Seventy Years of Chinese Strategic Intelligence Threats

good afternoon everyone graphic graph good afternoon professor d graphenread welcome to the ag initiative lecture series at the institute of world politics my name is amanda wong and i'm the founder and coordinator of the asian issue of lecture series for those who are new to the institute of oral politics iwp is a graduate school of statecraft national security international affairs and intelligence we have a doctoral program as well as five master's programs and 18 certificates of graduate study and a continuing education program the objective of this lecture series is to broaden the scope and discussion on a range of intelligence foreign policy and security issues attendant to the asian geopolitical socio-economic and cultural spheres of influence today we have a fascinating speaker iwp professor emeritus kenneth d de graffenreit who will be presenting a lecture on 70 years of chinese strategic intelligence threats professor d graphenried has over 40 years of leadership responsibility as a senior national level expert practitioner writer and teacher in the areas of strategic defense and intelligence policy and operations counterintelligence and protective security continuity of operations and infrastructure cyber telecommunications and information protection he has served as a deputy under secretary of defense for policy deputy national counterintelligence executive and special assistant to the president for national security affairs as white house senior director of intelligence and security programs on the ronald reagan national security council a retired navy captain he had he also served on the professional staff of the stanislaus community on intelligence he has been a senior group vp of an r d and systems engineering firm and a vp of a high level policy analysis firm supporting sensitive usg programs in counterintelligence telecommunications and security as professor emeritus at iwp a graduate school in washington dc where he developed and directed the first emma degree in intelligence and security studies to be offered in the united states currently he is a distinguished fellow in intelligence studies at the american foreign policy council thank you professor dick reference for joining us today and i'll hand it over to you it's a pleasure to be here amanda and thank you for inviting me um it's nice to be back at iwp um if only through the magic of our zoom and so here we are um i a warm welcome to all of you who are looking in on your zoom i just learned from amanda that a number of my former teachers are in the audience and so i'm a little sheepish but i'll give it a shot here anyway professors tierney and uh shulski and also professor fdmatis and and others so i encourage any of you to interrupt me if i get off track here um well this afternoon we're going to be talking about uh it's kind of a big title 70 years of chinese strategic intelligence threats um i guess the the summary thing is uh there have been 70 years of it and it's getting worse so um i'm gonna try to hit some highlights as as we go um but i do have to say a few words about um in truth in advertising here um when i was in graduate school in the late 1960s and early 70s one of my professors at catholic university was specializing in chinese communist theory and uh revolutionary movements and i was forced to take a number of courses in that which were i have to say looking back on it quite painful so i am now back talking about china and there is one incident that i must confess to a few years after that i was working on the senate select committee on intelligence and while i was there i got a number of us got invited to go to taiwan by a university in taiwan and uh they flew us out there in those days you could you could take those kind of junkets um and as part of the visit to taiwan we were flown out by the uh republic of china air force uh to the island of kuamoye which is an offshore island very close to the chinese mainland very interesting because there's been quite a a number of of uh incidents there in the taiwan straits in the 1950s uh which i knew about from reading about them and so we got out there it's a beautiful island they have all the they grow sorghum there so everything smells very sweet but the thing was honeycombed with defensive positions and um at one point um i i think we're all invited but i apparently took the invitation and we launched um i launched a propaganda balloon at the mainland uh the in earlier times uh the uh prc and the roc sent these balloons toward each other but they had explosives or weapons on them but by the time i was there uh that had changed and they were just little packages of toys and candy for for children so i launched it and a couple days later in the paper there was my picture launching this uh propaganda balloon at the mainland so i don't know whether they remember that but i suspect they do so i'll i'll get on with this in in 1949 to the surprise of many americans and who had hoped i think that world war ii had marked the end of major world conflict the soviet union who had been our ally uh in in world war ii exploded nuclear weapon which turned out to be identical to the bomb that the u.s had dropped on nagasaki and it was identical because the bomb's nuclear technology had been stolen through massive espionage by america's russian communist wartime ally and this um event was one of the events that threw cold water on on the idea that the post-world war ii period was going to be easy and it instead it well it ushered in a a new conflict in which nuclear weapons and strategic intelligence operations would be the framework for what would be a 50-year conflict between the united states and its allies and the soviets but also in 1949 the people's republic of china came into existence having defeated the nationalist regime who fled to taiwan and began pursuing what has come to be a very similar hegemonic course also relying as it turns out on stolen nuclear weapons design for achieving its own strategic nuclear capabilities and also engaging in strategic intelligence activities um and um so i want to go over some of that today um and first i want to um clearly the the chinese foreign policy development in during this period was different than the soviet one but there are many many similarities because we are going to talk about intelligence and in doing so um we have to talk about um the nature of how the chinese the people's republic of china views intelligence and in many ways is very similar to the way the soviet union did and to some extent to the way russia post soviet russia views intelligence which is not the way america looks at intelligence for the most part to the united states intelligence is a necessary ingredient of the tools of foreign policy but it is not at the center of our foreign policy to be sure and um therefore the the organizations and missions of american intelligence are somewhat limited in in what they are to achieve but not so with um the um either the russians the soviets or the prc um and so i'm gonna try to make a couple points about that before i get into kind of tracing some of the events of this long 70-year period and while many americans today i suspect are not used to uh viewing china uh as a uh strategic power uh with with many threats for the united states preferring i think to see it as a at worst a benign commercial competitor uh but um in fact the prc's intelligence operations and activities um reflect uh a much more ambitious national uh strategic goal which i think many of us can see now is to help get the people's republic um to the point of being the number one power certainly in asia but perhaps in the world and for that they will i'm sure we would agree would use uh their intelligence tools uh in furtherance of that and um we generally don't think of that i mean we as a united states as a society don't think about what we're we're going to advance ourselves into a number one position um to the extent that the us has achieved that status it was the result of of the accumulation of other in the drives of other purposes but i think we see in china a much more purposeful and planned strategic effort to certainly to bring china into modern times in terms of technology industry economy military power and one of the ways that that is done is through the use of their intelligence services but i think we need to go back a minute and note and here there is a similarity with the old soviet union the nature of intelligence in a revolutionary communist movement when the soviets uh took power in what was essentially a coup d'etat in 1917 they the bolsheviks had a history of very involved as a conspiratorial revolutionary movement and they knew all about intelligence operations because they were the target of certainly the czarist okrana secret police and they themselves because they were trying to survive in that revolutionary environment used intelligence excuse me they use intelligence more in the way of that a secret police would they had a secret police chasing them excuse me and uh they used all of those kinds of techniques uh that secret organizations did um and that continued when the chica the which later became the kgb rose to its position of prominence within the soviet system that was because it was being used to protect the leadership of the communist party of the soviet union and um in all of the techniques of the sort of the nastier side of intelligence were free game uh to uh the soviet uh intelligence service um and um we see that is true as well in um in china when during the rise of the communist party in china they were also a conspiratorial political movement revolutionary political movement which was uh very much competing with the komentang and almost in one incident in 1927 as i recall they were almost put out of business uh but they slipped the leash uh a bit and were not caught and mao and his fellow revolutionaries went on to fight another day and eventually to win but um the thought of of being eliminated and literally eliminated um i think gave both the bolsheviks and uh mao's uh army uh the pla and his co-conspirators um a sense of uh how important uh the the tools of intelligence and counterintelligence secrecy and penetration of opposition groups how important that was this wasn't just a democracy with an intelligence service like the united states it was um the very life and death matter to the both of these parties and i think that goes a long way uh toward coloring the nature of both soviet and chinese prc now intelligence operations because that's the history they came from um this the third piece is that china different somewhat from than russia and the soviet union has because of the nature of chinese society and culture they have a strategic tradition going back millennia uh sun tzu who talks about a lot of intelligence matters and the importance of deception and and all of the techniques of intelligence he's as relevant in china today as he was in 500 bc um and that's a long tradition and um that combined with the marxist leninist revolutionary movements in in uh movement uh in china uh is a big factor in thinking about how what a ch what the chinese intelligence services look like and what they do and their role within the communist party these are not adjuncts these are not service functions they are pillars as was the kgb in the old soviet union they were pillars of the society and the government because their job in the old soviet thing was the sword and shield of the party their job was to keep the presidium of the central committee of the communist party in power which is a much different job than the cia has or the fbi or army intelligence um so that is to be noted there's a there's another dimension to the particular histories in both the soviet union and in communist china and that has to do with um and i have no psychologist so i can't tell you how big a deal this plays in things but both the the stalinist period in russia and uh mao's uh time and the great leap forward and the cultural the great people's cultural revolution uh a few years later were events in which millions of their fellow countrymen died uh you know the numbers are debated today but um during the stalinist period it was it was scores of millions and um the estimates for of the great leap forward uh in the late 50s early 60s and then a few years later the the great proletariat cultural revolution um estimates there of you know 45 million in the first instance and 20 million of their own countrymen killed now i don't know if that's a factor but we don't have anything like that um and most of our western allies don't have a history like that uh other than world war ii um and of course if you go back to world war one which were terrible blood lettings but they were against enemies for the most part um in um in these two instances the soviets and the chinese communists those were um deaths that resulted from uh political decisions of the regimes and um so the the chinese communist regime today um is the regime that succeeded well not succeeded just continued on from uh those events and i don't know what all that means for intelligence exactly but i do think it is a factor um in in what they the way they are today well um the uh chinese approach to intelligence therefore is tied to the party it is um strategic in the sense that um if you're looking at sun tzu or you're looking at what is done has been done since uh the 1920s within the chinese communist party these are absolutely essential capabilities to staying in power and um the um and their names have changed uh there are some good books out now um studies um which i weren't a few years ago um i think i mentioned professor afghanistan he's got his classic book of chinese intelligence operations and he's got some new uh smaller volumes uh bringing things up to date and there's a fine a book by peter mattis and matthew brazile on chinese communist espionage of primer and other associated books uh the the the tau of intelligence activities and the tao of deception which go back into chinese way back thousands of years into chinese history but the modern ones take apart and look at the actual organizations and individuals in a lot of cases and we know a lot more about that than we did just a few years ago so the ministry of state security um which wasn't created immediately when uh china came into a uh prc came into existence in 1949 uh it i don't think we see the mss coming into being until about 1983 but it took uh all of the parts counter intelligence and security and all of the pieces that had been there for a while uh the investigations department of the uh the central committee um and uh wrapped him up into a new um secret police intelligence organization we have we have here in this country we've got a you know foreign intelligence service and we've got a domestic police investigative uh organization the fbi which also does some counterintelligence but we don't have a combined uh all-encompassing ministry of state security which is responsible for it all and if you look at the new material which i'm not going to have time to to go over these organizational charts and things today the current chinese intelligence activities have proliferated um it's not just the ministry of state security obviously the the defense side which used to be the the second bureau of the pla is now the intelligence bureau of the joint staff department and so in the last 20 years the chinese intelligence service has matured and proliferated and also become more specific to functions so the third what used to be the old the three pla that did sig in now there's all kinds of organizations within the chinese government that do that the important thing however uh that we want to say about all this is that um when we look at china as a threat to the united states or to the west we're not looking at just an intelligence service we are looking at an approach to strategic growth on the part of the prc that encompasses what is referred to as the whole of society approach not only do they have intelligence services and they have intelligence officers in the united states who are covered as diplomats but they also have all kinds of other collection and intelligence influence activities from other organizations that run the gamut from private individuals who just are i won't even say co-opted they're just encouraged to uh conduct activities on the behalf of on behalf of china uh in a way that we don't quite see in the west for the most part um we have there are any number of companies and um what appeared would appear in a u.s context to be private firms which are private firms but they are also at the very same time um a element of chinese intelligence collection and or influence operations um so it's it's a different construct than we see because it is far more encompassing and so one big second big difference is the sheer size of the intelligence capabilities across this whole of society that we see in the prc the the cia is a tiny little organization compared certainly compared to the mss and to all of these other outfits which counterparts don't really exist in a lot of cases in our in our context and then to that we we have to add what has happened also in the last 20 years has been the rise of cyber and the chinese to become very very good at uh cyber intelligence operations uh influence operations collection and disruption and any number of things i want to go back though to yet another comparison to the soviets it took a long time for the united states government and the american society to come to realize the soviet union was a the threat that it in fact was and one of the reasons for that was that there were a lot of americans who played down for whatever reasons they play down the nature of the soviet threat and we see that in the case of china as well we certainly saw it during the you know what that right after world war ii at the time the uh civil war was going on um in china um and for time after that with um and this without putting a political spin on it this was many cases left supporting individuals uh publications uh that uh were simply um not taking the threat at the time let alone now uh as seriously as uh it was warranted and there was a lot of political fighting about that in the um in in the 1950s um particularly with regard to what were called the china hands and and all of this and there were all kinds of political charges that about who lost china and all of these things which of course scrambled and muddied the issue but the fact was there were a lot of people who um particularly people who had served in china and were not particularly enamored of the shang kai-shek regime um and who showed at least some tolerance if not sympathy for the chinese communists and um that was a factor in probably the intensity with which we as a country looked at the intelligence threat from china at the time now that records have been opened and there's more material available we know that there was a steady stream of successful chinese intelligence operations against the u.s the most famous in those early years was a cia employee by the name of larry wu tai chin who had joined the started working for the americans during world war ii as a translator for the us army and he continued to do that and gradually was promoted and finally went with cia and was a conscious chinese intelligence agent until he was unmasked and he wound up committing suicide in prison while awaiting sentencing i believe the and there have been some other a number of other important um intelligence events um that occurred following that in the in the 80s with the expulsion of several chinese intelligence officers diplomatically covered who we're attempting to get nsa material and [Music] the um and this continues on until we get into the uh 1970s uh excuse me uh into the from the 70s on into the 80s uh when we come to find out although we don't know how that the chinese intelligence services had in fact gotten the plans for every one of the us nuclear weapons designs which you know at least putatively were the most carefully guarded secrets in the american government and we still don't know how that was done fully um the uh a few years after my other touchings with with chinese events i worked with the what was called the cox committee was in the late 1990s a committee of the congress a bipartisan committee of the congress that looked into chinese acquisition of american technology uh particularly nuclear technology but also space and computer technology and this was a major study by the congress back in the days when the congress did those kinds of things and um that was over 20 years ago and the report that cox report uh lists an entire agonizing history of how the chinese were successful in outwitting of the united states in all of these areas and we it had a the report had a whole list of recommendations it went to the president all kinds of potential for getting some of these problems under control lack of security for example at the nuclear labs nuclear research labs and here we are 20 some years later and that book is as evergreen as it was then and except more stuff has happened and um so i guess what i'm um particularly uh at some page today to talk about is what um what we can do at this point uh given some of these um efforts by the chinese the first thing we need to talk about is um the lack of understanding of what it means to deal with the with a nation that is operating if you will strategically where it is putting its efforts in terms of intelligence collection in terms of acquisition of technology and all of these other things uh to advance itself to a position of prominence and perhaps probably parity with the united states strategically and politically in the world um politically is a little harder but uh certainly the efforts to acquire these technologies and this information is a fundamental kind of challenge and if we don't understand it at that level which was the point of the cox report if we don't understand that at that level then it's gonna be very hard to do anything about it um other than to do piecemeal responses so our counter intelligence today for example uh remains for the most part um case driven there's indications of espionage and the fbi goes to investigate and it treats it as a case which it needs to do at if you want to call it the tactical level but at the strategic level there's no indication that we have taken this chinese threat of all of these activities in cyber in technology transfer in cultural infiltration that we've taken these seriously at the strategic level and that's the that's the precursor of doing anything serious about this for the most part the united states hasn't in its intelligence activities particularly its counterintelligence activities hasn't uh acted um in a strategic way we did for you know probably 20 years in the middle of the cold war we did treat the kgb as a strategic threat and went after it in the counter-intelligence sense strategically um and um would to some effect some good effect but it's not clear that we have done that at all with the chinese threat when i was at the national counterintelligence executive using this same kind of thinking we said well shouldn't we shouldn't there be a way to to design a strategic counterintelligence effort on the part of the united states um to thwart what was then apparent that the chinese were up to um and we came up with some ideas most of them faltered however on the fact that in the nature of the bureaucratic government of the united states particularly in the national security side there's not a premium on thinking strategically particularly if a particular department or agency or bureau feels that that would be taking away from its resources or its prominence or its ability to call the shots in certain areas so um when i left that job we had made a something of an effort in in the case of china and um then i was gone from there and then a few years later uh we see what has happened with our uh what happened in 2010 and 11 uh with all u.s human operations in china got rolled up um this is as bad as what happened with regard to the our american intelligence ops in cuba where they all got doubled by the cuban dgi and in east germany during the cold war where the same thing happened um and you know one doesn't want to be too critical but those things those kinds of of failures are not just failures of particular times and places they really reveal a failure to look broadly in a strategic way at what's going on it in part the problem is doing the case by case method as opposed to doing a strategic approach the one of the first things we would probably need to do is realize that in addition to the united states being a big target a principal target of chinese intelligence operations broadly speaking the whole of society approach um the chinese have a very specific problem called taiwan and so an enormous amount of their effort goes into intelligence activities both collection influence propaganda all of the other dark arts of intelligence aimed at taiwan and so that fact needs to be realized in the councils of senior councils of the government in order uh to be able if one wanted to mount a strategic counterintelligence response to one would need to say well now look if they're they're appointed at taiwan and a lot of their effort is going there maybe that's an area where we could have uh some effect with our counterintelligence activities and so another factor another that we could use in in our um effort to do something about this strategy is to fashion the american government to be able to respond to these things one reason that we deal in stovepipe solutions is because we're a government of stovepipes and in theory at least the idea the original idea in the 1947 act of the national security council was that there would be a place and a process for bringing these issues together and dealing with them across the government and that if i had a recommendation to the new administration it would be that to take seriously this threat and therefore configure the government in order to do this putting one person in charge of something is not necessarily the answer uh but but having a process for uh defining um the um the nature of the threat which is an important first step and then thinking about well what what does this mean to us what what what about the chinese strategic effort is it's harmful to the us for the chinese to modernize is certainly not a mortal threat to the united states in fact it's it's a good thing but um to do it by the theft of american technology uh either through espionage or influence operations or as we covered in the old cox report um the kind of just simple corruption of buying people to do that is not not good um and i go to go back to a point that i was making a little earlier um we also need a place inside the government within the administration to be able to openly and clearly state what um the uh the goal of all of this is um i mentioned that i thought that there was a lot of political support certainly in the in the 50s and and on what i would say ideological reasons um for downplaying the nature of the at that time the chinese threat um but today um that kind of political support is in the form of business interests which say well look our interest really is um in in china uh in in the economic relations in trade relations um well that's fine uh but that needs to be um tempered with an understanding that we are also losing uh a lot of american assets um because we're not we're not being serious about this um one of the and that is one of the challenges this whole of society approach that is done um to coordinate these things when this kind of of problem was first identified or was first addressed back in the cold war vis-a-vis the soviets uh there was a whole range of things that were done in terms of technology transfer uh there were uh diplomatic regimes with our allies um the cocom and and some of these other structures that were created precisely uh to address it as a um international issue at least from our side um and that bled into the government when we were dealing with what was known in those days as soviet active measures um which were soviet political propaganda and other active measures activities um there was an effort made to one work with our allies on this but also to address it in a broader way and so you just it's not the job of the fbi alone to deal with those kinds of things in some cases in the fbi's job at all but it's somebody's job and when the organization it was not really an organization but a coordinating effort called the um active measures working group was put together in the mid 80s to deal with that um it went much broader than simply the intelligence and security elements of the national security bureaucracy it went to everybody it got from from the diplomatic through the information uh and and on around um through the government and that was an effective uh effective effort it didn't mean didn't stop soviet acquisition of american technology completely but it certainly did some and now the chinese effort in that regard is much much broader and it would require a creative new uh structure to deal with that and it's not a one-sided thing i mean it does not mean we don't trade with china it doesn't mean that all forms of technology sharing are bad but um it does say look think about this before you do it and certainly a situation in which we have today uh where we've lost the designs to or had compromised to china the all of our nuclear weapons designs and many many other weapon systems um that's that needs to be stopped at in some way um the um a number of cases i was gonna i don't wanna bore you with all these cases uh uh that have um come up over the past few years um a couple of very bad ones were the chi mac case um the um monteperto case at dia um and um as i alluded to the horrible situation which reportedly since i don't know anything about it officially um the perhaps up to a score of american sources were discovered and executed through mistakes that we had made um and today um i think our biggest probably one of our biggest problem apart from the huge and variegated nature of the human intelligence threat is cyber and um my sense is that the there is some attempt within our nsa and cyber command to understand this problem and do something about it but it's as we all know it changes constantly and it's a it's a race between the offense and defense in all of these things um amanda could i take some questions thank you professor de graf for such an insightful lecture and we'll take questions now okay so if you have questions please type them in in the q a chat box the first question we have is from professor tinnery do you believe that china will represent a similar threat to the west as the soviet union did greater or less well i think it's i'm going to say he's my old professor so i've got to give him an answer and i'll say greater i i think that um the soviets had a number of um shortcomings in their political system uh and in what they were trying to do um vis-a-vis the west i want to call it that um that the chinese do not necessarily have um and the chinese appear to have a long-term strategy uh and it's well thought out i mean this is not just um a belligerent stalin or brezhnev you know kind of blindly setting forth um strategic utterances about the what they were doing the brezhnev doctrine this is the the chinese are much more i think thoughtful and uh now they've got some you know belt and road initiative and and building little islands in the south china sea and all of these specific things can be outrageous and threatening in their own but um they're all they're going somewhere with this uh so i i guess my answer is i think they're more um in part because they have this several thousand year strategic understanding um that i i think they're more of a threat but it's not you know they're khrushchev is not rattling his rockets uh we don't see that today although we have had certain threats about losing los angeles to save taiwan but i do think they're more sophisticated and therefore more dangerous and i think that that cyber shows that um they're very good at cyber and um so i i professor tierney i think the chinese are more of a threat than were the soviets at a comparable stage in history thank you and the next question is how are the american leaders deceived by the soviet communist party and the chinese communist party successively and repeatedly fdr saved stalin nixon saved mao bush and clinton saved zhang biden will save c g say the last part again amanda biden will save the current uh chinese president xi um i guess you know it's hard to it's hard to argue against that analysis there americans are americans and um it's very hard for us to be on what i would call a uh a strategic mission in the world uh to counter in this case the prc uh because there are so many other factors involved and we do reach out i mean the united states does in that sense and these uh regimes do get um if you want to say red was the word you used rescued um in a way they do get rescued uh and uh probably just you know i think my observation of my years in the government uh is that most government officials i'm talking about the senior ones necessarily but although some days they don't feel right about triumphing in a particular political geopolitical situation there's always the thought well we we need to leave these guys a way out we need to do this um and i think uh that you know i'm not sure what motive which which part of the american political psyche that represents but i do think it is a very you know much uh a factor how much but a factor in why it seems that the communist regimes get let off the hook if you want to say that although ultimately they don't get let off their hook but um yeah it's a question of you know we have i think an innate thing that our goal is to turn adversaries into friends uh and friends and allies well if you're up against somebody that that's not their goal um they they can have a certain advantage from that that but i think the the questioner is correct in that if looked at one way um the u.s did not do everything it could you know now certainly in the case of the prc i mean the united states spent years and lots of treasure trying to save help save the nationalist kmt regime over against the communists and we they weren't successful and we weren't successful in an effort to do that thank you and the next question is from an iwpp professor this question is what is your assessment of china's continued efforts to establish confucius institutes on american academic uh premises and uh the follow up question is you also mentioned that the us was not adopt adopting a strategic policy as regards countering the chinese threat wasn't it the job of ncis to come up with a strategy yeah stain that second one let me get through the first one uh for the uh ci incident confucius institute i i do think that those are um and of course the reason that that's such in one sense a dangerous uh technique dangerous to us by the chinese is there's a lot of good that comes from those things but if those are used uh for in effect whole of society influence operations on american campuses then you know we have a right to think about that and decide you know is the good we're getting worth the bad we're getting um and um i would have to say that uh from what i know and again i'm not been in the government a while in a while um the confucius institutes are on net a a dangerous thing and i think the last administration tried to do something about that um and um i i think there were problems give me the the next one's a little trickier what sure um so the second one was you mentioned that the us was not adopting a strategic policy as regards countering the chinese threat wasn't that the job of ncis to come up with a strategy in part it was and i think i alluded to the fact that some years ago when i was there we were actually trying to do that with regard to what the ncix had which is is kind of a more limited perspective but one having to do with all counter intelligence which is a pretty big perspective but that is not the same as a national policy allah for example the containment policy that grew out of the national security council debates of the nsc 68 or whatever it was um a more formal um adoption by the u.s government broadly speaking of a cold war strategy of containment now i know it's subject to all kinds of interpretations and a lot of people thought well the containment strategy wasn't all that effective but there was an instance where it was that's that was more than a pure counterintelligence uh task um but you're right the ncix should have been doing that um and as i say i can at least assert to you at one point we were trying to do that the problem with the ncix which is often the problem within the american government is that for what maybe the most wonderful of reasons many of the departments and agencies and bureaus did not want to seed any of their authority and or resources to the ncix saying i mean the fbi's answer was well we we do counterintelligence what are you guys telling us you know what's ncix got to do with and of course from bureaucratic point of view i understand what they're saying but in terms of trying to take a strategic approach um the bureau's vision the fbi's vision of what good counterintelligence in it effective counter intelligence against the chinese does not automatically equate to a strategic approach to counterintelligence vis-a-vis the chinese intelligence um it's a more limited thing and when the congress wrote the [Music] counterintelligence act in 2001 or 2002 that established the ncax the idea the kernel of idea there was precisely to have a place where you could deal with develop and deal with and promulgate a national counterintelligence policy the a lot of the departments and agencies did not want to did not want to do that and um it was very hard uh to to achieve that and i think just a footnote here and i'm not being defensive but you will notice that the mission of the national counterintelligence executive which is now name's name's been broadened because the um the the everything but the smile on the cat has disappeared uh counterintelligence isn't what they do anymore they do security things all of them important they do uh a bunch of other related activities which in a perfect system would all be done but the idea of focusing on counterintelligence which was the purpose of the that bill and that law um has disappeared um anyway sorry to get too hot about that one he's actually asking so would you assess ncis as a failed effort well i i think if one is judging by the plain words of the uh i'm getting my numbers wrong here but i think the the statute was the national counter intelligence act of i think maybe 2002 might be a more accurate number it was written in 2001 if you judge it by what it's what is written in the plane words yes it has not it is not it has failed in that mission it may do some other things and there have been other good things being done and they're probably good things being done this afternoon but um it is not it did not produce a national counterintelligence strategy worthy of the word strategy now the first couple of written strategies were pretty good it's just that nobody the the elements of the counterintelligence community did not want to buy into that they wanted to do what they wanted to do and um so sorry thank you and the next question is given the current political climate uh both stateside and globally the recent events do you think professionally and personally that china could succeed in becoming the world power if so do you think russia would alter their allegiances policies to pose a threat to the us or the west you repeat the second part well let's try that one more time and i'm trying to given the current political climate both stateside and globally the recent events do you think professionally and personally that china could succeed in becoming the world power well um it's certainly on its way to becoming a world power um being the world power is a pretty tall order for anybody even the u.s which i think didn't seek that position but sort of got it as a result of a variety of factors so i don't know necessarily that it's going to become the one for one thing um as i think the second part of your question uh there is russia and there is the united states i mean the united states has not folded its tent i've um you know i've indicated we we have ways to go in dealing with the strategic threat particularly in the intelligence area which in the case of china is a very broad area much broader than it is to us um but um we haven't withdrawn from that struggle i noticed the new uh dci uh ambassador burns uh he's got an article out uh about how to you know countering china and it's got a whole bunch of of sensible tough things to do um so you know the united states is not withdrawing from the pacific and as we've seen in the taiwan uh area and in the straits um south china seas china sea um the united states has not withdrawn from that in fact we're you know making sure that our presence is known there um and so i think you know the chinese are they're on the make if you will and and and given that that has a societal dimension to it it's very powerful you know in my few visits there in talking to chinese about this subject you know there are many chinese who who want china to be the number one power they may not necessarily be um died in the wool you know marxists uh and supporters of the current regime which in some cases privately they're not but uh they are uh they like the idea of china being number one and uh that's a big that's a big deal in in all of this but um just wanting that and just doing the things that the chinese are doing um it doesn't necessarily have to come to be and particularly uh if um you know what actually that means if i mean you know having china as a major power does not necessarily mean that that's a threat to the united states it's only a threat to the united states if it's a threat to the united states and um so there's there's a lot of room there did i waffle that answer well enough oh man i think so we actually have a question from iwp president uh dr john lynchowski many former cabinet members have been directly or indirectly on beijing's payroll helping american businesses to open doors in china these figures are key to downplaying the threat from the ccp is there a way to prevent this kind of work perhaps by legislation well dr lanchowski is certainly correct that there are an awful lot of people on today americans who are on in one form or another china's payroll and that doesn't necessarily mean that they're putting their finger on the scale in the wrong way but it's still an ominous situation i don't know how one i mean legislatively or that you know prevents that i mean it's a free you say it's a free country you know if you want to go to work for a chinese firm i think you know and advance their cause that's you know that's every individual's choice but there's certainly a lot of that going on i i talked to one gentleman who was in a meeting and he said he looked around the table and he said i realized i was the only one who wasn't on the chinese payroll and he was at a fairly senior level of a corporation and what he meant by that is many of the other people around the table in one form or another we're getting support financial and otherwise from from the chinese where this is clandestine or covert or hidden i think that is a place for legislation i mean and and for enforcement uh and we've seen that at several universities where uh there have been a couple's recent scandals uh where professors have not declared the fact that they're getting you know massive amounts of money uh from a chinese entity um well why are they hiding that well they're hiding it because it's embarrassing to them and um so i think the those rules and i'm not an expert on those by any means could be tightened up a bit but you know it's a free country you want to go to work for the chinese you know it's hard for we i don't think we as a country can say no but um it's it's a little too convenient now to receive support from the people's republic of china which you know seems innocuous or may seem or you can argue that it's innocuous but it really isn't you're not innocuous you know it's you're getting a lot of money from somebody which is why we have generally in our law laws and procedures the appearance of conflict of interest not just conflict of interest but the appearance of conflict of interest is a a factor and uh i think in some cases people have gone way over the line and well the hidden appearance of conflict of interest thank you dr lynchowski thank you dr lynch for joining us today and the next question is do you feel that the character and nature of chinese intelligence efforts against the u.s has changed has changed in the last few years and if so how one more time amanda sure do you feel that the character and nature of chinese intelligence efforts against the u.s has changed in the last few years and if so how i i i i would bow to professor efti miatas and some of the other experts um but um i do i mean i think the well first of all the intel chinese intelligence operations are more ubiquitous and they're indeed you know all different kinds of places um are they more sophisticated and polished uh than they were 20 years ago or 30 years ago uh probably we saw that with the kgb uh you know it used to be the case in the early days of the cold war that your standard kgb guy was kind of thuggish to put not too nice to spin on it but by the end of the cold war they had very very sophisticated uh intelligence officers um both in terms of influence operations and in terms of of recruiting of spies and running spies um i i would suspect that if you know people to deal with this on an everyday basis would say the same is true for the mss and the uh uh people from the uh whatever it's now called with the old 2pla the military intelligence because i mean one of the things about these regime communist regimes is they got a lot of intelligence services not just one they and they the and that goes for russia today the gru uh has a whole set of activities illegals uh all kinds of activities that mirror what is being done by the svr and the fsb so they those are three major russian outfits that are out there causing trouble and i think that's true in the case of the the chinese and you know the chinese the ministry of state security there is this and i don't know again for about a professor after mattis about this but at least a few years ago the the various provinces also ran their own intelligence operations and like you know kansas would have its own intelligence service um and and the big one is the shanghai state security bureau um traditionally from because of the diplomatic nature and the position and everything but um they you know they have you know wholly owned subsidiaries of people doing things and you know one of them is dedicated of course to taiwan um but there's just a lot of intelligence outfits and so in that sense uh not only is it probably more sophisticated there's just a lot more of it and uh we you know does that necessarily mean it's better no but they've been pretty effective and it's certainly the case that it does not appear that it it certainly appears that their counterintelligence has successfully blunted american collection activities now you know i think american intelligence still knows a lot about what's going on in china particularly with weapon systems and cyber capabilities and others but um you know i i suspect our human operations are not all that keen today i know one thing when i was back in the i think i could say this when i was back in the in the business that uh because we agreed uh to in the case of terrorism we agreed to cooperate uh you know as we do with other nations in counter-terrorist events of activities and so we agreed to do that with the people's republic of china and the mss and um you know we i assume pass things and they pass things but the issue there of course is that their idea of counterterrorism namely against their own uighur population is not what we would call terrorists uh i'm not falling back on you know one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist but um so that became a problem for us and then it also became a problem because uh there again the the chinese were not above using the leverage and by the way is same as the soviets with regard to counterterrorism um both and the russians let me update them all of those outfits were more than willing to leverage our attempts at cooperation in the field of counterterrorism with getting their way in other areas and probably blunting things that they didn't want us did that answer that i hope that answered that sure and the next question is from professor f f mieras why has the usg been unable to marshal a response to china at a strategic level is it even possible for us to effectively counter china well i'll answer the second question it's the easy one is it possible sure it's possible is it likely to happen in the foreseeable future you know i realistically i don't see it i mean look there was in in this american democracy there is a political dimension to the things that we do in these things and it took a long while that was what i was alluding to at the beginning it took a long while for the united states politically to decide that soviet intelligence and the kgb and all of the associated activities was something that we really wanted to be against and even then uh you know there were people on what i would say the left side of the political spectrum who they really want to do that and so uh you know you have to marshal a certain critical mass of political opinion public opinion among the leaders uh in order to get you know a national if you want to call it for a democracy a national strategy even in this limited area um eventually that happened with regard to the soviets although it was never uh a hundred percent we had people um american politicians who who would thwart attempts uh to do uh effective things in what i would call in this context strategic counterintelligence vis-a-vis the soviets uh particularly in the area of uh technology transfer that was a hard thing to do and it was never done perfectly but um there was political opposition not in the sense of you know waving a political banner but certain senators and certain members of congress and certain members of the media tried to put the brakes on those things for whatever reasons but um they they did and you know going back in time there were the whole crew of people uh that uh professor kengor uh up the road or down the road from here but up the road from there wrote about dupes and fellow travelers and and a whole uh taxonomy of people who became effectively supportive of the soviets particularly in in these kinds of matters now probably not as many as time went forward but at one point that was a big deal and um it was a big deal during the uh 1930s we're talking here with we got to china with technology transfer one of the um the the the big things that happened in the 1930s is the united states willingly transfer technology after the recognition in 33 willingly transfer technology to the soviet union but also had a heck of a lot of it stolen more than is probably realized certainly at the time but even today people don't comment on that much but those who've gone back and looked at that that was a huge deal of of getting advanced technology to the soviet union and i think there were a lot of people uh well there were a number of people certainly who who favored doing that um in in the american political system and none of them did it and look there were a whole bunch of people who went to the soviet union um as volunteers to help the soviets with their you know becoming a great power um and um of course under stella a lot of them never came back and it was it wasn't a pleasant outcome for them but they they went over there bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and all idealistic um but there was also just a lot of stuff stolen um you know we don't make a big deal of it today and then pretty soon you know we were allies and there was len lease and and all of that but even there the soviets got a lot of mileage literally but they got a lot of stuff out of lend lease because there were a lot of people involved in the process who wanted them you know wanted to help the soviets um so i i i think that the political context on some of these things matter uh to be sure if we're going to see um the professor's question if we're going to see a strategic response to the chinese strategic um effort to become you know a great the egg one of the great powers or a great power or a great power in its their own backyard of asia um which is a big backyard um we're going to have to um come to some general agreement about this and i i i'm not optimistic about that i mean we got a lot of problems in doing that one our country has become uh polarized in its political views and in kind of a gut reaction way if you know the republicans say one thing the democrats don't like it that means it's just gut reaction uh when i worked on capitol hill with professor schulsky and some of the other in your audience and it wasn't all that many years ago you had it wasn't everything was not a strict party-line vote to be sure in fact on matters of of intelligence you you had a you know conservative democrats and liberal republicans and you had all these different varieties and they would come together on one issue and then on another issue they'd be you know not in agreement but it was a much more representative of what one would think in the school but school textbook case is kind of the way it should be today it's just very bipolar uh and i mean that both since the word um uh and you know that's hard to get agreement on anything you know the simplest thing today you can't get i was giving a lecture last night actually in iwp was the last night of the night before on fisa and somebody said well you know why hasn't that been reformed and you know you've got all of these things you need to do well because you can't get you know a republican and a democrat to sit down and address the issue apart from uh their intense dislike of each other anyway so that to me uh professor would be that i you know but is it possible to do it sure it's possible to do it and you know americans have done it before and it uh sometimes though that takes the sense that um you're in deep trouble and um with regard in this case to what you know i think some of the chinese activities chinese activities don't necessarily need to be as threatening as they are to the u.s but since they are we can't ignore it thank you professor and due to the limit of time we'll just take one more question um this is actually a series of questions do we need to reconstitute something like the old usia to deal with the united front works department efforts to distribute its propaganda and increase its political influence throughout the world would it be possible to create a new usia how could it harness the tremendous amount of soft power that is present possessed by the u.s media entertainment universities and etceteras well this is a you know a very tender question right now since you know the previous administration attempted to make some reforms in the entire uh area of information official u.s government information and the first thing that the new administration did was to fire everybody and reverse those things so um i you know do we need to do that absolutely but again the reformers some of whom are friends of the institute dr bob riley went back into government in the last you know in the last year of precisely to do this and he and the gentleman who was the head of the whole whatever it was called now um you know they were run out of office on the very first day so um there's another example of of the extreme polarization and and we do need a an american government uh coordination and strategy with regard to information and the radios and and all of that stuff uh we fought about those things in the government for years partly political and in some cases just bureaucratic but that's a glaring need and if you know particularly with regard to the people's republic of china we need that and i'm i don't want to this is not a political commentary but um i'm very disappointed with the the new administration you know so the first thing they did was get rid of the people who were were in there trying to fix the the situation that uh whatever the or whatever the new name is um that that that's not a helpful sign in my view so that's just my view thank you professor degraffenreid for such an insightful lecture today and thank you everyone for raising so many important questions um i'd like to share the ails upcoming event on april 14th with dr patrick cronin he's an asia pacific security chair at the houston institute and he'll be presenting uh about his report on fear and insecurity addressing north korean threat perceptions again thank you very much everyone and i look forward to seeing you all on the 14th of april you

Channel: The Institute of World Politics

Views: 654

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: #IWP

Id: _mkq28MkXwo

Length: 89min 39sec (5379 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021