The Team House - Former China Analyst at the CIA | Gail Helt | Ep. 162

Episode Date: September 10, 2022

Gail's Bio: I came to King in 2014 after nearly a dozen years at the Central Intelligence Agency, where I worked on issues related to East Asian security, politics, and governance. I had the privilege of traveling the world, and writing for and briefing the senior-most policymakers in the US Government. The opportunities I was given were amazing, and I appreciated every one — but in reality I always wanted to teach, and I was never a city girl, so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to move to northeastern TN and teach at King. I was recruited by the CIA out of a PhD program at the University of Arizona, where I was studying political science/international relations, with an emphasis on China. I have a M.A. in political science from Iowa State University, and a B.S in political science from the University of Nebraska at Kearney. I am the Coordinator of the Security and Intelligence Studies Program here at King, and also serve as the Director of the King Institute of Security and Intelligence Studies. I am also the faculty adviser for KSI–a great group of students interested in global events and security and intelligence-related issues. I teach classes in analysis, which are intended not only to teach higher level critical thinking skills that government agencies expect prospective employees to possess, but also to prepare students to succeed in graduate school. I also teach classes in intelligence ethics, counter-terrorism, and I will be teaching a new class in Chinese history and politics in the Spring 2016 semester. My research interests center around democratization and liberalization, human rights (I know, shocking for a former CIA officer!), and political stability. I also have a strong interest in Chinese history and politics, particularly how Western influence, and particularly Western religion, has impacted the development of China’s politics. In my spare time I enjoy hiking, kayaking, and spending time with friends. Today's sponsor: BUB's Naturals https://www.BUBSNATURALS.com/ Use the code "TEAMHOUSE" for 20% your order! Pick up their collagen protein, MCT oil, and apple cider vinegar gummies today! BUBS Donates 10% of all profits to charity in Glens honor, starting with the Glen Doherty Memorial Foundation GO TO: https://www.BUBSNATURALS.com/?discount=TEAMHOUSE or Use the code "TEAMHOUSE" for 20% off your order! FEEL GREAT. DO GOOD. Words that we live by. Thanks for supporting the companies that support the show! To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed Subscribe to our Patreon! 👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House...Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Searching for just the right job, whether you're looking for full-time, part-time, or seasonal work, you can get started today. Amazon jobs offer the whole package with great pay and flexible shifts that allow you to choose when and how much you work. Find a warehouse close to home and discover the role that works for you. To get your application started for an hourly job, go to Amazon.com slash apply. That's Amazon.com slash apply. Amazon is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five,

with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Hey folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Teamhouse know how you think we're doing. Go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify, or whatever else, those ratings really help us out. And we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the team house and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page.

And you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not so good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops. espionage, the Team House, with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone, welcome to episode 162 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park, D, stuck behind the computer system producing, and we're here with our guests tonight.

We're very excited to have Gail Helt on the show. Gail served as a China analyst at the CIA for a number of years, and today is a college professor that teaches about the intelligence community, intelligence operations, and national security issues at King's College in Tennessee. So, Gail, thank you so much for taking some time on your Friday evening with us. Thanks so much for inviting me. I've been looking forward to this all week, so this is a lot of fun. Yeah, absolutely. We've spoken, you and I have spoken before, and I mean, I always found you like super insightful on these topics. So, I mean, I'm really glad. I mean, this is kind of overdue, I feel like.

I appreciate that. Very few people call me super insightful here on campus. So I really appreciate that. What I'd like to do is jump in by asking you, you know, what we ask most of our guests about their origin story. I'd like to hear a little bit about yourself and where you grew up. And what was sort of that path that took you towards the CIA? So I was actually born in upstate New York. a town called Elmira and we lived there.

My dad worked for Westinghouse. And we lived there until I was about seven, I think. And he decided that he wanted to work in education. And so he became the principal of a small private school in Pennsylvania in their hometown. And that didn't last, you know, as small schools are want to do, that there are funding issues. That didn't last very long. And so he went back to engineering and we moved. to North Carolina. So basically New York to Pennsylvania to North Carolina has been my

formative years, ended up going to college at the University of Nebraska in Carney because it was a lot cheaper to go to the Midwest to go to school than it was to stay in either North or South Carolina. So I went there to study political science and I absolutely loved it. Also did some graduate school did my master's degree at Iowa State in Ames, Iowa, had an extremely great experience there, and then went to the University of Arizona in Tucson to do some Ph.D. work, which was a less great experience, but an experience nonetheless. Academia. By the, what's your PhD work, and I'm just interested, was that about the time that you were being drawn towards, uh, China studies or was it happening before that?

Actually, yeah. So I did take one class before I decided that I wanted to go to college, back to college full time. I took one class and it was on the history of China and it was at Winthrop University in South Carolina with this brilliant professor. He was a China historian and that just sucked me in. And so when I went to, in undergrad, you know, you don't really have a lot of flexibility about what you study and what you write about.

But in grad school, my master's program and my PhD program, I tried to incorporate anything I could. Like if you had a broad paper assignment, like in comparative politics, I wrote about the evolution of China's constitution and rights in China. So I would try to bring it in that way and study Chinese language a little bit. Although I never became fluent,

it is a hard language to learn. And I still go back and try to refresh on my linguistic skills every once in a while. I'll take like a month and pour all my free time into it. But I just loved it. I loved the history. I love the culture. Their political system, even though it's abysmal, right?

How it got there has always been really intriguing to me. And yeah, I just loved it. And I knew I wanted to go work on that for the government in some capacity. And what was that process like? I mean, did you talk to a recruiter on campus or did you just kind of make a phone call in the blind? No, there was a, there was a, of recruiter on campus, she was at a career fair. And I handed her my resume.

And it was apparently like the only one she had seen on that entire recruiting trip where anybody had any academic experience on China. And so she called me. She, I get this phone call. And she's like, okay, meet me at this hotel. And she tells me where it is. And she tells me where to be around this corner. And, you know, and I'm just like, oh, this is so sketchy. But it was really cool.

It was a cool experience. We talked for two hours or so. They gave me like a writing assignment to do. Like I had 48 hours to do this, to do this writing project. I think the topic was China in Afghanistan, if memory serves me. And whatever it was, it must have been enough to convey that I had some writing skills and some analytic skills. Because within two weeks, I had a job offer. Wow.

Yeah, it was awesome. I was surprised. I was really surprised. I thought that I would go into the Foreign Service. I thought that that was the route that I would probably end up pursuing. And that was great. I passed the Foreign Service exam, the written exam, and then there's a in-person component where you get into groups of other people

who they call up to go through this with you, and you're asked to problem-solve and work together as a team, and apparently none of us had people skills. So we were all rejected. it was sad and I was like, okay, I've got to find another route. So when the CIA recruiter was on campus, that was awesome. And so what was the job offer? What was the position?

To be a China analyst, they wanted me, I think the, I think the initial, the initial expectation was that I was going to do something related to human rights. I'm not exactly, I don't remember fully right now, but, it didn't turn out that way. I ended up working on cross-strait issues. So the relationship with China and Taiwan, you know, what could what could provoke China to go to war? What could Taiwan do to provoke China to go to war? How likely is it? What is the impact of this independence movement? Is Chen Shui Bien going to say something stupid during the re-election campaign that's going to, you know, cause China to actually launch those missiles that are aimed at Taiwan? So stuff like that. And I loved it. It was

it was awesome. And you were at CIA for like 12 years? Just shy of that, yeah. And, well, let's start off talking a little bit about the, the training program, because just as the ops officers go through a tradecraft's oriented school at the farm, I understand that the analysts also have some sort of a school, a training program that they go through. They do. It's the career analyst program, so CAP for short. I was a member. of CAF 19 back in 2003, because I started in 2003. I'm pretty sure my training class started the same year. And you basically, they pull you aside for four or five months

and they teach you how to write analytically. They teach you, and it's, my students are doing this this week actually. They're learning how to write analytic sentences, how to craft a sentence that actually says something in a, in one sentence that would be useful for a policymaker to know without them having to wade through multiple pages of, you know, fluff, basically. You know, how to be, how to be concise, how to get the what and the so what in the same sentence. And we refer to it as the bluff, get the bottom line up front.

Yeah, I'm sure you all have heard that at some point. And so you go through this process for four months, learning how to write sentences. It can be a little bit demoralizing because you're like, oh, my God, I never knew how hard it would be to learn how to write. write a sentence, right? This is insane. But it is really important because once you get it, you know, the confidence that you have in yourself grows, the confidence that your team and your management has in you grows, right? You can be tasked with writing pieces for the president and, you know, with an hour turnaround. So it is absolutely beneficial for you to learn this stuff. And then they teach you, you know, analytic tradecraft, collection tradecraft, what goes into recruiting

foreign assets, what signals intelligence is, you know, a little bit about vetting. They talk about, oh gosh, some of the history of the agency. I think when I was in CAP, I think it was Mark Lowenthal, who came and gave us this great history discussion, like, you know, from 1947 onward, it was great. Senior analysts come and tell you their, you know, their origin stories to kind of motivate you and keep you focus. Like you you guys can be doing this. You guys can be having this kind of an impact on policymaking. And it's just really great. And then when I was in CAP, you got to do a short rotation at another agency just to kind of give you exposure to what other agencies do. And so I went to the State Department and did some very limited work there. I mean,

because really with the amount of experience you have, you may or may not be able to be particularly useful. But when I went, the person on the Taiwan desk decided that it was a good time for her to take her vacation and left me there during during Ungo week. So I was getting these calls about how do we deal with, how do we deal with Taiwan's effort? They're begging people to be let in. You know, I mean, it was, they're trying to bribe people. It was funny. And so dealing with that was quite the experience. It really was. It's really funny. I mean, I think about it like, you know, in the Army, when you're the new guy, it's sort of like, I don't know how to use my nods. Can you show me how to do that? But when you're like a new policy analyst are calling you up like, hey, how do we deal with this crisis in Taiwan right now? You're like, well. Exactly.

So it was always, let me make a phone call and I will get back to you. But yeah, yeah. But it was cool because, you know, you get to walk around the State Department or whatever agency you're detailed to you for that period of time. And you get to meet other, you get to meet policymakers. You get to meet your peers and other agencies. So it was actually a really, it was definitely a career enhancing experience, I think. And then after the, after the program, you're back at CIA, you are working as an analyst. Tell us about that.

I mean, what's it like working in the office coming in and working on these issues at a very high level, you know, dealing with, you know, ultimately American national security, but looking at East Asia. It is, you know, it is, you can't really put a word to the experience. Like I don't, there's not a word that comes to mind, except it was awesome. And like that just gives it short shrift. You know, the first, the first day that you walk across that seal or you drive through the gate, that feeling of awe. And it's like, oh my gosh, I'm just so honored to be here. That never goes away, right? Because you're serving your country, no matter what you do, no matter how rough it gets, no matter how tired you are,

because you're on a three, like a task force that convenes at 3 a.m. every day, right? You know that what you're doing is meaningful. And so I think at first when you're starting, because you know, you have much less responsibility in those first couple of years, but you have the opportunity, obviously, to prove yourself. And it can be a little bit daunting, right, because you're around people who can crank out a PDV, a presidential daily brief article in a matter of minutes. And you're just like, I will never be able to do that. My boss is always going to hate me. I'll never get promoted. But you know what? You do, right? Because if you put in the hours, if you put in the time, you do, being trusted with, you know, with national security

secrets, being trusted once you're writing PDB articles to go and talk to the president's briefer in the mornings before he goes to the White House, you know, that's just, that's just an incredible, an incredible feeling. And then once you're trusted, you know, you've proven yourself and you're trusted and you know when this piece of reporting comes in, you know that's a significant change and you have to write about that. And you don't have to sell your team chief anymore. They're just like, okay, go talk to whoever, right? You know, it's a really, really, it's just an amazing feeling. When you write the piece that warns the president of this one thing that could go really, really badly for you. And in three hours, you hear Vice President Cheney making a speech that

addresses that thing, right? And you're like, oh, my God, like, I did that. I have had an impact on national security. And it's just, it's an amazing feeling. But it's also, you know, there's long hours, right? You come in, I think it under normal circumstances, I was trying to get there at six in the morning because, you know, traffic in D.C. sucks. And if you, and if you, if you, if you leave too late, you're not going to be there before your morning meeting and you need to prepare yourselves for that. Ours was always at 9 a.m. So you'd get there, you want to read everything that came in overnight. What happened? Make note of it. What was unique? What needs to be maybe followed up on? What do we need to issue requirements back out to the field? What do we

need more information about? I think I got to a point where I was coming in earlier than that, five or six because I realized I can talk to, you know, colleagues who are overseas and get them to give me a heads up, too. So, you know, you find ways. to make yourself useful that you might not have recognized, you know, early in your career, but suddenly it's like, oh, wait, I can do these other things too. And, you know, it was just, it was truly the best experience of my life. Like, working for the country, it was an honor that, you know, nothing will ever compare to. As an analyst, especially for a country like China, how did you divvy up, whether it was in the office,

you know, like the human, the SIGM, the open source, Like people, just the open source, I imagine, is immense when there might be an article in, you know, from a newspaper in India that, you know, the people in the United States have no visibility on. Right. So basically everything that you see is the stuff that you have to need to know. So if I'm working on cross-strait stuff, right, cross-strait relations, I don't really need to know about what's going on in Xinjiang. right, because I'm not working a human rights account. So basically that helps to narrow down my piece of the pie. So I would see everything, all of the raw intelligence from various sources, open source,

humans, siggins, whatever, State Department cables. I would see all of that as it related to what I was doing. And then nothing else. And, you know, what you're doing is broad. So you would see a lot of stuff on China, right? You'd see stuff on China military. Is that your primary focus? No.

but could I see it yes. Could I see other stuff? Not really. And I didn't have time to go looking for it. You're just, I mean, you're just that busy staying up to speed on your own account. Yeah. And then how would you go about, so if you have a specific focus, how would you go about? How would you go about the analytical process?

Yeah, collecting that as an analytical process from all the different sources that you had. So you're lucky because it all. I mean, it all deposits into your inbox. Okay. So there's like one go-to source. And then in terms of how you keep, how I would keep track of that, I think every analyst has their own personal preference, right? Some people, if you're using, if you're on a terrorist account, you can probably use Palantir because it's great for keeping track of relationships. You know, I was following trends and dynamics and sometimes statements from policymakers like in China or Taiwan.

But I mean, it's dorky. And granted, it was like 2003, 2004. I would use Excel spreadsheets. And that worked for me because you could make them searchable. I thought for sure you were going to say post-it notes and colored yarn. No. No. And Aki Peretz wrote a piece about that in which I am quoted.

This is not an art class. It is intelligence work. So, no, definitely not. But for me, Excel worked. It worked great. Everybody had their own preferred way of keeping track of these things. I worked with one or two people who just had amazing memories. And I'm just like, how do you know he said that when?

And you would go and look and it's like, crap, he's right. And you just be so disgusted. But there are some people who just have that gift. I was not that person. So that you would find ways. And after you've been there for a while, I mean, your own institutional knowledge, your own sense of history on your account, it just becomes part of you. So when did you actually start at the CIA?

What year was that about? Early 2003. Okay. Yeah. So not long after 9-11. Was it difficult at that time getting people to pay attention to China since, you know, terrorism became like the golden child, the new focus of our intelligence apparatus? You know, some people might disagree with me, but I think that because of the, I mean, the importance of China and the war on terror to some degree, because we needed, you know, there's an intelligence sharing relationship that's been, you know, it's been talked about in the press. That's not a huge secret. We had to engage in those relationships with a lot of people after 9-11. But I think there was also a sense that China was more going to become increasingly important, or the

relationship, at least, between China and Taiwan. Because in 2000, China, I mean, sorry, Taiwan had its first transition of power, right, from the KMT to the Democratic Progressive Party. And that put a lot of tension in the region. And I think that there was a focus on maintaining that relationship and not letting the China relationship get, will be ignored, fall by the wayside, because we didn't want to be blindsided by anything else. So, like, I never had a sense that my bosses felt like it was difficult to get the good attention, I think, on China. I mean, there may be some policymakers who didn't want to pay attention when they should have because they were focused on the war and terror, especially in the Pentagon. I think that's fair to say.

But I got the sense when I was hired that they were trying to size up. in my office. I mean, I can't prove that, but that was the sense that I had. So, so there could be some truth to that. But I mean, I also think that the Bush administration always knew the potential for pretty significant instability in East Asia if he, if people didn't stay on top of the China threat. What were some of the biggest challenges or, you know, the sort of like Rubik's Cube problems that landed on your desk that they're like, Gail, unravel this, please. Do you have that done by COB today?

Thank you. Oh, man. Well, I mean, obviously, I can't speak to specifics on that. But I think that one of the vaccine, one of the vaccine things was, was certainly why, what is going to be the thing that is going to push the DPP over the edge

and lead to a declaration of independence? You know, what is going to be that thing? Is China going to provoke it? is just does the leader of Taiwan, you know, is this like a long held dream of it? Like, what is the thing that's going to, that's going to cause it? And so I think that that issue, and again, I can't be more, I can't be more specific than that. But I think that that issue was the constant source of anxiety and focus, at least in the back of our heads. You know, it's not like it was always, it's not like there was tension all the time, like every single day of every single

year that I worked on this issue. But certainly there were moments around election time in 2004 and 2008. So that was basically it. How did it affect your, if it did, did it affect your office, the agency at large when, like in 2004, when the DIA officer, right, Montepara, Perto, what was his name, was arrested for selling secrets to the Chinese. Do you recall that at all? I'll be honest, I don't recall that. Yeah. I don't recall that.

Okay. Yeah, I didn't know if it was like a big deal at the time or not. I may, you know, in 2000, if that was in 2004, I may still have been too new. Okay. It may have been one of those things that was circulating kind of over my head. Right. But because I was new, it wasn't something that I had to focus on. Right.

But I know from talking to colleagues, you know, some of the other, you know, people who've been convicted who had ties to China analysis. Was it Kevin Mallory in 2016, I think, I want to say? the guy who apparently had some kind of communications device that the Chinese had given him. Was that Lee? No. Is it an actual former agency employee who they? At one point. Yeah.

He was former agency and the Chinese got a hold him through LinkedIn. He was that guy. Those kinds of things definitely, like I don't know that there was any changes in like security practices or anything like. that, but those are the things that kind of deflate morale, whether it's on a China account or anyone. You know, when you find out that somebody has been, has taken state secrets or taken, you know, even potentially names, because I think that was rumored in the press. I don't know if that's true. And given them to the enemy. Yeah. And that at some point they were one of you, right? That hurts. That's a, that's a betrayal. And so I think it, you know, it kind of kills morale a little bit,

but it also reaffirms your commitment to honoring your own oath, to, you know, they say this all the time and it becomes trite after a while if you see something, say something. But, you know, reporting things that are really strange. Like, I actually did have someone reached out to me after I left the agency through LinkedIn. And it turns out it was, it was the same guy who reached out to that Mallory person. And I reported it. Yeah. So I reported it. I mean, I'm not an idiot.

Yeah. So, yeah, I told. I told the colleague, I was like, are we supposed to report only pitches or, you know, or up to pitches? And he's like, I don't know. And so I ultimately, I ultimately reported it. It took me a little while to figure out what to do with that, but I ultimately reported it. Yeah. And it was, you know, it's something that seems innocuous at the time. Right. Because there, you know, there's think tanks in China that have relationships with American think tanks. Right. And sometimes, sometimes it seems like it is a legit offer. Right. And particularly with China, it's,

it because of, you know, the Thousand Talent Program, because of how well their sort of espionage infrastructure is built and that everything sort of runs through the CCP, it's very hard to tell when it is, like you say, a think tank or a legitimate business interests and when it's, you know, a bump, you know. Right. We're going to launch into our big deep dive here on China and U.S. National Security with Gail. I do have an ad to pitch our audience tonight, but actually I've been using. this product for years, and I'm really happy to work with this company. The team house is really

happy to work with this company, Bubbs Naturals. And Bubbs is a company that works with the Glenn Doherty Foundation, which is apropos who we're talking to and what we do here. Glenn Doherty was a Navy seal who, after his time in the military, went off and became a GRS contractor. He was a security guy for the CIA, and he was unfortunately one of those guys who died at Benghazi, Libya. I was fortunate enough to meet Glenn once before he passed. Instantly likable guy, just a terrific dude, and, you know, I'm really sorry he's not here today. But his friends and family continue to keep his name out there through the Glendorty Foundation, and Bubbs is a part of that. Bub was actually his nickname, so that's where the name of the company comes from. So they do this

protein powder, and this is a good protein. Like I said, I've, like I said, I've use this for years. It's completely flavorless. So you can mix it in a coffee with just water, with a soft drink, I mean, really whatever you want. So it's a little bit different than some of the other protein powders that are on the market. Then they got this MCT oil powder. And this is actually like a really good creamer. Yeah. You use this in your coffee. You can use it in the coffee. Yeah. It's great for keto or even if you're just kind of going to half keto. It kind of fills out that, you know, that, that, that the desire for fats. Really good.

And then this is a newer product they have that actually I just started using their apple cider vinegar gummies, which helps with your metabolism, promotes energy, supports your immune system and your digestion. Now, I know a lot of you are thinking apple cider vinegar gummies, that sounds like it tastes disgusting. I assure you they're delicious. They taste like normal gummies. Yeah. Don't be frightened off. D, do we have a website up there for them? It's Bubbs Natural.com and it's bubsnaturels.com and use the promo code Teamhouse for 20% off.

Cool. Yeah. Check it out. It's, they're great products. And even if you're not like lifting heavy weights, like everybody could use a little extra protein or high quality protein. And MCT oil is great. Great in your coffee. Great, great, you know, to help curb, uh, curb those cravings.

Yeah. So being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy

children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five

with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Thank you. and we will jump over back over to Gail here. Appreciate your patience. Let's jump right in with the history of Sino-American international relations. You're the professor.

I'll let you choose where to start. Where should we start with the history here? What's important for Americans to take away from our history with China? And where do we begin? Oh, my gosh. open-ended question. I mean, I think you have to begin with the place that Xi Jinping frequently refers to, which is China's national humiliation that, you know, extends from the 1718 into the early 1900s. So it's not a specific incident per se. It is the entire history of what China

perceives. And to be fair, what was Western exploitation of China. The opium wars, the boxer rebellion. All of those things. Even the Taiping rebellion, because even though that was indigenous, that was inspired by Western religion. And so, I mean, it was a perversion of Western religion and a very, you know, mentally disturbed into Chinese individual who let it. But it was still leaked in the minds of the Chinese to the West in some way.

And so, you know, that has never gone away when Mount Seedong took over in 1949. You know, he was angry because we were supporting the nationalists. He was angry because we continued to support the nationalists after the Korean War started. They were somewhat relieved. Maybe that's not the words that I should use. Appeased maybe in 79 when we decided that we would recognize the PRC and no longer the Republic of China on Taiwan. The Taiwanese were not that happy about that, of course. But they've been making an effort ever since

to basically design policies that will allow them to exploit the West to make themselves rich because they feel like whether we want to admit it or not, we owe them that because of everything that we've done to them for all of these years. So that's basically, I think, the crux of, at least in a broad sense of China's issues with us. Of course, there's also ideological,

ideological issues, communism versus capitalism. The Communist Party of China certainly does not aspire to create a communist utopia, right? Socialism with Chinese characteristics or stateism or state-led capitalism, whatever term you want to call it. But they do see them as rivaling the United States. And now that they've gotten stronger, now that the United States has become, at least in their minds. and to be fair, relatively weaker, at least in terms of China. You know, their economy, China's economy has grown.

Their military has grown. They can project power a little bit farther. They're taking control of parts of the South China Sea. You know, they think that it's their time. Yeah. I think that they think that their time is now and that this is what they've been working towards all of these years. It's hard to argue with their conclusion when you, look at how effective their industrial espionage has been, their military espionage, that they really

don't have to invent anything because as soon as we do, they have it. That's true. I mean, that's very true. A lot of the stuff that they've had has been reverse engineered. You know, they brag, they brag about their, their maglev train, the magnetic levitation. Yeah. And to be fair, it is really impressive. When you're in a car driving towards Shanghai and you see.

that thing past you and all the sudden it's gone. I mean, it is a wonder to behold, but that was, you know, Russians help them design that, right? That's not something that is indigenous to China. I mean, China has struggled to come up with, and I don't mean this in a disparaging way as some people might want to take it. But I mean, China has struggled to come up with high tech, with the exception of maybe solar, right? But the things that they have developed on their own are few and far between. And yeah, they reverse engineer a lot of, a lot of Western inventions, a lot of Western military, military products. Their aircraft carrier was an old Russian one that they refurbished, right? I think they're working on an indigenous one now. It may be floating,

but yeah, they would have very little if they weren't stealing it from the west. It sounds like from what you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, that there is a deep-seated sense of grievance and even insecurity in the minds of the Chinese elites and that that guides how they view the world. Do you think that's more or less accurate? I mean, I think that's probably true. And I mean, I think that insecurity, to some degree, stems from the success of Taiwan, right? Taiwan, I mean, they are a first developed country. China is developing still. It is not a developed country. They still have a lot of poverty. There's a lot of challenges that they need to overcome. And so, you know, Chinese citizens can look at Taiwan and say those Chinese people over there can do this. They can develop. They can pull their people out of poverty. They can have a, you know, first class economy. Yeah. And they can have human rights. And they can have political freedom. They can do it all. Why can't we do that? And there is a sense, I mean, Chinese leaders probably won't say. this. If they were being honest, they would. But yeah, they do. I mean, they fear that.

And they fear, look at how they've handled COVID. I mean, I think right now there's 65 million people again in China locked down in cities starving. I think that there's lockdowns in Xinjiang this time. They've locked Uyghurs up without food and they're not bringing them food. You've had people like taking to Twitter and social media begging for help. And help is not coming. And so, you know, when they see that and they see the hardships that the CCP is reaching on their own people because of this virus, when that didn't happen in Taiwan, I mean, Taiwan had a pretty easy time, relatively speaking. A few people, I don't want to say a few people, but compared to us, it was a few people who died. They had it pretty much under control for a long time. You know, there weren't, there weren't freezer trucks parked outside of hospitals.

because they had, you know, way too many bodies for the morp to handle. You didn't have people dying in their homes. You didn't have people locked in. You didn't have armed guards at the end of streets. You didn't have any of that. And so, yeah, I mean, the elite, they're sensitive to this. They're sensitive to screwing up. And I think that right now, because of COVID, because of the draconian approach they've taken to it,

because of the fact that their economy is really suffering. For some, some of the suffering is due to non-COVID, issues. I mean, no economy is going to grow at 15% forever, right? So China's, you know, their capacity is becoming saturated, so their growth rate is decreasing. But then COVID adds, you know, takes another huge chunk out of that and cuts into the growth rate that was already diminishing. And so now I read an article last week or the week before that said China could end up with a 3% growth rate this year, which would be the lowest in like 50 years. I mean, That's crazy. And so, you know, you see that. And how does the CCP, which has previously justified

its, you know, authoritarian approach by saying, but look at our economy, look at what we're doing for you, we're pulling you out of poverty, when none of those things are true anymore. Right. So what does the CCP actually have to show for it? So I think we're moving into this dangerous time. I think Pelosi's visit didn't really help. It kind of gave the party some room to maneuver and show what it might be capable of or what it at least might be thinking of doing in the future if things keep looking more and more difficult for the CCP. She has to go to the party Congress next month in October and basically ask, well, he's not asking, I guess, demanding. He's expecting a third term. And is he going to get it? Well, I would say probably, that he probably will.

but if you have too many more, you know, COVID lockdowns, if you have too much more economic, you know, bad economic news, if you have too many more people starving in their homes. And yeah, to be fair, if you have another congressional visit that he doesn't react strongly enough to, they may think, well, this looks, the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, he's not doing. He's not speaking on China's behalf. He's not standing up for the motherland. He's not protecting us. He's not allowing us to project Chinese power anymore.

Look, the Americans think we're a joke. They send their leaders to Taipei and we do nothing. Because the big mess, the big drama we caused in the summer, that didn't leave an impression because here they are again. So, I mean, I think we're in a dangerous time. And, you know, I do think that I think conflict is unlikely, but I think it's becoming more likely. Is it, you know, with Pelosi's visit, like I have mixed feelings about that,

because on one side, I do feel like you that it's like antagonistic, but on the other side, it is also sort of a reclamation of sort of American presence saying, because I feel like China has felt as though they can operate with impunity and then America, you know, is kind of toothless right now. Yeah. But do you kind of feel, and is it sort of the feeling amongst the Chinese experts that it was more antagonistic and more detrimental? than beneficial? The Pelosi visit. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I do. And there are some people who think that we should be able to send congressmen and women and the president if he wants to, to Taipei, and that it should be fine. And in a perfect world, it probably should be, right? But the reality is we're supporting Ukraine's fight for freedom in Eastern Europe. And, I mean, that's taxing resources. Right.

How willing are Americans going to be to sacrifice in order to support the Taiwanese in a war against China that we've inspired or we've incited because our congresswoman just had to go, right? The Speaker of the House or the Senate Majority Leader just had to go to Taipei to prove a point. I mean, it is antagonistic. If nothing else was going on in the world, I'd say, okay, fine. You know, China shouldn't dictate where you go. Maybe it's time that we take a stronger stand on behalf of the Taiwanese. I generally support that. I mean, I certainly think that if China attacks Taiwan, I would want us to go support Taiwan.

Absolutely. But that doesn't mean the American public is there. And that doesn't mean that we could, we have the capacity to provide the kind of military support, like in terms of hardware and guns and bombs and planes, that we would hopefully want to and be able to support in any other situation. So, I mean, I do think it was unnecessarily antagonistic. And it also gave China the opportunity to raise the ante, right? They did the blockade. They sent a missile over Taiwan, over Taipei. People used to talk about that.

Like, well, if China wanted to ratchet it up, what would they do? Oh, they'd send the missile over Taipei to get them to back down. Well, they've done that now. So what's the next thing? Right. What's the next thing that's going to happen? Is it going to be, you know, fighter jets actually flying over the island? Right.

Is it going to be, you know, a missile or a, a bomb that's dropped like in the port of Gauchang in that area, what is it going to be? And as China escalates, as China feels like it has no choice but to escalate, the possibility for miscalculation or for an accident where civilians are killed or where somebody reacts in an unexpected way, that just increases pretty significantly as that dynamic builds. And all of these things are sort of interrelated to one another too, aren't they? what you're describing about falling GDP growth in China. I mean, if the country or the government ceases to have legitimacy in the eyes of the people,

doesn't that also increase the likelihood that they may need to have a little foreign adventure going on? Yeah, a little wag the dog adventure. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the best ways to maintain legitimacy is to show that you are doing something, to further whatever you've been telling your people China's national interest is. And the Communist Party has always made unification, reuniting the motherland, bringing Taiwan back to the fold, to the loving arms of the motherland as part of that. So yeah, absolutely.

I mean, to get to divert the people's minds from the crappy situation at home, the CCP has created, hey, we will turn your attention over here. Surely you're not going to say that we don't have a right to do this or that we shouldn't take Taiwan and do this thing that we've been talking about for years. Now is the time. And people are likely to rally around that. I suppose Beijing would have to sell it a little bit because you have to mobilize the nation. You have to put the nation on war footing.

You would have to divert if it's going to be a long, prolonged conflict. And it almost certainly would be because I don't see Taiwan negotiating terms with Beijing for unification at all, especially after they've seen what one country, two systems means in Hong Kong. Right. You're going to have to mobilize pretty much all of China to support this war effort. And, you know, that is also going to decrease the cost of living for most Taiwanese, sorry, for most Chinese people. So you'd have to sell that as well. But it might make sense for the party to do that at some point because at least that would be a reason.

Here's a great excuse why your centers of living suck. It's because we're at war taking Taiwan back. Right. So that might make sense to them. Right. I've read that the Chinese government studied Operation Desert Storm very closely to try to develop an understanding of modern military operations and how they might counter the United States. I was wondering if from your perspective they're watching what's unfolding in Ukraine right now. And if that has any impact on their own little geopolitical adventures and what they consider their.

backyard or how they might interact with the United States. They might tangle with the United States military in the future. I mean, I think they're taking notes, honestly. I do. I think that they are studying this. I'm sure that if China has the equivalent of, you know, the National Defense University, and I'm pretty sure it does, I just can't remember what it's called. They are there studying this.

You know, why has Russia failed? Does China have the capacity to fail in that way? Why have Russian troops been allegedly refusing to go and to wage war? How do we maintain China's morale? How do we make sure that Chinese troops, that PLA soldiers are sold on this idea of reuniting the motherland? And how, you know, we need to make sure that they're willing to face hardship. How, what lessons can we draw from the Ukrainians' will to fight? And how can we use that to undermine Taiwanese will to fight?

fight, right? Taiwan is in obviously in a slightly different geographic location, whereas, you know, Ukraine has friendly nations that border parts of it. So you can actually get military aid, economic aid, food aid, humanitarian aid into Ukraine still. And you can get Ukrainian exports out to some degree. They could block aid Taiwan and make it totally impossible. Right. So, right, so there's things that Beijing is looking at and they're like, all right, you know, we can't assume that this would be sufficient. We would need to go and do exports. Y and Z because look at what's happening in Ukraine. So yeah, I do think that they are, that they're watching this and they're watching our will to continue to support Ukraine.

Right. How long will it be before American citizens demand that that U.S. tax dollars stop going to Ukraine and would our will to fund a Taiwanese, some kind of adventure in Taiwan, would our will be less? Like, would we have less of a desire to do that? when we have more because, you know, we do have this longstanding history with Taiwan that we haven't had with Ukraine. How will the Americans press their government? I think it's dangerous when you see certain parts of the Republican Party talking about why are we doing this. What is our interest in Ukraine? We have no interest here. We've got to stop this. That's dangerous. The message that that sends to other enemies is really, really disturbing because

all it says is we can make this bad enough or long enough. enough and the Americans will back out and we will win. Right. Do you think that there are elements within our own government that one of the reasons that they go so hard on Ukraine in terms of, you know, the funding is as an example so that China sees what our resolve is like. Is Ukraine sort of an example for on our side too? Like we're not going to give up on Ukraine because we want China to see that.

we're not going to give up on Taiwan. I'm not sure if people are thinking about that as directly as you might hope. I would like to think that we're going hard on Ukraine because it's the right thing to do. Right. But I do hope that there's some back channels, you know, some assurance as being given to Taipei. Like, look, we would we would go to bat for you like this, right? This will absolutely happen. I have a feeling that's what Pelosi intended to do on her visit.

I don't know if she did. I don't know if she conveyed that. I don't recall seeing a readout. I think the Taiwanese gave a readout where she was basically reassuring Taiwan of our continued, you know, fondness for them and our continued support. But I hope that's happening. I don't know if we're thinking about that as explicitly as we should. And I hope we are, in a sense, because if we are, then we also know absolutely what message it sends if we back off. And that's, you know, that's absolutely terrifying. And frankly, if we back off, what message does that also send to NATO?

Right. You have to play chess. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, you know, there's some really significant reasons. I think we, we, it will be damaging if we allow the, the, the folks like Nikki Haley's and, and, you know, the, the Freedom Caucus wing ironically named in the Republican Party in the House to, to change our policy on this. I don't see that. I don't think that's going to happen. I really don't, but those voices are dangerous. Interesting. We jumped right into a whole slew of interesting foreign policy questions. Faster than I thought we would, but that's okay. This is a really good conversation, and I'm sure we'll circle back on some of it. I wanted to take a small step back here to discuss Chinese intelligence services, and I was wondering if you could tell us, I know it's a huge sprawling apparatus, but. if you could, to the best of your ability, sort of walk us through what the Chinese intelligence

services are like, who they are, what they are, what their capabilities are, and a little bit of how they differ from, let's say, since we have a common point of reference from American intelligence services, CIA, DIA, and so forth. Well, I mean, the primary Chinese intelligence agency that is, like, externally focused is the MSS, right, the Ministry of state security. I almost I almost glitched on that. I'm bad at acronyms on a good day. The MSS, right? They're the folks who are sponsoring, for lack of a better word, the economic espionage, you know, stealing, trying to steal secrets from universities or from corporations or, you know, hack into Oak Ridge nuclear facility or those kinds of things, right?

Those are also the folks who are behind institutions like the Confucius Institute that China was using to get a foothold in universities. But, you know, of course, they're funding universities and giving money to universities to fund their China studies. But then that comes with a string where you have to use their curriculum and their, you know, and it's sometimes there are people. So, you know, that comes with a heavy cost. sometimes. And I think we're getting wise to that. Finally, and universities are starting to kick those institutes out. So I think that that's a good thing. The MSS sponsors, sponsors efforts to monitor Chinese citizens abroad, even if you are a, if you're an ethnic Chinese person who is a U.S. citizen, you're not necessarily safe, especially if you have family members still in China.

I mean, to be able to do this, to be able to monitor, you know, 1.4 billion people around the world, and granted most of them are in China, but a lot of them are not. You have to have a huge apparatus, right? You have to have a lot of people. So imagine, you know, whatever you think, you know, U.S. intelligence services who are deployed overseas, whatever numbers that you think they have, and I honestly don't know what they are. You could imagine or you should imagine that China's is like 10 times more than that, simply because the scope of what they're doing is so much broader. I mean, the CIA doesn't give a crap about what Americans are doing overseas, right?

The FBI might if they think they're involved in terrorism. And I guess the CIA could come in there a little bit. But right, they're not, they're not really following me when I go to, you know, if I go to Tokyo on vacation, they don't care. They're not going to pressure me to make sure that I only say nice things about, about Washington or that I never, you know, just the Republican Party or the Democrat party. They don't care. But the MSS does, right?

They care about China's image. They don't want the truth about what's going on in Xinjiang to get out. They harassed Uyghurs. They harass people who are sympathetic to Uyghurs and to the notion that there shouldn't be concentration camps. I didn't think that was radical, but apparently it is in 2022. So they have to have a huge capacity to be able to do this. And that's on top of, of course, all the domestics by security agencies, like the people's armed police, military intelligence, all of the other components that exist within China.

Sorry, this huge spider just fell off my ceiling, but we're okay. It was big enough for me to see it. Now I'm nervous. So, I mean, the state apparatus when it comes to spying is enormous. And again, you know, a lot of this goes back to economic espionage. You know, the United States doesn't do that, if much, if at all. I mean, I'm not suggesting we do it at all. We could be doing it and I don't know about it.

But it's not something that I've ever heard of us doing. But the Chinese do. And you have to have a lot of people placed everywhere to be able to pull that kind of thing off. There's a little anecdote. And I apologize to viewers if I've already told this story before. But when I was at Columbia, I was taking a foreign policy class, international politics class. And I was in a study group with several Chinese students. And it was just me and three Chinese students.

And I asked a very naive question. I didn't realize at the time. I asked them, because we're having just kind of talk a casual conversation, I asked them what they feel about Fu Long Gong. What's your opinion about that? Like, I'm genuinely interested what they think about that. And they, you could hear the second hand on the clock just like, click, click, click, click. And I did not understand at the time that they could not give a genuine opinion in that group.

Not because of me. I mean, I'm irrelevant. But because there's other Chinese students in there, they have no idea who's going to inform on them and how their opinion, their wrong think, might make it back to the mainland. And I only bring that story. I tell that story because I think Americans need to know, like, how pervasive and oppressive this is here on American soil as well. Not just in China, obviously, but for people who are ethnically Chinese, Chinese Americans who are here in the United States, I mean, they also have to deal with some of this.

Yeah. Yeah. You'll have Chinese Americans who get phone calls from someone in China, apparently in China, who is MSS-related, and they will mention their family members by name who live in China and where they live and where their children go to school. And, you know, you're going to stop, you're going to stop whateverness that you're doing that we don't like. Right. If you want them to stay out of prison. I stopped by your aunt's house. Yeah.

They get the message immediately, right? Yeah, exactly. I'm very concerned about her health. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Was it somebody on the show or was it something that I read where somebody, you know, a Chinese American was approached by, you know, a Chinese national and said,

hey, you know, just kind of randomly starts talking to them. It's like, oh, you're so-and-so. Are you from? you know, this area. Oh, it's interesting. I just spoke with your grandmother last week. Oh, man. Yeah, that's unnerving. Are you getting the message? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So imagine the number of people you have to have in your state security service to be able to actually do that and to project that kind of, you know, obsessive control over over your population. Yeah. I was at a, I was at a conference once in the United States. I was working for the, I was still CIA. And at the time,

And it was in San Diego. And I was walking around. I didn't have my bad, like my, you know, my conference, that little dorky tag they make you wear. And a Chinese man walked up to me and said, I guess the weather is a lot better here than it is in D.C. isn't it? And I'm just like, how, how? Like, how do you even know that I am from deep? Like, that was really creepy. Yeah.

And I just said, I guess it is. And I kept walking. Yeah. I'm not going to have this conversation. But it was, it was eerie. It was, it was really unnerver. Well, and now, you know, we talk about just their human apparatus, their human, and, you know, we can talk about their cyber warfare. But we also make it very easy for them when they have things like TikTok, when they own so many of the...

Well, they hacked OPM. They know who we all are in. Yeah, exactly. I got. I got busted in that breach. But also in terms of them owning, like, the major companies that do prenatal testing and collecting genetic information on America. Americans. It's insane. It's everything. Everything they can get their hands. How widespread and insidious they are. I think some of the data they collect, they're not even sure what they're going to do with yet. It's just like, we have this data. But think about what you could learn from everybody's TikTok videos, right? First, you know who their friends are. Then you know who the friends look like, what they look like. You can link names with faces. You can add to your, collection of facial recognition software.

You can, you know, some people are going to get their, you know, their parents or their neighbors or somebody at their kids ballgame and they're going to identify them by name. And they're going to figure out, hey, I've seen that name before. Wait, I've seen that name on the list of people who work for the CIA when we hacked OPM. Right. This is what they look like. I'm going to put their picture into my database because I want to know if they ever come to China.

Yeah. Right. Even if it's under an alias. I mean, the risks to this are huge. I tell my students if they have TikTok to get it off of their phone if they don't want someone in China knowing everything they do and who they do at list. And then they just look at me like, really? Yeah. Are you exaggerating?

Because it doesn't because it, it's sort of like our own, you know, Google and collecting on us. We're like, it doesn't really matter, right? It doesn't really matter. I mean, at the end of the day, it's, I mean, everybody should be concerned with privacy for whatever reason. but Google isn't a hostile entity either. They're harvesting your data so they'll sell you more shit, which is very different than what a foreign adversary is doing. And I've had that same conversation with people, Dave, and I've had the conversation about TikTok with my own kid. And, like, hey, that app is run by the Chinese government.

They're using it to harvest information. Like, it's not just a little like a video Snapchat thing. and my daughter will be like, no, daddy, you don't understand what it is. And it's a, it's a generation. This is a generational problem because we're boomers, basically. We grew up in an analog world and have a, I think, a little bit of a boomer-esque distrust of the technology. But think about it, if you're a kid growing up today, if you're one of these, you know, not even Gen Z, what are they called the younger kids than that? But whoever, if you're 10 years old today, you grew up with all of this stuff.

And it's just right over their heads when you try to talk to them about it, that like there's a danger here. Right. It's like you can use this app, but not this one. I mean, they don't understand the capacity to understand. And, you know, when you talk to someone in junior high about the dangers of facial recognition software, you know, they're not necessarily going to get it. Right. Right. I mean, they're just not going to know.

they understand what a surveillance state is. I sound like a extremist when I say this, and I am using some hyperbole here to make the point. But for people out there who don't understand the dangers of it, I mean, they should read probably IBM and the Holocaust and think about what a modern day Holocaust would look like with artificial intelligence and biometrics. And if that does not shake you,

to your core, I really don't know what to say at that point. There are some very profound decisions about technology, about privacy, about all of these sorts of things that we should be making, our generation should have made them, but we really just, you know, try to go for the cash grab and we pass that off to the next generation to deal with. People need to start thinking about this. Well, and China has, you know, they read our culture very well, and they understand that any time we enact sort of, you know, anti-Chinese policies that they, through their, you know, representatives and proxies just have to scream racism. And it becomes a contested issue. That's why you shouldn't say anti-Chinese, anti-CCP or anti-PRC. Like we're not interested in

passing anti-Chinese policies. But I think that's a good topic to get on, G. is how do we separate these two things? Because we do have, we have had problems in America with racist policies. Everyone's familiar with what was done with the Japanese in World War II. Yeah. I mean, yeah, racism exists in America, of course. Yeah. How can we go about separating some of these things from some of these regressive policies of the past versus protecting American citizens from a hostile foreign government today?

How do you separate those things? I mean, that's hard. Like, that is hard. I mean, you know, you can, you start with, you know, a focus, like, I try to tell my students this is not a Chinese issue, right? It is a CCP issue, right? This is not the country of China. This is not the people of China.

This is not ethnic Chinese. This is the PRC. This is the CCP, right? The government of China. These are the bad people, not the average Chinese. The party goons of this. Yeah, exactly. Right.

average Chinese person is a victim of this. They speak up and they're going to be put in a gulag and nobody wants that and you can't expect someone to speak up when that is the outcome, not just for you, but you know, for your family and friends. But in terms of, you know, how do you, how do you separate that? I mean, I think that our elected officials need to be more explicit. And I also think that there needs to be some walking back of some of the rhetoric that we saw around COVID, around the, you know, the, you know, the.

the quote Wuhan virus or the Chinese virus, right? That was not a Chinese virus. That was not something that was carried by Chinese people. There was no effort on the part of individual Chinese citizens to infect people. And yet there was a lot of people who were attacking Chinese citizens for that. And I think to some degree, there was at least some quarters

of our government that need to walk that back. And whether it's apologizing for that or clarifying that, I don't know, because that's the spring, the springboard from which you can then say, we stand in solidarity with our Chinese brothers. We know that they're oppressed. We respect the fact that Chinese Americans here love our constitution and love our freedom like we do.

But here's what the party is doing, right? Here is what the Communist Party of China is doing because ideologically they have a vision that requires, you know, to some degree global domination, at least for their ideology or at least over part of the globe. Because they are trying to export. their state-centered capitalism or statism, if you will, which is kind of a mesh between socialism and authoritarianism and, you know, some level of capitalism. But it's basically, you know,

look, authoritarian governments across the world, you know, the U.S. has offered you guys development aid. They've offered you all of these things, but they offer you these things with strings attached. We're offering you these things with no strings attached. And not only that, but we'll come in and we will help you recreate our authoritarian system in your countries, right? We need to be explicit that that is the goal of the CCP and that's who the enemy is, not the average, you know, not the average Chinese person. And I think that needs to be called out more and more. But effort needs to be taken to draw that line between who the enemy is and who the enemy clearly. clearly is not. And I think once you do that, you can feel more comfortable warning about this

Chinese technology, warning about TikTok, warning about WhatsApp, warning about Huawei, warning about all these other entities, because the CCP is a nefarious entity, right? They have ill intent. They want to use that ill intent, not just against Americans, but against freedom-loving people anywhere, everywhere. And that includes in China. So I just think that there, that we need to up our, I don't like to use this word, but our propaganda game, if you will. Our messaging. Yeah. Yeah, our messaging in ways that benefit us, but also benefit the Chinese people because they're victims here in this.

I think it's, I mean, you're absolutely right. And we can definitely improve the messaging and the counter narratives, too. It's quite humorous to me to watch, like, Chinese government officials try to, like, play the victim of racism as if the Han Chinese or this oppressed ethnic minority. It's like, no, guys, you're the ethnic majority. Exactly. Like, knock it off with this. It's not to, again, it's not to say there isn't, you know, anti-Asian racism in America,

but the Chinese government is, they are playing up that narrative. As Dave mentions, they know that's a pressure point in our society that they can go after and try to, like, guilt us or shame us. as a smoke screen for their intelligence operations. Oh, absolutely. And I think it's also fair to say that, you know, you would have to at least consider that some of the anecdotes, you know, of Chinese people who are here in the United States saying,

I was walking down the street and somebody spit at me, calling me, you know, telling me to go back to Wuhan, telling me I was carrying a virus. But you have to expect that at least some of those are contrived, are, you know, people being forced to say those things and make those allegations simply because it is, It does, it does stir up, you know, some political strife and, you know, gives ammunition to people on one side of the political aisle or, or another. So, and China will, you know, they absolutely will stir up political strife if they can.

They tried to in the 50s or the 60s under Mao. They tried to stir up racial issues between blacks and whites. And it was unsuccessful. And that doesn't mean that they've given up trying. Right. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five

with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting.

Visit child and family resource network.org today. So there are, you know, it took us a long time, I think. But we, in my opinion, Gail, and I'd like to hear what you think, we are starting to finally take some steps forward to push back. I don't know if you've seen some of the indictments that have hit over the last year or so. There was actually a guy from Brooklyn running for Congress who is ethnically Chinese and the Chinese intelligence hired private investigators. to like follow him around there are even plots to like beat him and other people up um yeah yeah this stuff's for this stuff happens uh you know we we have seen some of these some uh prosecutions the fbi i has had a hell of an uphill battle trying to prosecute people for espionage i mean espionage

is a hard hurdle to clear in the american legal system um but i was wondering what you think of some of these uh some of these counterintelligence uh investigations that have come up in in recent years and some of these indictments that have hit? You know, I know, gosh, I mean, my first response, the first thing going through my head was I'm surprised there's not more of them. Yeah. Right? Because, I mean, really, if you think about it, it seems like there's a lot more of them,

but I think it's because they've happened in a short, shorter period of time. But, like, there's really just not, like, for as active as the MSS is here, for as active as, you know, anyone who's even remotely informed about, what China is trying to do inside the U.S., the number of espionage cases are very, very small. There was one here in Tennessee recently where I think he worked at, I guess, UT at the University of Tennessee, and he was accused of not having reported the fact that some of the funding he got was from a state-owned enterprise in China. Like, it was not even something he thought of, but because he didn't report it, he was accused

of some kind of espionage. Like he was under suspicion. And like they took him to trial. And they had to walk that back. Basically that he was clear. Thankfully. But it was long and it was painful. And how do you redeem your reputation because of that?

Right. So so I think that there is a, on one hand, I want to say that there's not enough attention being paid to these cases. I mean, to the fact that this is happening, that there's probably way more instances of, of this kind of,

of bullying of this kind of espionage of this kind of strong alarm tactics that are going unreported or at least that we don't know about maybe the FBI is aware of. But at the same time, I think that there's such a fear. We've stoked such a fear of Chinese who may still have an accent so they, you know, you know they weren't born here. Their first generation Chinese in America, I think that there's this expectation that they're all spies. So I think that there's also a little bit of a negative consequence here that is counterproductive because the more cases that are kicked out, right, the more time someone is cleared of the thing that they were accused of doing, it's going to be, the bar just keeps getting higher and higher and people

are going to be less and less willing to bring these cases. And some of the cases are going to be legit. So like, it just, as a dynamic, it makes me really, really nervous. And I, hope that these the cases that are out there are being, you know, well sourced, well investigated and will be prosecuted with good evidence, as opposed to just being things that stir up additional, additional strife and additional tension. What do you think of the, I mean, I don't want to say they botched the cases. I mean, the FBI has tried to prosecute a number of people and failed. And like I said, I think the, I think getting an espionage conviction.

is quite difficult. I was reading a book recently about a case of a Polish intelligence operative during the Cold War, recruited somebody in an American in the aerospace industry. The FBI got that guy in the aerospace industry to confess. He did a written confession for the FBI. Then he agreed to wear a wire and went and got the Polish intelligence handler to say things on the audio recording about this transfer of information. that they had going. And the FBI that case almost got blown. Like they were it was very dicey whether or not they were

going to get a conviction. This was back I guess in the 1980s, late 70s or early 80s. Yeah, it's more difficult than I think John Q. Public understands to convict a spy in this country. But I was wondering what you think of some of these cases, what you make of them. I mean, is that FBI botching the cases? Is it just that

the legal thresholds are so high that they have to meet or or is it just that these people they're prosecuting are probably innocent? I think it's a little, I think it's a mix of most of those things, honestly. I mean, it is, you know, how do you prove, as I understand it to prove that an espionage charge, you have to prove motive, you have to have, you know, prove connections, you have to have all of that and you have to be able to, you know, prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, right? So it's really hard. I mean, I can imagine it is really difficult to prove someone's motivation.

to prove that they were engaged in what they were doing willingly, to prove that what they're claiming is, oh, I forgot to fill out some paperwork, right? That doesn't mean that I was hiding a relationship with the MSS. It means that I forgot to fill out. It's really hard to prove that forgetting to fill out that paperwork was nefarious, that that's a sign of guilt. So, like, the threshold is, I mean, it is very, very high.

And I think it shouldn't, to be honest. I mean, otherwise you're going to be, making false charges against every member of every group that falls under suspicion in any given period of time. At one point, it would have been Muslims. And now it's the Chinese, although it's probably still Muslims. But now it's now it's Chinese. And I think the bar needs to be that high because I could also envision, you know, politically motivated cases as well. So it's probably, it's probably good. I don't think the FBI is in the habit of botching cases. But I, I could imagine there being a lot of pressure to catch the person who is the spy, did not want to be the guy who let them get away because they didn't look hard enough or were too sympathetic, right?

I mean, that would be a career-blowing move, I would think. So, I mean, the pressure, when you know that, you know, the China threat, the China MSS threat, the China infiltration of our universities and corporations and nuclear labs, when that is hyped all the time. you don't want to be the guy who allows someone who actually is a spy to continue to work and move in those places. Right, right. And it's difficult because, you know, when we like when we talk about focusing on these and, you know, like the China initiative and how it was ended because it, you know, it focused on Chinese. It kind of, you know, the critics said that it encouraged racism. Yeah. But as we were talking about earlier, there is that angle that people in America.

particularly those who were born in China, even if they don't come here as a spy, it's not that hard for the CCP to put that pressure on them if they have access to material that they want. Oh, absolutely. You know, so even sort of comparing it to Muslims, you know, AQ didn't have that pressure on, you know, that type of pressure on or leverage on Muslims. No, that's true. That's absolutely true. You know, it's a challenging situation for sure. And again, that's just the human side of it. You know, you talk about Hawaii. Yeah, let's get into that.

So let's talk about the tech stuff. Oh, Huawei, yeah. Yeah, Hollywood. Everybody pronounces it differently. So I assume that was where you're going. But yeah, the tech stuff is, I mean, it's disturbing, right? the drone initiative, the Huawei, like, why anybody would think that a CCP owned and financed and subsidized and blessed tech organization or tech company is someone you want to get in bed

with. And like the governments in Europe who were actually at one point thinking of, you know, incorporating Huawei into their communications and telecom infrastructures, like what is wrong with you? Right. Why would you even think that? does not matter what kind of threats or coercion or inducements the Chinese government offers you. Do not do that thing because they might say there's no backdoor and they might say that there's nothing nefarious. But there is. I mean, I can guarantee you that there is there it's stupid, right? These people are stupid for considering this. I just do not understand this whatsoever. But yeah, there's a danger. And also we shouldn't be subsidizing.

China tech companies that are used to repress ethnic minorities in China. So there's that aspect of it as well. Right. There was that article that came out recently, Gail, talking about how Hauway, well, during the Trump administration, first of all, the scary thing is Hauai was their hardware was in U.S. governmental systems. And it wasn't until the Trump administration, they said, pull all of that stuff out of there. Like, that doesn't belong in governmental, American governmental systems.

but still to this day, we still have their hardware in civilian infrastructure, our ICT or telecom infrastructure. Yeah. Yeah, I don't understand that. I mean, at what point does China pull a switch and leave half of American, America, you know, blind and deaf, basically? That's really disturbing. And would they do that during a time of war, during a time of, you know, some kind of national crisis just to make it worse, to exacerbate the system? I'm sure they would do it if we ever went to Taiwan. defense. Right. So why in the world are we hamstringing ourselves before we ever are called to come to Taiwan's defense, whether that be just selling them stuff or actually, you know, ships in the water and boots on the ground? Why are we basically seating ground to China before that ever even happens? Right. It's it's counterproductive in, in my view, it's just stupid and it's irresponsible. Why do you think that is, though? I mean, we'll get into this more, but I mean, why do you think we, is it a

question of like, it's just money at the end of the day? This was the cheapest answer and we went for it? I think that's a possibility. I mean, I honestly, I really have no idea how we ended up with that stuff in defense, in defense infrastructure at all. Like, I don't know how Huawei, how anything Huawei got into U.S. borders, honestly. I don't know what those deals were like. But I could imagine the situation where a deal was made where China did something that they were not. necessarily inclined to do. And in return, we agreed to give Huawei a bit of market share or to, you know, subsidize this thing or to buy this one, you know, I don't know. I don't know telecom terminology, but to let them have just a little bit of access in return for something that we really, really needed them to do. Like I, I envision that kind of a dynamic. I also,

you know, envision a lot of just pressure. And if you want us to normalize, trade on these issues, you'll normalize trade on this issue. We shouldn't be banned from government procurement contracts, all that, that kind of stuff. So, you know, and again, that may, they may play the racial card too there. You're just keeping us out because we're Chinese and you think that our product is inferior. They actually did play that up in, in courts when we started banning their hardware and they said something like, you're violating our constitutional rights or something like this. It's like you're a state-owned CCP company. What constitutional rights do you think you have exactly?

Absolutely none. Yeah, but exactly. And it's, you know, there could be, they may have, like DOD may have done some kind of study and thought, okay, well, we can mitigate any potential harm from this one thing, right? I mean, I'm not saying that happens. I don't know that that happened. But like, I can imagine scenarios where, yeah, where a deal like that is made. otherwise I have no clue because it is just so counterproductive it's so harmful to national security I don't know what possessed anyone to do it well had to have gotten something out of it

there's I suspect there is a much bigger story there with um what was the term the technology transfers that started the 1990s um but yeah I do think there's a whole other story there but um as far as kind of like fighting back again against this. Again, we have started maybe 20 years too late, but begun making some tepid steps in the right direction, I think. Could you talk a little bit about the supply chain resiliency initiative that has kicked off and kind of how that hopes to counteract some of this? The effort to get elements, key elements of our supply chain out of China. Pharmaceuticals and other things, yeah. Chips and all of those things. I mean,

I don't know why we've waited this long. Right. Anyone who's paid attention to China and the way the CCP operates, we should have seen this coming and have been doing this 15 years ago, honestly. Like when the first free and fair election was held in Taiwan, we should have been making sure that we never were dependent on China for national security or life and death kind of stuff. and yet here we are.

It's hard, right? You have to get a lot of companies to be willing to give up a lot of money, a lot of perks, and bring that stuff back here or to some other country, I mean, preferably here, but some other country

where the government is not repressive and isn't going to, like, withhold these things to penalize the United States or punish the United States for some foreign policy thing. You know, I, it's moving too slowly. It's moving way too slowly.

I think it was today that Biden was in, was it Ohio breaking ground on the Intel? Yeah, it may have been today or yesterday. Yeah. How long is it going to take to build that facility? Like so, and how many Toyotas are sitting offshore or sitting somewhere not being sold because they don't have microchips or they don't have microchips or they don't have the chips that they need to be able to actually put them on on Toyota lots in my town

and actually sell them to people. I mean, this is a pretty big thing. At some point, people are going to run out of vehicles. At some point, the military is going to need computer chips. And, you know, the supply chain initiative is something that, you know, every single member of Congress should support. Every elected official should support. It certainly is something that nobody should.

to be playing politics with. And to some degree, I mean, there is, as I understand it, bipartisan support for this. But it's something that they need to take a lot more seriously and be coming up with ways to induce more companies to actually bring their stuff home because it scares me that I might go to the hospital one day and I might need an MRI because, you know, I may have lacerations to internal organs and there's no, oh, what's the stuff they inject so that they can, they can, you know, distinguish one organ from the other. the dye that they inject. Yeah. Yeah, and there's none of that there because that stuff is made,

you know, in China. Like that, that really is, is, is scary. I mean, there's cancer drugs that come from China, or at least parts of them come from China. People's cancer treatments are being impacted. Like, this is, this is a situation we never should have been in in the first place. But we need to get a lot more serious about bringing this home and, and enhancing our domestic production. There should not be a supply chain issue on this crap. And that was part of the Chips and Science Act. Yeah. Yeah. I was reading is to, yeah, bring, I mean, Taiwan has a huge semiconductor industry. We're kosher with them. But if a war pops off, obviously that might be cut off to us. So bring some of the, start making the chips here,

but also there are parts of that act that prohibit, um, companies we're trying to inject money into to develop a domestic industry to prevent them from taking that technology at the U.S. taxpayer expense to China, as some of them are want to do. Exactly. And China, one blockade, you know, for a week, for a month, for a year, how long is it going to take? Taiwan can't export any of that stuff from Taiwan. So, you know, we've been talking about scenarios. The government talks about scenarios.

They war game these things. And a blockade has always discussed. And yet why do we not have domestic chip production? I mean, Taiwan is good at it, right? But why do we not have domestic chip production to at least offset some of that potential danger? It makes no sense to me. Gail, I don't know if we want to get into, if we want to go down conspiracy theory territory, but fentanyl.

methamphetamine, some of the precursor chemicals come from China. Yeah, they do. Yeah. They get those out of there. What do you make of all that? I mean, China's wanted, I think, and this is conspiratorial, okay? But the CCP has wanted revenge for the opium for a long time. Yeah.

They have wanted to get us back for this. Now, to be fair, I don't know why they're targeting us because that was the British thing, right? But it's Western antipathy in general. And yeah, I mean, they understand how weak they became when a tenth of Chinese citizens were addicted to opium. I mean, it had a huge impact on the Chinese society and on the Chinese economy in the 1800s, even in the late 1800s. So this is something, you know, if they can get Americans addicted or facilitate the addiction that already exists. I mean, just look at all of our politicians talking about the opium crisis and what a drag on the economy that is and how much money they need to throw at that. How money on us is killing.

Yeah, and how many of us it's killing. I mean, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I don't think this is 100% a conspiracy theory. I do think that there is something to this. I don't think the CCP is like churning this stuff out itself, but they could definitely stop this and they won't. So, you know, that's that's the, that's their involvement. Right. I mean, I think part of the CCP strategy with the United States is just to destabilize the country as much as they can, keep it as divisive as they can. You know, we've talked, was it James Olson? Who were we talking about where they were saying like the CCP, the Chinese government doesn't want to go to war with America because it's a financial relationship.

relationship. You know, they want the money. They don't want to destroy America in terms of, you know, like bombing it. But they would definitely love a more pliable country. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, to, they want to be able to inflict enough pain that they can control to some degree, or at least influence America's policy abroad, especially in East Asia. They would like to be able to have a way to inflict enough discomfort on the American people that we won't support policies that would, for example, get us more involved in trade relations in East Asia, right? I think that there's probably, if China did, you know, pulled the right levers, there could be a lot of domestic opposition to an Asia-Pacific trade agreement, because, you know, they've

been talking about reinvigorating the TPP or remodifying it or whatever the right word is. I mean, there are things China could do that would really have an impact on American views of our foreign policy and why we have to be involved in that part of the world anyways. And there's a significant portion of American society that does have isolationist tendencies, right? Why do we give so much foreign aid? Why do we have to trade with them? Why do we have to, you know, why do we have to supply arms to Taiwan? Why would we get involved? Why is our military in South Korea?

Yeah, exactly. or in Japan. We need to bring those folks home. It costs way too much money. So we already have that group of naysayers who, who, you know, has the potential to grow and who could become a lot more vocal about being less involved in East Asia. So, you know, for China to be able to figure out what those levers are and inflict a little bit of discomfort just so that they can influence the White House, I think that they absolutely are looking for those ways and would definitely do it. Well, on that note, I mean, why don't we talk a little bit then about from your perspective, what is China's endgame if we're not successful in countering them? Because as,

as, you know, Dave pointed out, and I think it's true what both of you have said, they don't, they're not necessarily seeking out World War III here. Like, that's not necessarily a goal of theirs, even though it could potentially happen. It's more like they're trying to displace us and become the next global superpower. You hear arguments about, you know, like the economic papers, Can China grow rich before it grows old? Some of these things. Are they like in a race to kind of make it as a superpower before their own system implodes on itself?

Just curious about your perspective. I mean, I think that they are. And I think that that is one of their, one of their end goals is to get us out of East Asia or to reduce our influence there as much as physically, as much as physically possible. They see themselves as, you know, they want a bipolar world in which they control their sphere of influence, and we have a much diminished sphere of influence of our own. And, you know, they want, it's kind of a, I think, a point of pride for Xi Jinping if he is able to export his system, his ideology of, you know, authoritarianism and state-centered capitalism and cozy up to want to be dictators, right? He can pick off a lot of people who, a lot of governments who have been sort of lurking around our sphere of

influence and they come into our sphere of influence because they need stuff from us. But they don't really want to democratize. And they resent that we tell them that they need to. Right. And we resent that we tell them that they need to liberalize their economy. And they resent that we tell them that they need to stop putting their political opponents in jail. China won't tell them that. So China has this, you know, this sphere that's ready for the taking, basically. if they can just get us the heck out and reduce our, our influence. So to the extent that they can push us back militarily, which, you know, it's questionable that they can do that. But, you know, how much of a presence do we have in the South China Sea these days?

Right. That's meaningful because China's taken over those islands and we basically let them. Right. We've ceded that region. There's really not a lot of, you know, bitching and moaning coming out of the White House about China's doing something in the South China's seeing anymore. So, you know, they've been able to do that to some degree. Yeah, they don't want to fight us, but they do want to project just enough force that the American people are going to become resistant to a dynamic that looks like it could pull us into conflict. Right.

And once we're out, once we're out of East Asia, once we're out of that region, China is basically the go-to entity. And then Xi Jinping gets to brag, like, you know, look, my ideology, whatever you want to call it. national rejuvenation. I think there's another phrase, too, that it's escaping me. This has won. This has defeated American capitalism. This has defeated democracy.

This has defeated human rights. That's his endgame. And you're right, he doesn't want to go to war with America. I mean, the Chinese military has never been tested. Like, they haven't been in a conflict since 1979. And that was with Vietnam. And it didn't actually end really well for the Chinese. So, like, they don't really want to go to war with America.

They've got, you know, a few big things, and they don't want them to be blown up. It costs money to rebuild those carriers. It costs money to make those investments, especially into the Navy. And they don't really want to do that. They don't want to risk it. But if they can, you know, sort of ideologically woo people around the margins, they can achieve the same goal. They can kick us out without firing a shot or at least too many, too many. shots. So I think that's their end game. Do they need us for money? Yeah, absolutely, because we have

made them rich and they want to get richer and they certainly don't want to be stuck in a 3% annual growth rate. So they will need to continue to trade with us and they need us to be wealthy enough to sustain that trade. Yeah. Do you think that with their economic woes that China, because they're sort of late to the game on the world stage, right, that they are learning the lessons now that America and Great Britain and these other places learned a long. long time that, that I don't want to say expansionism, but or expansionist ideas, but that supporting all these governments, all these countries around the world does not pay off the way you think it's going to pay off.

That is true. It is costly. Prophing them up is an expensive proposition. And I do think China's finding that out to a degree now because it's Belt and Road initiative. Now, not that it's followed through on a lot. lot of those, a lot of, or on all of those projects, I should say. But its bell and road initiative has been ridiculously expensive. And I'm not sure that China thinks that it has gotten the bang for its buck that it wants, that it's wanted, that it's hoped for. And I think that that's why

they've turned towards exporting ideology, right? So like actually being willing to prop up the dictators, the authoritarian. You've got them sending their, their surveillance technology to Venezuela. You've got them sending it to, Serbia, not this summer, but last summer, I think it was. There were a bunch of press reports where Chinese police are security officers. I think they used the phrase security officers were showing up in Serbia. Why? And there was no unrest in Serbia, right?

They were apparently basically instructing Serbian police in their ways. You know, Serbia has had a very contentious, I'll be general. contentious relationship with its Muslim population. They're still very paranoid about that. There's been marches. There's been rallies recently. There's been indications that they may crack down on their Muslim population. So why is this happening? Because China's encouraging it. China's enabling it. They're emboldening it. They don't have to promise to build palaces. They don't have to promise to build airports. They don't have to promise to build stadiums or roads or bridges or hospitals, they are basically exporting authoritarianism. And that has a huge appeal.

Yeah. And so Solomon Islands to ban foreign journalists who are not respectful, a report in the Guardian from about a week ago, two weeks ago, PM offices journalists cannot operate in the Pacific as they do in other countries accusing Australia's ABC of racial profiling in China coverage. So it seems that the PRC was able to put some pressure on the government of the Solomon Islands to get favorable press coverage, exporting their ideology. Yeah. And suddenly there were also press reports that the Solomon Islands were not allowing U.S. vessels to come to port there recently over the summer. So that's a little bit disturbing as well. What is their relationship with China? I mean, obviously it's pretty cozy. I mean, like, that's kind of a given.

But there's something going on there, and the U.S. is being, you know, edged out as China is replacing it. You can see the conflict or the tensions over this play out in Australia. I mean, there is a lot of Chinese pressure on the Australian government to stifle, especially at universities of all places, which to be the bastion of free speech, to stifle student speech, student-led speech, that is critical. of China's persecution of the Uighurs. And you'll have PRC, CCP thugs who show up in these protests or at these vigils or at these panel conversations. And they're pretty abusive.

If verbal abuse doesn't work, they will resort to physical abuse. And Australian universities basically do nothing except for penalize the students who were speaking out using their free speech. So how in the world is that happening in a country as free as Australia? Well, Australia sees potential,

still writing on the wall. If the U.S. isn't able to project power in East Asia, as as it has in the past, they may have to forge a new relationship with China. And it's not in their interest to have continued hostility, continued bad blood. They have to choose their strategic partner. Yeah, exactly. And they're going to choose to not be at war and they're going to choose to not have exports cut off because China is their biggest trading partner. And that kind of makes sense. But that's, I mean, that's what's at risk. Australia is, as you know, is part of the Five Eyes. We don't want to lose that relationship.

Do you think Australia is starting to swing away from China further towards the United States? They're buying our submarines. They're buying the F-35. It seems we do our, geez, what is it, Talisman Sabre is the yearly exercise we do with the Aussies? Yeah, I mean, the relationship with the U.S. is still clearly very robust. But these things are starting to happen around the perimeter that makes me wonder how much longer is it going to be before Australia is going to kind of pull back on these things, like not be as, I don't want to say reliable, but not be as close to the U.S. in terms of defense and national security as it has before, simply because when China sees it, China applies some kind of economic pressure or some kind of other pressure. the pressure may be to Australian citizens in China. I mean, there are several Australian citizens who are detained in China

who have no hope of getting out of prison simply because they're married, their spouses are weaker or another ethnic minority in China. And the Australian government doesn't have the clout to negotiate their release right now. I don't see the relationship diminishing like today, like this year, but I think it's a very real long-term, even midterm, I think it's a very real possibility.

Fellas out there in the chat, get your questions in quickly, and I'll try to ask them, since we got an expert here, great opportunity. Let's talk for a moment a little bit about your experiences with Guantanamo. And you were for a while at CIA, part of a task force that was looking into ways to potentially who shut down Guantanamo Bay, the prison at Guantanamo Bay, during the Obama administration. Can you tell us a little bit about that and your continued involvement in it? So we basically, I was basically on a task force that was charged with providing intelligence support, for lack of a better phrase, to the people who were making the decisions about

who to transfer, right? Because before you can close the prison, you have to find a place for the current inhabitants of that prison to stay. So Obama wanted to step up, the transfer process, hoping, I think over time, that if the numbers dwindled low enough, Congress would realize how silly it is to be paying millions of hundreds of millions of dollars every year to house five guys, right? That's just silly. You know, relax the legislation and bring those five guys to a person in the United States. So I was on a task force that was designed to provide intelligence support to that process, to the periodic review board process, basically. It, it, sort of, of collapsed on itself a little bit.

It was, nobody really knew how that process was going to work. So we ended up being less involved in each detainees decision-making process and more involved in just providing intelligence support as principals downtown defense secretaries, whomever, the special envoys for Guantanamo, as they needed guidance and help. intelligence support as they were negotiating settlement agreements. So there was that aspect of it that came into play at the end of my stint. So I did that for two years and then left because as you are providing support to this process, you're also reading some pretty disturbing things about torture that, you know,

the American government engaged in. And it was, you know, it was pretty overwhelming after a while. So I opted to leave and to come teach. and to spend some time lobbying, basically, for eventual closure and to support the detainees who have been cleared and transferred. Was that why you left CIA? Because that, you know, peering into those files kind of just soured your impression of the intelligence community to that point?

I'm not, it didn't sour my impression of the CIA or of the intelligence community. I mean, that was something that very few people played a role in, right? That wasn't like a CIA torture, even though it is. I mean, the CIA did not torture. A very small number of people contracted with the CIA or by the CIA engaged in torture and pushed this torture program, right? This is something I agonized over for like six years before I finally left. What is my moral obligation here?

Because I know that this thing that some people in my agency did is wrong, but I didn't do the wrong thing and I think I can still make a contribution. So when I actually went to go work on this task force, that was. was me trying to kind of make sense of it in my mind and like do the honorable thing, right? I really felt strongly that that shouldn't have happened. I can help to a very small degree try to make right. You can't make this right. But try to bring justice maybe and get people out.

Try to support that process. But yeah, that is why I left because once you start, once you know the gravity, once you know the depth of what we did, once you know how far beyond what was authorized, the program really went. You need to go talk about that, right? I felt like from a moral standpoint to just leave the task force and go back to a regular, you know, analytic job,

I would be, I would be, you know, not fulfilling my obligation as a human being to these men, some of whom I believed and still do are very innocent, had nothing to do with terrorism, yet were brutally abused by us. And we're still in that hellhole, right? I feel like as someone from CIA who had seen these things, who had read these documents,

that I was in a position that gave me maybe a little more credibility, right? I'm not a defense attorney for a Guantanamo detainee. I'm not a human rights activist. I'm not somebody who goes out there and bashes U.S. national security policy. I'm not anti-CIA. I want my students to go work there, right? I'm not any, I'm not some like left-wing, bleeding-heart liberal, but what we have, did was wrong. And so I think that having that CIA background gives me a little bit of different

perspective and a little bit of maybe some additional credibility that some other folks might not have. And I do feel obligated to bring, to give voice to that. How have you done that outside the agency? I mean, what form has that take? Call it activism, if you will, or advocacy? I've written, I mean, on my own, I've written open letters to, to President Biden. I've I've written articles, I've written op-eds, I've given interviews, not just here in the U.S., but in Australia. And I think we talked about this in an interview I did in the South Korean media. All right, this comes up a lot. I support and make people aware of efforts to support Guantanamo detainees who've been released.

Because when we transfer these men, in most cases, they go to countries that are totally new to them. And, you know, the government says. Slovenia or someplace. Yeah, Serbia. I mean, how would you like to be resettled in Serbia knowing that they have issues with their own Muslim population? I mean, the conditions are not always great for these men who leave. Mohamedu Salahi goes back to Mauritania, and little does he know there's an agreement between the Mauritania and the U.S. to not allow him to leave for at least two years, right? You can't have a passport. And then the Mauritans, he says, were pressured beyond that two years to not give him travel papers. And he needed to leave Mauritania to get health care that he couldn't get there. So making people aware of those things, you know, trying to lead a call, which is frustrating for reparations.

Because, you know, if you want people who you once accuse of terrorism to go on and live productive lives, is it not, is it not in your best interest to give them a means to support themselves and their families? It seems to be like it is. And I mean, most of these men were never terrorists to begin with. But when you release these people, you sure make them targets for people who might want to suck them into something and capitalize maybe on ill feelings that they have or their lack of financial resources. I mean, you put them out there in pretty sketchy situations sometimes. And to the credit of many of these men who are, I've had the privilege of becoming acquainted with and are incredibly good people, you know, they brush the, if their approach, they brush that stuff off. I mean, these are men who want to make the world a better place. And I would have loved to have known them before their Guantanamo experience. I can only imagine what they were like that. But yeah, so, I mean, I tried to do this. I was, I was honored to be asked to consult on a project that the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law is doing. It's actually going to be released. on Monday that basically lays out a path forward for the Biden administration to proceed in closing Guantanamo prison. There'll be an event at the National Press Club Monday night. If people are in D.C.,

it is open to the public. I hope they'll come see it, come listen to the speakers. I will not be speaking, but some friends will, and you'll get to see that and read that report. I've lobbied in Congress through writing. I'll be going to come to the House and Senate offices on Monday with some folks to do some of that in person. So, I mean, this is something that I feel an obligation to do as what I hope is a decent human being, but also as an American. I mean, this stuff was done in my name and all of our names. And to the extent that I can at least help to shine a light on it and bring some kind of justice, then I think that that's something that I should be doing. It's, you know, it's interesting because it was such, like I spent a few months in Guantanamo

in the beginning there. And it was, it was, there was such a vast range of detainees there because every Arab that was in Afghanistan got rolled up. And, and a long, lot of the Arabs that were in Afghanistan weren't there as really a part. They weren't there as part of al-Qaeda. They were like Yemenis farmers who had no money. And then a speaker from the Taliban or whomever would come to their mosque and say, hey, you know, if you don't have money, we'll give you a job. If you don't, you know, we'll give you a wife. We have plenty of available women in Afghanistan for these guys who in these countries, getting married was not really a propit. You know, it wasn't a possibility for them because of poverty and how the whole marriage thing works.

And then when they got rolled up by Dostom and those guys, they were subjected to a lot of really bad things. Because the Afghans associated every Arab with Al-Qaeda, with the Taliban. And so once these guys would get to Afghanistan, the Taliban would take their passports so they couldn't leave. And, you know, and it was tough. And, you know, it's like you say, well, I don't know if you said, but, you know, like it was there was never supposed to be Guantanamo Bay. It was never supposed to be a U.S. law enforcement thing. They were supposed to go into military tribunals to be, you know, what is their guilt? Are they guilty?

And then sentencing. Right. Yeah. Exactly. But because they, I mean, a significant number of people in the Bush administration wanted a place to interrogate people that they believed were high value detainees. And they didn't want them to be anywhere near the U.S. Constitution. Right. They had to put them somewhere.

So, you know, Guantanamo seems like a great place. And once you have it open for some people, why not just start, you know, you know, sending everyone there because you really don't know who you've rolled up right i mean you and there's a there's a surplus of people being arrested right um and you know there's there's a lot of you know a lot of fear that that that that we decided to to give into during during those years and and while i understand the fear to some degree like it was wrong how do we not trust our military how do we not trust our our intelligence community. Yeah, I mean, obviously 9-11 happens and it was horrible and there was a failure at some level and we could debate that another time. But the idea that that was going to happen

a second time was really, that was really small, right? We were on top of stuff. You didn't need to engage in torture to get information about future plots. There are things you can do to make the country more secure so that buildings are not going to come down again. And yet we did. We don't. didn't trust that we could do that. We didn't trust the security apparatus. We didn't trust the judicial system. We didn't trust the intelligence community. We chose to give into fear. And, you know, once you do that, now we're stuck. Now it's, you know, Saturday is the 21st anniversary of 9-11. And the families, the victims' families and the victims themselves, they don't have justice because there's this military tribunal process that is totally a farce.

But, you know, they're still in pretrial hearings. I'm not even sure if the actual trial for the 9-11 accused is scheduled yet. It was for a while, but then COVID, you know, deterred that and delayed that. You know, this is a very real problem. And people wouldn't bring them to the United States because you don't want them to have constitutional rights. And you can't introduce torture-tainted evidence in a court. But you can, to some degree, in military proceedings, which is also a problem. problem. I mean, there's no United States legal proceeding anywhere where torture

detained evidence should be allowed to be introduced. The defense attorneys are not allowed to have access to the information that the prosecuting attorneys have, have access to. They can't see certain health records of detainees, they can't, of their own clients, they can't see torture records of their clients. They can't, the clients themselves, the accused themselves, can't get on the stand and testify about the torture that they experienced, right, because their memories are classified, and that program is classified. Like, this is not justice. This is just not justice.

Gail, is it, what are the nuances, though, about trying, like trying these people in a U.S. Court of Law or putting them in a U.S. prison or returning them to their countries for judgment there. What are the nuances around that? Like, why is this process difficult? Well, so if you bring them to the U.S., you know, they will have constitutional rights. They will have every due process right that an American citizen has, essentially. And there are a lot of people who do not want to see that happen because, and this is kind of ironic, but because those due process rights as they play out can delay a trial. They can delay judicial proceedings. They, in some instances will result in evidence that cannot be introduced because it was torture

and so there's a belief that if they access the federal court system they will not be found guilty now i mean there may be something to that i i personally believe that at least in the case of of at least several of the plotters that i don't think that there's a chance that they're going to be found innocent right because there's been statements that they themselves have willingly, seem to have willingly made in legal proceedings elsewhere. When you have people on videotape bragging about the crimes that they committed, I think that that's probably not something that's going to be kicked out of a judicial proceeding. But then the issue of sending some of these people back to their own countries for trial, we can't do that under international law. Now,

ironically, there's a lot of things that you can't do under international law that we did do when it comes to these men, but you can't do that under international law if you believe that they will be unfairly persecuted or injured or tortured. And that is a very real concern for men from several of these countries. So finding places for them to go, even the men who are already cleared, that's a really big concern. Where do you send the Pakistanis? Where do you send? You can't send Yemenis back to Yemen because of the civil war and the terrorist activity there. So what to do with those people is a very real consideration. And if you send them to third countries, do you ask third countries to incarcerate them?

There are some problems with that under international law as well. Do you simply release them, clear them for release? And there's 21 men who are cleared for release now. And apparently the State Department is negotiating with countries to try to find countries to take those men. But then you have to negotiate security assurances, not just for keeping them from engaging in some kind of bad activity, but also making sure that the men themselves are safe because they will become a target when they're released, if not for harm, for harassment. So for yourself and other people who are, you know, are passionate about this issue.

what are some of the solutions that that you put forward or that other people put forward when it comes to those issues? Well, I think one is ending the military commission's process. Like just there's an executive order that establish those. Get rid of that. Biden could do that. And allow the detainees to enter into plea agreements, right, where they can plead guilty and the death penalty is off the table. The issue of a trial and what can be introduced there and what isn't introduced. there is not an issue.

And yeah, that may involve ultimately bringing them to the United States. I don't know. But that at least addresses the justice issue. Ideally, they would go to the United States, go to a supermax or somewhere. Because we have like 700 terrorists, who have been convicted in our federal courts,

who are perfectly safe in those facilities. So they could easily be sent there, but allow them to plead guilty. That takes the federal court, aspect out of it and then move them to safe places in the U.S. And then the men who are cleared definitely send them home, whatever the hang, if there's hangups, if there's a glitch in the negotiation process somewhere, maybe we need to lighten up on that a little bit.

Maybe we need to not be as adamant about security assurances as long as the men themselves are safe. And then, you know, folks like Abu Zabeda, who, you know, is a forever prisoner who we swore he would never be able to talk about the torture that was done to him. And that's why he's still stuck there. I think we're going to need to just suck it up and find a place to relocate him. Wasn't he the guy that they waterboarded like 200 times and the CIA psychologists were like emailing back to headquarters saying like, hey, this guy doesn't know anything?

And I think they actually told the psychologist stop being a pussy and keep waterboarding him. Basically, yeah. Yeah, the people who were on site with him. said, you know, look, if he knew anything at this point, he would have told, we are confident that he has divulged everything that he knows. And headquarters said he's third in Al-Qaeda, he should know X, Y, and Z, keep it off. And so they were forced to continue to do this. So, yeah, I mean, they knew long before that he was not who, the Bush administration said he was. And they just kept the facade. He was not, he was not third in Al-Qaeda?

No, he was not even, he was not even formal. an al-Qaeda member. He was at best a facilitator. He was like a logistics guy. He was, he would help militants in the region, al-Qaeda and other group members travel from one place to another. So you could call him a logistics guy. You could call him a facilitator. He's a cab driver, yeah. Yeah, I mean, probably a little bit more than that. But he, you know, he's not the guy who's plotting against the United States. He's not that guy. So if you're trying to round up people who were plotting against us and who killed Americans, that's not the guy. All right. I have a question here from Scott G. And he's asking, I believe, into regards to, you know, you're saying if you see something, say something, talking about Chinese espionage. He's asking what sort of activities or behaviors should people report if they see them?

Well, I mean, if you're working at a facility, you know, that has government contracts, if you're doing research at a university and you see people around you who, or lurking near your computers or, you know, accessing rooms where you don't believe they have the authority to be accessing, you know, those are things you need to look out for and maybe ask someone. Look, I've seen this thing. Should I be concerned about this? Is this maybe a guy that he's a new employee? I don't know him. But look, this guy has been lurking around. He's suspicious. Yeah, absolutely report that. If you see, you know, vehicles driving around government facilities. If you see anything suspicious, you absolutely should report those kinds of things. If you're an academic, if you travel regularly, especially to China or Taiwan or East Asia,

and you start getting outreach from people who are ostensibly Chinese, people who are offering you, you know, money to come and speak at their event in Shanghai, right? You should probably ask somebody about that. Find your local FBI office. Run that for them. Hey, does this seem weird to you? I don't know why they're contacting me or, hey, they might be contacting me because I have a government contract. And I have friends who work for the government on my LinkedIn account and they can see this.

Is there a danger to me here? And, you know, those are the kinds of things you should probably be considering. Gail, I mean, so we talked a little bit about, you know, leaving CIA, some of the advocacy work you do. Where are you today? I mean, I think you told me earlier you're teaching some classes, intelligence-related classes at a college level. Yeah, I have just started my ninth year at King University in Bristol, Tennessee. It is a small liberal arts school.

It's awesome. It's in a really lovely part of the country. Even though it's dry. Even though it's, yeah, well, we've had a lot of water recently. But it's a little, well, that kind of dry. Yes. Even though it's dry. That doesn't go over well at the two house.

General order number one at college. Yeah. Seriously. And I am not the kind of person who will rock the boat on that whole dry thing. I am not going to dampen my office, so to speak. So yes, I will show you the water bottle again. It is only hint, Blackberry essence water in case anyone in my administration. We believe you.

So what classes are you teaching? this semester? So I'm teaching a class in espionage and intelligence. It's kind of an overview of everything the intelligence community does. And we'll talk about analysis and intelligence failures and covert action and all of that stuff. I'm also teaching an introduction to intelligence analysis class. We're learning how to write analytic sentences right now. They're frustrated with me, and that's okay. They will get it. And then I'm teaching a class on security challenges, which focuses on the North Korea threat, the rise of authoritarianism. And we're talking a little bit about the China stuff, actually.

Because of the Colossi trip, I felt like I needed to bring that up. And actually, I also teach an American government class just because I want everybody to be as enthusiastic about being an American as I am. And I enjoy teaching that material. So it's a breath of fresh air. Is it difficult teaching subjects? like that because of like partisanship in the classes, whether it's the left or the

right, because people are into a narrative and they believe one thing and they'll argue, you know, just in those general terms. Yeah, it is hard. I mean, like, I always make sure

that on the first day I tell students you do not have to agree with me on anything. I mean, you have to, there are facts that you need to understand are facts right and I'm not going to tolerate conspiracy theories right I you know January 6 was an insurrection please do not tell me it was Antipa that kind of stuff um you know there is the there is no community of living organisms on the moon right there are things that we need to all agree with that the earth is not flat um but beyond that uh you know you don't have to if i if students

are able to figure out what side of the political aisle i fall on um and you know i was i'll be notice I was a Biden delegate in 2020, and that was public. So it's really hard for them to not know. But like, I'm not going to wear Biden T-shirts into the classroom. I'm not going to, you know, talk about that experience very, very much at least. I think I did maybe to a handful of students who know me well. But I tell them, you know, your grade does not depend on you agreeing with me. Your grade in this class depends on whether or not you can master the material, make a coherent argument and back it up. And that's all I care about. As long as you can do that and use legitimate sources, then you know why you believe what you believe, then we're good. I'm here to

teach you how to think, not what to think. And I think if people are focusing on weeding out truth from fiction, then I think that there is a pretty broad swath of information where we will all agree. So, but yeah, it is hard sometimes because you don't want to use partisan examples. But, you know, to be honest, when you talk about the rise of authoritarian, It's really hard to not talk about Trump. I mean, it's hard to not talk about the Trumpist element of the Republican Party. And, I mean, I'm very clear. I was a Republican for longer than I was a Democrat.

I left the Republican Party because of torture. So that was my biggest, the biggest sticking point. And I haven't gone back because most of them haven't really renounced it. So that's where I am. And I mean, it's hard to get your mind around some of these things. and I certainly don't want to be confrontational on anything that seems to be to be partisan. And I think I do pretty well. I've never had students complain to me about this.

I've never had my chair or any administrators come in from playing and say, hey, a student told me, you know, blah, blah, blah, you said this in class. So when I do use partisan examples, you know, I put a caveat on it. Like today in class, I talked, we were talking about disinformation, and I talked about Hunter Biden's laptop, right? And you know, remember the letter that a bunch of intelligence professionals, sign that said that it had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign or a Russian information campaign. I can't remember the language they use. I talked about what that might mean, right? How is that, how is that statement true, right? Even if the laptop is real, and I will give you that it probably is, even if the pictures are real, even if the content is real, or at least

most of it is, how can it still be part of a disinformation campaign? So we talk about how that could be, right, you're releasing things without context, you're releasing things with the intent to hurt and, you know, one group of people and help another group of people. It's being introduced by nefarious actors who have a political goal in mind, right? So there's all of these reasons why, why that is very true, that it almost certainly is part of a Russian or some disinformation campaign. That doesn't mean that parts of it can't also be true. So, you know, there is kind of a fine line, that you walk. But, you know, we need to give college students some credit.

I think most of them are willing to consider multiple perspectives. And as long as they understand that they don't have to agree with anyone. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, honestly, like, if they're in college, their ability to engage in discourse, whatever they believe, or not necessarily whatever they believe, but to question things and, you know, is, it's important, right? It is important. I mean, that's a skill, right? Knowing that you have the right to question. As an American, we should be asking questions of our government and about why we believe certain things. And I mean, across all aspects of our life. Why do I do this? Why do we believe this? Why is this a tradition? What does this thing mean? I mean, we should all be asking those questions far more, far more than we do. But we just shouldn't go looking for the answers, you know, on conspiracy websites, on info wars or, you know, in that, in that vein.

I get all the truth from freedom eagle. It's right there. Oh, really? Because I get mine from freedom eagle. You can't trust the lame stream media, all right? I mean, really. So travel with love gave a bunch of donations, and so I'm just going to go quickly. You don't need to read all that.

Yeah, I wish all good health. So Taiwan is number one and then expletive China. I'm illegal in China. And then, yeah, and then my travel plans for China canceled. Sorry to hear that. Nurses and pathological I and a CCP. Well, it works for them, right? So next Friday, we're going to have Kim Casey Campbell on the show.

She is a former A-10 pilot. Dee, she was the one that almost got shot out of the sky, right, and made an emergency landing? That's correct, yep. In Iraq? Really looking forward to talking to her. It's going to be super cool. Gail, thank you so much for coming and spending your Friday evening on this, you know, Army Bro podcast with us. We really appreciate it.

We appreciate the in-depth conversation about our foreign policy in regards to China. And I hope this will get more people thinking and talking about this subject. Well, thank you so much for having me. I have really enjoyed this. I like to talk about China or anything else, national security related. So anytime, it's been my pleasure. Thank you so much. Yeah, absolutely.

We'll have to do it again sometime. You know, I'll be in touch. I'll be inboxing you, bothering you about things. There's little doubt in my mind. Awesome. All right. And make sure you sign up for Gail's classes if you're over there at King's College. Awesome.

Yeah, get educated. The more than merrier. That's right. What's that, Dee? Isaac had a question. Oh, boy. I didn't see him. Okay, there's a couple of alibis.

There's a couple alibis. Yeah, some of us are really political. Ask one that's not. Oh, the PRC hacks us and we hacked them and it goes on. But has Israel ever taken a shot at them and can they do more damage? And maybe not just Israel, but, you know, I think that Americans, like we tend to see ourselves engaged in a solo fight against China, right, in terms of us. against them. Are there other countries that are actively working against like Chinese efforts as diligently as we are, if we are doing it diligently? So like, I can't speak to that concretely,

but what I do know is China has been moving closer to Iran in terms of both military, like, defense kind of relationships and intelligence sharing relationships. So if I'm Israel and I know that China is getting closer to one of my, you know, to the enemy that wants to push me into the sea. Right. I am, I'm absolutely going to be engaging in some, some targeting of China in some way because they're going to have information on my enemy. They're not probably going to share it with me, but I can probably take that information. So I would, I would assume with near certainty that that's going on.

Yeah. All right, guys. We'll see all of you next week. Gail, again, thank you. And take care. We'll see you guys then. Thanks, everybody.