this work which where we felt sometimes like we were hacking our way through the jungle but here we are so I won't say that I'm going to take you through a tour of the history I'm gonna take you through a tour of the violent and exciting past that led to today so 1927 the year that the Chinese Communist Party and the Guangdong split was the year of intelligence failures for the Chinese Communist Party because they had virtually nothing in place they had assassins and they had VIP protection people and they had a few spies here and there but they didn't really have a structure and so the nationalist coup d'etat of April of that year came as complete surprise and indeed at the end of the year in December the Canton uprising Mao Zedong called that and he didn't say intelligence failure but he said we failed because we knew virtually nothing about the enemy and so it was in this context the CCP founded its first professional organization and it got off to a rocky start it was hard to recruit agents at first but then they recruited their first concrete useful spiring which is referred to today as the three heroes of the dragon's lair Lika Nong was mentioned earlier he was out of those three people including Lee as the ringleader he's the one who survived more than a few years and indeed he went on to lead CCP intelligence in the early years of the People's Republic so the resulting structure that that followed with intelligence people knuckle-draggers of course everybody needs knuckle draggers analysts and people who do communications and technical work that resulting structure basically survives into the present and it's of course changed a great deal but the special services section that was founded at that time had successes that saved a lot of lives of communist operatives however when their boss defected over to the Nationalists in 1931 that was a disaster his name was Lucien Jong and to this day like one of my distant relatives who's a black sheep in the family you can't find a picture of him so in 1935 by that time although it's been depicted as a time of brilliant operations by clever individuals actually there was a slow-rolling disaster for the Chinese Communists as the Nationalists cleared their people out of the cities and in 1935 the special services section was abolished and this is about the time that Mao Zedong started to have concrete strong influence over intelligence operations and his focus was enemies within if you've studied China you've probably heard of the Fujian incident in 1931-32 when he purged a great deal of the Red Army of everybody who was opposed to him and this was one of the first what the Chinese today call the first of three left deviations they don't say that these are all driven by Mao Zedong himself but they were those those are the three left deviations that are acknowledged today are the Changjo or salvation campaign and yet on in 1943 and of course the Cultural Revolution and in between those in 1955 there was a gigantic purge of intelligence people when Mao Zedong decided that one of his chief spies from the revolution named pan Hun yen was actually a traitor because he hadn't reported a meeting with a with a an agent a big agent now that left a legacy of purges to solve problems and of course we see that today even though dung Xiao ping declared that the age of political campaigns is over with when when he ascended to become China's paramount leader today of course we see anti-corruption campaign that's being used to purge the enemies of Xi Jinping and has left many others intact but the point is that these purges of corrupt individuals that are going on now have also taken in intelligence people and indeed these different purges that I just mentioned each have cleaned out the ranks Chinese Communist intelligence and had very severe temporary effects now part of that legacy to that we see today is that areas during the Revolution that were under control of Chinese Communists and in the People's Republic it was a toxic environment for enemy spies for people who wanted to come in and spy on the current government and this was a continual drive and it was it was nearly impossible to penetrate eastern China during the the beginning of the PRC regime a notable exception was the ambush on 25 October 1961 in Tibet of an army column by u.s. sponsored guerrillas that resulted in the capture of a 1600 pages of classified information which you can find in libraries today but that was the exception to prove the rule that was Tibet it wasn't Han China so this strong toxicity for counterintelligence counterintelligence toxicity that stops the PRC from being a normal environment to infiltrate and spy has made it easier interestingly for the PRC to recruit foreign spies themselves because people who go to China study Chinese people who are tourists there's a baseline of surveillance which we discuss in the book of interest to people who have to travel to China or do business there there's a baseline of surveillance that that everybody goes through and indeed there are very clear triggers that lead to focusing on an individual if there's any indication that there's somehow suspicious like if they're working for what the Chinese call a Ming ganda Don Wei a sensitive unit sensitive company that has technology or if you're a Tibetan or if you're Weger so it's easier to spot assess and recruit foreigners in China under these conditions and I wanted to do a footnote and point to the two FBI videos people have made fun of but actually they're very illustrative the two FBI videos which many of you may have already seen are called game of pawns and company man in game of pawns we see a dramatized version of the Glenn Duffy Shriver case in company man we see a dramatized version of some industrial espionage and the difference between the two is that in the game of pawns the Glenn Duffy shriver case we're looking at a professional operation in company man the industrial espionage case we're looking at a state-owned enterprise following an amateurish program to try to get some industrial secrets so with that I'll say one more word about influence operations because that question always comes up so there's always a mix-up by the way in CCP history between the underground and the intelligence people by 1938-39 intelligence had become a core a core core operation a core business of the party along with propaganda military work and organizational work and so in the offices that the PR said that the CCP had nationalist cities at the beginning of the of the United Front period which were like little embassies there were people from each of those departments including intelligence and the intelligence people then were often the ones who were called upon to pursue influence operations red star over China which many of you may have read by Edgar snow is an example of an extremely successful info it's operation and who was involved in that nobody less than song Ching Ling Madame Sun yat-sen who was at that time not only trying to influence people to see the benefits of the Communist revolution but she was also passing code books to local agents and one of her chief contacts indeed was was dong gen Wu yeah an agent of the special services section so with that I'll conclude and let's do some questions oh great well I want to bring Arun into the conversation now and and broaden this out of it I think I'll first just a couple follow-up questions based on on Matt what you and Peter have been talking about Peter one of the things you'd mentioned is about bureaucratic politics or bureaucratic rules and behaviors so my first question is broadly looking at Chinese intelligence as a system it's obviously operating under a political system controlled by a Marxist Leninist party which will give it particular characteristics can you talk a little bit about what is it like to be an intelligence service operating under the Communist Party of China what's distinct about how its its bureaucratic incentives are as opposed to intelligence services in say modern democratic systems I think there are two that I can speak to that that come directly out of the research for this for this book the first would be you know for example if you've read the news about what's been taking place in Hong Kong and the Chinese press statements about it or the spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the People's Daily they've they've painted all of the disturbances is coming from the black hand of the United States and we often attribute this to some sort of paranoia but it's actually kind of a logical outgrowth of the ideological system right the Chinese Communist Party says it has a unique grasp of historical trends that it's that it's Theory there four gives them unique policy insight to create to craft policies that are scientifically adapted to the sort of the trends of the times and that if something goes wrong well then it wasn't the theory it wasn't the science it wasn't the analysis somebody must have done something so that that that mentality creates a drive on the part of the intelligence services to essentially ask paranoid questions and it's not a it's not as where this where the difference is is not a question of what is taking place it's a you know where is the interference happening who is interfering and where are they doing it and they're just searching for a piece of evidence that may or may not exist and they may or may not have the willingness to pass that up the chain to say look you know we looked we had good sources and they tell us nothing and they say nothing like this is taking place but because of I think of ideological system that's a very difficult thing to do a second meant a second piece of it that's that's interesting is that when you look at say the Ministry of State Security I am unaware in any of the organizational charts that I found in any of the ones that I've tried to build up from interviews with with people there's nothing there that says there's an analytic department or an analytic Bureau right the China Institutes of contemporary international relations are more closely more closely resemble the open-source enterprise than they do you know the Directorate of intelligence at CIA and that in that absence of analysis there's I was told by by a former intelligence officer from outside the United States that in his services view analysis was done at the ministerial level or or the vice minister's office where someone who'd been in the service for a long time and was trusted and had sort of the personal protection of someone at least at the level of a vice minister that that was where analysis could be done and and put through the system so what this what happens at sort of a more practical level is that you can see and I think a couple of these cases are just are discussed in the book you can see pitches to people who are who are academics who are journalists who are sort of other kinds of investigators and people ask like why would you know why would I get pitched or why would this take place and the answer is well because you can talk to people and therefore when you write a report if you write a report from the Ministry of State Security saying this is my assessment of these things the Ministry of State Security can pass it up and say look we're just the messenger the analysis is from the source not us so don't blame us for for what he says in order if the answer is wrong I just want to follow up on that and read from page 21 the language Chinese intelligence uses reflects its Marxist Leninist and revolutionary heritage the lexicon suggests and has been borne out in interviews with former officials who have had routine contacts with Chinese counterparts that the intelligence services are bastions of faith in the CCP it's maybe a naive question but is that is that an asset or a liability having having that level of firmness of belief in the in the party and its ideology both right I mean the downside is are the two the two things that I talked about the upside is that you don't get a lot of you don't get a lot of defections right your Mac the question for you is as I was reading through the book over the weekend the the evolution of intelligence and the intelligence services through the mail period but what I found interesting was through the reform and opening period and can you talk a little bit as China's opening out to the world and and we see dung shopping is is times man of the year Coca Cola blue jeans the whole thing what was happening in terms of intelligence services was it becoming you know more cuddly and friendlier or is that a misnomer well none other than jobs a young scene today is a martyred hero of of logic and so on was the person who made the speech advocating the founding of a Ministry of State Security and talking about all the enemies that were coming into China because of reform and opening indeed if you step back a few years to 1973 when there was a party Congress I think it was the tenth that affirmed mouth full control and affirmed the goals of the Cultural Revolution everybody who was brought in for the car Congress was brought in on in underground passages and the reason that they did that seems to be that by that time the Beijing hotel was full of Americans and others they could look out and see people coming into the Great Hall the people and they wanted to keep that Congress nice and secret so as people began to as more foreigners began to come into China I think this was a turning point that that then was followed a course in 1985 by the defection of Yu Jiang saw you Chung Chung and which was a big problem of course the first really big trader from the Chinese side maybe just four times I want to sort of bring us up to the the very present now and and in the introduction to the book you talked about this period in in 2010 to 2012 where the United States found suddenly that its chinese assets went dark and you'd in the book you said that that's because they've been a compromise and upwards of 20 Chinese agents who are working for the CIA were executed you know Runa you've been covering this some of the cases that are now being prosecuted here in the United States and what I wanted to ask you about because it may or may not tie directly into that is the case of Jerry Lee who was just sentenced to 19 years in prison just a few weeks ago so I wonder if you could talk about that case why it's important and I wonder if you could hazard a guess as to the connection between Jerry Lee and this pretty disastrous intelligence failure of 2010 so this is an important case of a long time former CIA officer charged and pled guilty to conspiring to provide classified information to the Chinese government the connection to the deaths of these sources for the CIA is not totally clear but at his sentencing a few weeks ago prosecutors made the case that he had the names of eight sources written in his notebook that he had kept with him and had with him when he was at a hotel in the United States when his room was searched and and they also made the case that he had gotten around $800,000 in cash that he had deposited into his bank account in Hong Kong over the course of 6070 deposits he could not really explain who gave them this money why he got it and so they were alleged prosecutors were alleging that he must have given the MSS information at least about these sources and other information to get that much money from them his attorneys were denying that he did actually give them any information and so what the connection is is a little unclear the the attorneys were saying that the government never gave them a harm assessment and to their knowledge the sources that he had listed in his notebook were not actually harmed we don't exactly know if that's true or not the government said they don't perform harm assessments until after these kinds of cases are closed so the actual connection to this pretty catastrophic leak of sources for the CIA is a little bit unclear but some officials are definitely drawing a link between the two you know the sudden upsurge in I think concern that you're seeing coming out of the US government and this I think is a question for everyone and I also like you know Matt Peter if you have any thoughts on the this this 2010 period but is this because we're seeing an uptick in actions by the Chinese we've got cases of Kevin Malory we've got Ron Hansen got a number these cases that are now being prosecuted is this an uptick or do we just know more now and are paying more attention to activities by Chinese intelligence I'll start with you and if you have any any thoughts I think there seems to be definitely an uptick in the number of cases that they've brought lately and there seem to be some concern that this is driven in part by China's specific efforts to get a lot of information about American government employees like the OPM breach got a lot of information combine that with credit card information that they get financial information they know who to target all of the people you mentioned had financial problems and were specifically targeted with offers of cash and so I think there's been a really big concern that China has gotten better about figuring out what the pressure points are in the system and who might be vulnerable but I don't think they can draw a very clear distinction between the two hmm I I would put it down to more aggression more money and more sophistication and certainly the it's been it's been a fairly significant part of Chinese intelligence practice or if you would use if you chose to use the word doctrine if you will to build up some massive databases of people of potential interest this is actually the original most now the name used in mystery of State Security just to describe United Front work and it's in the ministries contribution to that that issue of political mobilization and influence as Social Affairs and Social Affairs work back in the 1930s meant basically mapping mapping Chinese society for for journalists for academics for you know other intellectuals who who had a public who had a public platform and how do you how do you find them and influence them who were who are the important donors in the KMT who were the ones who keep things working and in dealing with the United States for many years they never had this you know they they were cut off then there was access then how do you you know how do you start mapping the society that you're not necessarily that familiar with you can pick out the elite that you're coming in contact with but necessarily knowing what it is sort of at the lower levels is a much more difficult proposition and you know where before they've sort of worked on rate on retirees as sort of a that's sort of a key focal point because they're not they're not going through another security background check they're not having a report their their finances they're not having to go through serious scrutiny this was a way that that they could try to get that understood that same understanding but it's a slow process you know and on Taiwan they had you know essentially seventy years to do it and whereas for dealing with the United States they didn't have that and where when you when you take the compromises about OPM also got some insurance which is the Google company that holds the largest federal insurance I mean the United breach here all of a sudden you're putting together a much much different data set of people and activities and you're able to map that on to who are who are employees and certain US government agencies don't hold their personnel data inside OPM so now you just have to map that against some of the other things that are available and you can identify who they are and where they were and once you have that kind of mapping it's a lot easier just to go out and start chasing next I think a question that is not only about not only about Chinese intelligence operations but is this larger question or dealing with influence operations and this is this tension that we seem to have between having an open society but also protecting national security and one of the threat vectors which has been identified by the US government in particular has been Chinese students and Chinese scientists and so and I know you've been you've been working on this as well I wanted to get your thoughts on what is the can you level set where the current state of debate is on the US government in terms of how big the threat is what actions are being taken and I think importantly I'd like to to got everyone's thoughts on this have we accurately calibrated the risk or we re spilling too far into overreaction phase I think on the FBI side at least the concerns about talent programs and the efforts at US research universities are one of their biggest concerns I mean you saw them you saw the FBI get up at a Senate hearing a couple weeks ago and basically say that they had been slow to understand this threat and they wish they had recognized the scope of it sooner and you don't often see them come out and acknowledge any kind of missteps like that and so I think that probably speaks to just how big a threat they do think it is in terms of the current state of play I think the past couple years they've spent a lot of time going out to US universities trying to talk to them about these issues and kind of not quite calibrating their message correctly because they keep talking about concerns about theft and then you have the universities ask them will show us what you're talking about what what is this theft when what we do here is essentially for the public and given the nature of a lot of the stuff they're looking at they don't want to get into specifics they don't want to share classified information and so I think there you have a bit of talking past each other and I think you've seen the FBI try to recalibrate how they're talking about this and getting other US government agencies to kind of take the lead the funding agencies to be talking about it more as conflicts of interest and concerns about research integrity and things like that but I do think it is one of the biggest concerns that even a FBI director Ray has talking talked a lot about just following up on that what solutions do you hear FBI US government giving to universities to fix this problem are they essentially saying this is you just tighten up the ship or are they actually coming with practical solutions that universities can implement I think as a baseline they're at least asking them to have a full accounting of the kind of research funding that all of their professors and scientists are getting and to be very upfront about what funding they might be getting from these Chinese talent programs because a lot of it was not disclosed previously so I think that's kind of a baseline that they're starting with and then kind of escalating from there that Peter you have any thoughts on this idea of scientists and students and how we might balance protection with openness or if that's even the right trade-off to be thinking of hmm well the infrastructure that's been set up by the Chinese side to bring people back is apparently very extensive it includes helping people move their stuff back it includes recruitment efforts for scholars who are in the middle of research of course besides professional operations there's probably a great deal of operations that are entrepreneurial in nature and so when it's that way then it looks a bit less suspicious but I think the key element that I hope is developed further is that when a government agency pays for research that it's made clear to the researchers that they shouldn't be doing anything that runs against the contract I'll just I'll just say that from my perspective were we're in a better place than we were ten years ago in the way that the US government is able to talk to outsiders about this the fact that so much of it is saying well trust us this is in the classified realm I don't think sort of fits well because there's own awful lot of this information that's completely available from unclassified sources and that is you know that that data is not being presented to explain in very concrete terms what's taking place I think is a is a very significant shortcoming because there aren't there simply aren't easy answers for how to say how to handle visas for example you know the US government you know asks universities to say take a look at what at what the bed at whose coming and the university says well you gave them a visa that's you know that's on you but if you know how the visa process is done you realize that you know thousands of these things get flagged as potential problems I think out of the you know something like three hundred and fifty thousand Chinese students that are in the United States sometimes the the sort of automatically flagged that should be followed up or measured you know in the sixty to eighty thousand range all right there's no human way to follow that up it's being put onto people with full time jobs to say hey can you take a look at a handful of these right and we do that because we have a presumption of acceptance but if we're in this place where you know people throw up their hands and say well we're not even gonna bother then all of a sudden we're talking about a presumption of denial and just all the sudden tens of thousands just go away some perhaps fairly many probably not and it's a blunt you know that that kind of system for flagging things is a relatively blunt system so if we're not able to find some medium and that in that conversation I don't think we're quite there yet because if we were we'd be able to the US government be able to talk and much more open away at an unclassified level about the nature of the talent programs and what's in what's taking place is this still an interagency process with a time limit or you can object or say nothing I'm not entirely sure I want to open up to questions just one final one because the quotes good and I want to see if it's actually true which is this we see this dichotomy brought up a lot as well and influence operations this contrast between Russia and China and and a supposedly qualitatively different feel to the way Russia does things versus China that this quote this Russia is the hurricane that comes in fast and hard China's climate change long slow pervasive I want to get thought it's not you could ignore the Russia part of this if you don't have an answer to it but on the China side does that accurately describe what we're dealing with and more importantly is that the static way we should be thinking about this looking forward or do we expect an evolution and how China is going to be looking at the u.s. especially given we're entering this now much more volatile fractures period which is likely to be a new permanence for a while anyone so I've been asked the question more than a few times over the over the last couple of years about how to conserve compare and contrast the u.s. or China and Russia and on the intelligence front you know it's I feel like the distinctions are small you know there's little bits little differences on tradecraft but when you look at the cases you see all of the traditional motivations that are exploited you see efforts to to coerce people into spying you see people who are paid a lot of money into spying and if you're doing that you want results right you don't put $800,000 down because you think you're gonna get something someday right if you're putting that kind of money down you think that you're getting value immediately so that's not necessarily you know a ten twenty year this er vision of how we sort of cultivate someone and maybe and maybe get something out of it on the influence side though this issue of political influence is that on the Russia side and in the Soviet days the intelligence services played a much more important role they were sort of some of the main sort of executives of the policy they played a crucial role in planning it they had the capability to to push ideas out there on the Chinese side I think you have to say that the Ministry of State Security or the military intelligence departments play a supporting role and that it's held at more senior levels within the party you know handled at the Politburo level quite directly and that from central government or central party departments and not from the ministries and you can see that the Ministry of State Security like the Ministry of Culture of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Education does contribute to this work and there and they can play a critical role in it in part because they've got capabilities that say the Ministry of Education wouldn't have but they're not the leading role and they're not the designer of the policy and they're not necessarily pitching up ideas in the same way that you could see in the Russian context the other point I'd make is that the only time the Chinese services ever acted like the KGB was 19 42 to 44 and other than that they've been under much more strict party control they haven't been purging the party although lately of course MSS has been involved in some anti corruption investigations parting thoughts comments criticisms anyway all right well why don't we go right into Q a capital Q question sir right here in the in the third row in right in the aisle here Mike Mike's coming down your way I'm Jim man I wanted to come back to the set the late 70s 80s period and ask because that was a period when the United States and China were engaged in very specific intelligence cooperation Afghanistan Cambodia and in setting up a missile tracking system in some obscure province called Shin John there was a lot of work done on that and my question is to what extent did the US help and you know and people like Bill Casey are making secret trips to China to what extent did the United States help in the development of Chinese intelligence either technically or in managing a new MSS well I can only give a limited answer certainly on the technical side yes there was help from the US as far as humid goes I'm not aware of any such help indeed I believe that the two sides have always kept in touch but I don't think the US has ever trained the Chinese side like the Soviets did in the early days of the PRC Alex wait for the talking stick to come your way thanks Alex boa he was trying to Commission so Peter you said earlier in your remarks at China has world-class intelligence capabilities he also mentioned this and I think Chapter six especially with the fusion of human and technical means could you explain a bit what you mean by world-class in this context does that mean parity with us does it mean something better that we can't do or something else I guess I would define world classes as being able to you know one handle sensitive sources in sensitive government departments that have to undergo the security checkup and might be subject to some serious scrutiny and to be able to do that you know in a hostile environment the second would be that their that their proficiency is not limited to a specific sort of geographic place but that had that there is a that there is a sort of a global scope maybe not everywhere all the time but certainly on a able to operate in a variety of different contexts and on the issue of mingling human and technical it's you know I guess the way that I would put it is think of the way that you would get to an air-gapped Network right you need you need to recruit a source who has access to that network and can carry a device across it and have it you know either deliver deliver a sort of program themselves or to access that network and bring things out and be able to conceal that activity and there were a couple of Taiwanese cases where they where the Chinese intelligence services showed that they could do that I'm David Crandall retired from Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration where I worked on the science side of nuclear weapons part of the time and I now work with some Chinese people Chinese scientists who work on the nuclear weapons side but do open science as well we work on exchange is only open science it my security clearance information was stolen twice through OPM but it's clear that the people I've worked with have never seen it so I'm interested in how did they use it and are they as compartmentalized as we are the answer would be like we are yes and no in part because I don't think we have a clear grasp of how of how things get shared across and crossed the entire system right everyone who's interacted with with Chinese government interlocutors at some point has seen you know a little bio across the table that's been prepared so there's obviously some sharing of that kind of information and that it's accumulated across government not just the intelligence services and as is put in when you look at the sort of classics of Chinese negotiating behavior there's discussions about how the Chinese side seems to be quite prepared in dealing and who they're dealing with and that they focus a lot on trying to identify sort of biographical details you know so we know something like that information like that is conceivably shared across the system but we don't know you know what that classification is or how they classify it depending on what kinds of information that they have and if they are talking about information about your clearance and what they stole you know is that something that's necessarily shared with everyone you come in contact with well it sounds like not but you know you could bump into someone if you were meeting them in China where you know it's a colleague who is in fact very well it's acted on those things there are a number of odd little things in the in the system where I think if you take a mature policy system like Taiwan Affairs or Hong Kong and Macau Affairs it's likely that information is shared quite closely in part because all of the different party departments and the intelligence services actually share cover organizations the United Front work department the Ministry of State Security the political warfare people in the PLA military intelligence they can actually all be in the same in the same organization and using the same platforms for operations so it presumed that that you know the fact that they might be sitting in some of the same spaces some of the time that information would be shared more readily you know what that means in a less mature policy system where where the different agencies are not necessarily as well integrated I think would be would be anyone's guess the other thing is that Chinese side has a history of denying everything I think they if somebody one of your interlocutors was given any that information they were told and don't hint that you know this I'm Bethany Allen Ibrahimi and I'm the shining reporter at Axios and I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about Wong Lee Chang I believe that's his name the perhaps defector in Australia right now is he who he says he is so there are I think a few things to keep in mind about what's been put out there in public about Wong leads young the first is that Peter there are a number of arguments against him ping genuine saying while an intelligence officer wouldn't do these things and they wouldn't act like this and you know first and foremost he's never actually claimed to be an intelligence officer he claimed to be you know what in in at least sort of five eyes intelligence parlance before those people would be called a co-op d here is kind of a staff adjuncts if you will who's picked up by by the intelligence officer themselves and integrated into what they were doing so that's the quits the key part of his claim you know he's not someone you know what we know from other cases that are sort of out there in public of these of these types of people is that they will be involved in operations they will be close to the system but they're not going to know bureaucratic information because they're not connected by a / through a professional linkages back to the services themselves you know what they have access to is basically what would be taking place around them and so you know he he could be opening envelope stew to read things he could have been keeping an eye on answered the comings and goings and what and and also to be able to discuss what kinds of things he was personally involved in so that I thinks isn't is an important piece to understand about who who he is and who he claims to be the second is that some of the the questions that have been raised about him from for example the deputy director of military intelligence military intelligence in Taiwan his argument was that because of single-line handling in the intelligence services this was an impossibility you know that that this that mr. Wang was connected in any way and you know I think in the research for this book it becomes very clear that Chinese intelligence operations are not operating along a single line you know where one person along the chain knows what's what's there that might have been something that was done in the Revolutionary era it might have been a feature of how Lu Tai Chan was handled it might be a feature of other sensitive cases but we have a lot of other examples to mention the State Department OMS Candice Claiborne where it's clear that one of the people involved in the case worked for the Shanghai State Security Bureau and the other one seems to have been a business person who provided kind of the services or you know resources for that intelligence person to chip in so it's you can't say that Intel that Chinese intelligence operations are just this clean you know professional only handled by the service in this very in this very narrow specific way that this that this part of his story does does actually compare favorably another two other contacts so the other you know the questions about whether or not he's reliable you know the Taiwanese things that he said are things that you could have said from reading off the press and having a very close read we don't necessarily know what his claims are about Australia because as part of the court case that's been taking place in the last year or two years the truth was ruled out as a defense for an Australian paper on a libel things so if you are the age why would you why would you put the specifics in there and we don't necessarily know why there was a connection you know what what the connection is with a zero or ASIS and a had a quick final point is that if the person is knowledgeable about intelligence operations intelligence services you would know that if he went strictly to the Australian government they would say we'd like you to go back in and you know do this for a couple of years and then come out and we'll talk about is sort of taking care of you because it's much better to have someone running in place than it would be some sort of you know out of out of operations altogether and only able to capture a certain moment in time so if you or someone who is a part of this system you know connected obliquely as he was why would you want to and you want to get out why would you try to keep it why would you try to keep it quiet it's not it's not a clean answer but I think those are some of the things to some of the things to think about you know it's still because we don't have access to everything that he said we're not able to interview him we don't necessarily have full visibility into the due diligence that either the Australian government performed or that the Aged performed in looking at him I don't think they're I don't think they're babes in the woods and I there are a lot of people in Australia who both inside government and outside government know how to do this work so I think we have to sort of wait and see but we can't just discount it on its face Jeff Chen with the China scope we know the big unique part of this is Minaj is they use the non-traditional actors Chinese students and scholars so I have a two questions okay all right do you think this has to do with a Chinese the government brainwashes Chinese people with the so-called patriotism I myself a grover singing the party is better than my mom so serving the country is serving the serving the country is a serving the party and a lobby in the country is to hate America in Taiwan so I guess this influence of follows the Chinese students to this country and the majority of the students are get information from Chinese media so I just wonder what your thoughts are relating to this that will come back that will think about that won't we lonely open up to another another question here while folks are thinking right there on those bit there sorry on the far my left hi Mary quick question Ministry of Public Security so we've mentioned for the intelligence services MSS and PLA what about MPs what role do they play in the intelligence service apparatus and what role well they play going forward after 1949 they were the primary counter espionage and counterintelligence service and the counter espionage elements of it were carved off in 1983 to join the Ministry of State Security and and tell them I mean the Ministry of State Security did not become a national organisation and tell the probably the mid-1990s and so there were an awful lot of public security people who had counterespionage type roles and then were eventually moved as as departments changed so they've had they've always had a certain amount of the role I guess it's hard to figure out what the Ministry of state securities accesses to the sort of the the massive surveillance systems that are going up and in China but a number of those are primarily done owned by the or sort of guided by the Ministry of Public Security so it gets to that question of bureaucratic coordination and you know how much do they share how much do they get along and that might be something that that changes based on the locality or in the relationships of individuals but I don't think we we know on its face so if they if they solely control those resources inside China that means they have an incredibly important capability that there will be crucial to counterintelligence in counter espionage and so they would probably be taking a more significant role you know they've also been involved outside of China it was a Ministry of Public Security that was was in in Burma and Laos trying to track down and the per ticket for the perpetrators of was the 10-5 incident on in October in October 2011 where 13 Chinese sailor sir River sailors were were killed it was the it was the MPS not the PLA not the Ministry of State Security that had its peak all sort of on the ground contributing to the hunt and for a number of the sort of the anti-corruption investigations outside of China it's clear that the Ministry of Public Security has also been there so we might be you know if there's a comparison to Russia it might actually be you know similar to the SVR and the FSB that yes the FSB is internal and the SVR is external but the FSB is you know moving around quite a bit I don't think there's a you know I don't think we can draw sometimes a clear distinction between what's a state security threat versus what's public security threat and therefore you know who actually you know who actually gets jurisdiction I once worked on a case where an MPS officer demonstrated to me that he had knowledge of an MSS arrest of an American businessman by sitting behind his desk at his computer and just dialing it up and when I asked him about that he said well we're the ones who are responsible for Gwen Lee for taking care of the foreigners in our district so they have to keep us informed at a certain level so that's just a single example indicates that they talk anyway gentleman in the back just in front of the computer Dan Garrett secure in teens yes LLL see countries when during a moment of existential crisis always activate their national technical means and their intelligence services what does the history of Chinese intelligence tell us about how China may surge its intelligence apparatus now to deal with this most existential crisis is with the us-china relation and also the situation in Hong Kong thank you I don't I don't think we have a good sense of how fast that that takes place you know one of the points you know that that Matt raised was was noting that a strong counterintelligence served as the basis for foreign intelligence and of the public examples that are out there I think we only have two cases that are that are public where the recruitment and the handling of a source was done completely outside China so that's not necessarily a good capacity to Serge overseas if you're if you're trying to to address some of these issues what does that mean I mean I guess the way I would interpret that is that until there's a much larger sort of foreign intelligence capacity a human level that so collection in cyberspace is in computer network exploitation is going to be the primary means before trying to get out because that's the easiest way to to have a global capability and to reach out as quickly as possible the historical case I can point to is the the loss of the Kashmir princess flight in 1955 I think 55 and during that time the whole PRC government especially the intelligence services were involved in an intense investigation in Hong Kong that ended up showing that Taiwan was indeed behind it I'm Alex Alper with Reuters I just wanted to ask I guess more on the corporate side of things there's been a lot made about the National Intelligence law I think from 2017 and how it could require the government could require companies to hand over data or spy on their behalf and I just wondered if there's any clarity on how much it's been invoked or you know what the government is really done with that particular law thank you well the propaganda that has been reported on for example by the New York Times the cartoons the the videos indicate that one should never hold back any information from state security and then you look at every every company that's that's big enough has a party committee so the the discipline that would naturally come with that indicates that indeed people do what they're told and they cooperate and I just find it conceptually impossible that anybody would try to push back now I've heard that that I think Tencent supposedly pushed back but quite frankly I just don't believe it just say when I had a had a visit or a discussion with with the China Institutes of Contemporary national Asians they can you explain who kicker is for folks who they're one of the MSS bureaus and they do opens they do open source research and open source so interviews you know ostensibly for the purpose of analysis and they also serve as an international relations training program for the rest of government and for the rest of the Ministry of State Security and I asked you know we'd had a we'd had a discussion about US intelligence reform five years before and time it was time to say you know now it's your turn to speak about China's intelligence law and he said you know the thing that you need to understand about all of this all of this national security legislation is that it's basically putting into law what was already the rule right and making it clear that everyone understood that you know this was the way it worked implicitly before it's going to work this way explicitly now which is also a great way to cut back on corruption because if it's in the law it's easier to prosecute somebody hi sorry Adam cozy with CrowdStrike was very glad to see schnitz Accorsi nit second the book yeah Peter you had mentioned earlier that there was kind of a lack of an analytic Bureau or that kicker was kind of the ones doing the analysis for them which I think stands in quite contrast to what we think about with the US intelligence community so my question is basically who in your mind kind of comes up with some of the intelligence requirements how developed is the relationship between say state-owned enterprises and the MSS to kind of create those requirements that then trickle down to what they collect on since they don't have as robust an analytic capability I'm Bob sitting here congratulations by the way on this book it's it's timely and it's overdue in some cases but my question to you is you described us as a primer with the notion that there should be something else coming down the road that won't expand upon this and I wonder what you would consider to be the priority issues that should be addressed and who should address them mark Stuckart just retired from US government Commerce Department got your book about a week ago it's phenomenal really very very insightful question the FBI said that they've got investigations of about Chinese espionage going and every single 5150 of the states that is a vast array of Chinese espionage which you detail very well in your book grains of sand and and many others how many Chinese spies would you estimate are working currently for the US government that are embedded more than 500 more than a thousand more than 5,000 just a range or a guess a number thank you the McCarthy era started by the way a simple question more than you can shake a stick at like like SOS who may be able to fill an analytical gap what gaps do we have in the research moving forward that will form the the core of your second book on this and then the last question how many spooks in this room yes I first I'll take the last question since it's the easiest to respond to which is I'm not going to I'm not going to guess it's this is the kind of thing that have to be have to be quite careful of inthis you know part of the point of the way that we structured this book was to start on the conservative side so that there's you know a hard center if you will that you can work out from and you know there there's a lot of there are a lot of questions that I think come up about the informal system that's a work in the Chinese Communist Party you know as Matt pointed out there is a distinction between underground work and intelligence work and underground work was much much larger and the people who were in on the underground sections of party versus the people who were back in yen on is one of the biggest splits in the party you know from from the 50s up until today and you know we should this is one of those things where you have to remember that remember that history so that it there's a there's a level in of operations inside the party that's not necessarily trusted to the bureaucracies and that's something that you know helps answer the second question of you know where should we where should we be looking and trying to explore it's trying to take okay what do we know about the formal systems and how do we understand the informal pieces that come across it as for the generation of requirements to Ministry of State Security does have a requirements bureau all of the open source sort of organizational charts analysis discussions with with former officials or current officials and other governments have you know sort of said yes there's something there's something there for the central generation and of reports and collation and distribution of them but you can also see things and say that the Jiangsu State Security Department case where you have an intelligence officer working for the Jiangsu State Security Department he's employing people to hack into GE aviation and he's working closely with nan Heung University to basically develop the requirements because that's the ultimate customer for the for the material out of GE aviation so there in this case it seemed to be a direct connection that was generating it now whether that was formally sanctioned and he was said you know your job is to figure out how to help these guys or whether it was a personal connection you know how that developed I don't you know at least from what's available it's anyone's it's anyone's guess see how there is something central but there is something that seems to be kind of ad hoc and and customer driven with respect to that and I'll just make a final note on this issue of analysis because Americans like to talk a lot about intelligence analysis in this sort of all source strategic assessment vein and he's pointed out but that's a distinctly American invention and most services didn't mimic that for a very very long time and to the extent that anyone did pick it up they didn't pick it up on the same scale as the US intelligence community I want to bounce back to the question about Chinese abroad it was from the back of the room so I live in San Jose California the restaurant situation is vastly improved because of all the Chinese and Indian people who lived there I have Chinese friends and the ones who are over 35 and who studied here and who were involved in Chinese student associations they don't have the same experience that more that younger people do with the involvement of Chinese official them in their business and so that certainly seems to have changed there's a there's a much more focused effort I think to to harness the influence of Chinese people and they don't have to be brainwashed because they've been raised in a I when I was based in Beijing my daughter was in Chinese schools and she heard all about the how the Americans were actually responsible for the opium that started the opium war etc etc they already have a view of history which is conducive to harnessing their influence and as for what we're doing in our next book I just want to say I'm not imitating anybody here Beijing if you're listening we don't yet have from you a Chelsea Manning or an Edward Snowden we need that we need those documents ante up any any final thoughts comments conclusions and yet obviously to the poor MSS analyst who's awake right now at 4:30 having to watch this and write a memo I'm sure he'll that maybe the Chelsea Manning this may be the spark thank you thank you everyone for up on the stage thank you all of you who came although not technically an exit tax we are selling the book outside and so you can leave without purchasing it although we will make it difficult because Peter will be downstairs at the lobby looking at you expectantly but we are selling the book I do encourage you to to buy it I don't know if we were able to hang around for a few minutes to to in sign copies thanks again and and hopefully we'll have them back in twelve months when they finished and published their their next book so thank you [Applause]

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

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Id: T9Z3O8u2HWg

Length: 87min 22sec (5242 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2019