Out on tuesday. This is about a topic which is relevant and important but as the authors discussed under studied and underemphasized. I dont want to waste too much time with a big long intro but i will have an intro to highlight the work of luna next to me whos been doing really fantastic reporting for the wall street journal and im going to quote from one of her stories this year because it sets us up nicely. A piece coauthored with him, they are increasingly recruiting intelligent officers as a campaign to shake loose government secrets, current and u. S. Officials say china has grown older and more successful in traditional spy cams including targeting less conventional recruits and she quote the infamous statement by crystal ray, the fbi that no country poses a threat than china. They are doing it through chinese Intelligence Services, through extensively private companies, through graduate students and researchers all working on behalf of china and finally, this is one of my favorite quotes from the piece, he says russia is the hurricane, it comes in fast and hard hard. China is Climate Change, long, slow and pervasive. I hope and suspect all of the people on this stage will have disagreement on these statements between each other about this issue of chinese espionage about what we think we know and organs like the security, mss, what some of the myths are that we believe and arent true so without further ado, i will turn it over to peterson. We will turn to them for 20 to 25 minutes and walk us through the book, how it was organized and how this Beautiful Partnership came about. Then i will moderate discussion here with all three of them on these issues and will save some time for q a. I will plant the seed now that the q a period is primarily, if not solely about actual questions so as you are thinking of the long, you want to make, id ask that you would email it to us instead of using precious time here. We want to hear everyones questions so we can hear about them. So think of questions to ask when we get to that. I will turn it over to matt and peter. Thank you very much for helping us to and thank you all. For believing in the project and carrying them forward. A quick disclaimer, since i am in a public decision, im speaking here solely in a personal capacity. Ive taken leave to be here. I am off the clock. My views are my own and not representing the commission on china or any of its numbers. If youre going to quote i say, at least acknowledge this is being said in a personal capacity and does not represent the people who i work for or as an associate. I hate that this was downplayed expectations in the book. It is meant to be a bit of a reference guide and a primary introduction. We made a number of choices for conservatives and what we chose to include in the standards by why we chose cases or the interest. In part because theres a real need to demystify and not say theres this 5000 here history or 3000 years, depending on how you calculate it. Invoking things that has a mystical embodiment of intelligence operation. What starts from the things we can see and we know and to build outward from there, this is a starting. , not the final answer. We tried to sketch this out, what took place in the development of communists in origins inside the party in the 1920s to where we are today and why the methods look the way they do. For the need to demystify, theres no better place to start than the idea thats been kicking around for a long time. Grains of sand to approach of intelligence. Any of the host of tentacle like metaphors for describing what the Intelligence Services are doing. It got passed around by an antidote saying sand on the beach are the Information Products you want to gather. The russians would have a submarine surface in the night, they would pick up a few buckets of sand and go back to the submarine and be gone by dawn. The u. S. Would pick up all sorts of signals and have sensors along the sensors on the beach and go from there. The chinese, on the other hand would send 1000 and when they left, they would shake out there towels and beach baskets in china with no more than anybody else. Theres a slight problem with that come up with that analogy. National security information is a public beach. You dont get to send 1000, you cant even get 1000 americans onto the public beach in an easy way because of the process. But this view, because it has a nice and catchy story, it had a few problems with that. The first, the chinese intelligence basically did not use graft. They didnt use traditional methods of recording sources or maintaining the relationship between case officers and the passage of information through communications and other things. There are distinct differences and styles but thats not really true and it never has been. The second was that the court of intelligence chinese did, and a lot of these cases, if you go through the book and look at the hard espionage cases, you dont see amateurs leading the way. The third point that i think is important is that it conflated any chinese entity within chinese intelligence. Chinese intelligence had something very different than what it means when you say russian intelligence or u. S. Intelligence. The equivalent would say when you say u. S. Intelligence, intelligent communities specifically are a handful of core agencies within that community. When people use chinese intelligence, they say any chinese person connected who does anything that doesnt look Like Technology or influence, thats a pretty broad definition and isnt a cognate of what we say. Include boeing and every hedge fund and everything america does are brought friends of wall street journal, they must be intelligent because thats how we are doing it. Its different but thats the wrong way to do it. That speaks to why we chose a conservative approach about what we included. The other downside is that it creates notion of every chinese person has a potential spike. Whatever you think of that proposition, thats not practically useful way for risk, it doesnt help you understand what system is doing what things. It has a notable feature of not really being true. To say the chinese intelligence had more success recruiting Chinese People or abroad, that part you can see. But to say thats been solely the focus or thats where they were putting all of their efforts, i dont think accurately captures the history. So to sum that up with saint chinese Intelligence Services always had tradecraft. These are great classic cases that are detailed. Theres a third country meeting went back, dropping off data for a courier to pick up. There are people going to borders and getting left across not having the passport so they can go to meetings. This is traditional and they run sometime in the 40s to 1985. That encompasses a pretty long history of chinese intelligence. Id also make a point that, for years, what weve seen from the chinese Intelligence Services about the potential impact, because of chinese role in the world, and the Security System and future of taiwan, a whole variety of things, its that scope scale and impact of operations i was a real threat. It wasnt necessarily sophistication. That, however, is changing. You could look at the periods covered in the book and see fairly sophisticated revolutionary periods of intelligence. In the middle heres the prc, not necessarily being there and more recently, an emergent sophistication that is a worldclass Intelligence Service. I attribute that to two things. The first is that when the ministries created in 1983, it basically was a bunch of survivors or rather handful of survivors or the chinese intelligence and a lot of Police Officers were told one day that you now work for an Intelligence Service. Not the best way to train people or give them a lot of skill so again, should we really be surprised that people who arent trained for foreign intelligence have better luck with people who they can communicate with directly into more readily and have shared cultural references . I dont think it is surprising. Beginning in the 1990s, matt and i were significant beneficiaries of this, the security and pla started major publication projects to talk about the chinese intelligence. To bring out the literature and say look, this is what we did and in one of the biographies, the author talks about a meeting they had in the early 1990s who said you need to write this book because our people dont know their history. They dont know what they are part of. We need to build that in the service so we understand the long and glorious tradition there is some associated with the state security professional. The forward to that book is written by the Generals Office and this book is for you to study and see the history. One of the lessons for you in the practice of intelligence . The other thing the state security did is a new Training Program. They realized if you were relying on College Graduate who majored in languages or computer science, you can have the professional skills they hoped they would have when they graduated. There seems to have been an effort sometime in the late 1990s, early 2000 and different parts of the mss to start recruiting people earlier to say look, if youre interested in this career, heres what you should do and say. Heres the assistance we can offer so they spent the time in school and a much more productive way to bring the skills into the service. Ive heard reports, i cant entirely confirm about and different kind of Intern Program so that young officers would get time so they were passing themselves as professional business people, they would look and talk and sound like a professional person. Some of the pictures discussed in chapter six. Business people dont have private meetings in the hotel rooms. They do it in the lounge room or the barr. So not entirely successful but it is, for those of you who have bumped into the Younger Generation of authors much greater degree of sophistication and skill and ability to interact was not there ten or 20 years ago and certainly not 30 years ago. The other reason, i would say that theres been a big change in sophistication, particularly for state security and also the pla, they saw this movement into cyberspace and digitization of storage as a real opportunity. Id call this a dreadlocked moment and technical operation because previously, if you wanted to pick up signals, you had to have an industrial system. You had to have satellites, a global network, you had to have computing hours to do decryption because it had gone long beyond what a human being could readily uncover. There was a huge capacity in which it was largely cut off for most of the pr people. His in the late 70s and 80s that it started to get access to some of this but was still fairly far behind. What this offered, and i think they voted on it well, the mss did it well, was to see this opportunity and invest in a public and private infrastructure. Centered around a handful of mss bureaus that created an ecosystem for defense and offense and therefore, had interchange, contractors, you have the benefits and private sector with the ability to keep people focused and on target and i think this is one of the reasons why they were yelling about the pla. They were in the mid to late 2000, breaking into places and running off with with data. No one figured out where the state security was. That came much later largely because they were much more successful than most of the pla work. This movement, i think is important also for technical operations. The idea of getting inside someplace, you had to get in, find a way to capture communications and excellent treat the data. Its a complicated process. It might for the bug discovered in the state department in 1999, you had to take a photograph in the conference room, you had to know the quality of your picture to recognize the true color of it so when you recreated it, you actually had it accurately captured. You had to have the skills to create the batteries to fit in that constrained space. You had to have a microphone, and exultation plan for getting the data out and save your battery so they werent just running and using up your energy while it was in the building. In this shift in craftsmanship that went into those devices, the skill set that the countries had to do well, the chinese didnt necessarily have the same experiences because when they did it domestically, they controlled the environment. They outlawed Counter Measures so those were only in the hands of the government. Not in the hands of anyone else. But when you look at what it looks like today, you think code. Its in the software code, not in the delivery device for that. Its a usb drive. You can come up with ways to hide it and theres some skilled in their its a different set of skills and its much easier to teach where we are now today then where we were before this moment. My last point, its very important to understand institutions involved. Intelligence officers, the state security for the pla, bureaucracies and bureaucracies work in particular ways. They were reward particular behaviors and they may not have, they may or may not be centralized as we tend to think. So the cases in the book, you see some tradecraft that is quite effective and useful and you see some boneheaded things that you wonder, why would we take it seriously . One of the answers to understa understand, the state security itself is a simple ministry, 31 units and dozens and dozens of local state Security Bureau. All of these organizations hire on their own. Should we really be surprised that the state Security Bureau at universities look slightly different than the state Security Department . Should be really surprised given the variety of what that place in china, this diverse look . Brings up an important thing that you cant just say intelligence, their sophistication and not here. You wouldnt get to this if you didnt understand the history of how people came up there may have been Police Officers first and Intelligence Officers getting back to a generation of people that have been Intelligence Officers first rather than something else. Thank you. I like to think the foundation and the people who sponsored us to complete this work. We are sometimes hacking our way through the jungle but here we are. I wont say i will take you through a tour a hip history, i will take you through the violent and exciting path that led to today. 1927, the year of the Chinese Communist party split was the year of intelligence failures for the Chinese Communist party. Had virtually nothing in place. They had assassins, they had vip protection people and they had a few spies here and there but they didnt have a structure. So the nationals in that year came as a complete surprise and at the end of the year in december, the uprising, he called that the same intelligence, he said we failed because we knew virtually nothing about the enemy. It was in this context that he found his first professional organization and it got off to a rocky start, it was hard to recruit patients at first but then they recruited their first concrete useful aspiring, which is referred to today as the heroes of the dragon player, leak was mentioned earlier. He was of those three people, the ringleader. Hes the one who survived more than a few years and went on to lead intelligence in the early years of peoples republic. So the resulting structure that followed with intelligence people, drivers, Everybody Needs draggers. Analysts and people who do communications and technical work, that resulting structure basically survived into the present and it seemed a great deal but the special Services Section was founded at that ti time, had successes that saved a lot of lives. However, when their boss went over to the nationalist in 1931, that was a disaster. To this day, one of my distant relatives is a black sheep in the camera, you cant find a picture of him. [laughter] in 1935, by that time, although its been depicted at the time of brilliant operations, by clever individuals, actually there was a slow rolling disaster for the Chinese Communists as nationals hear people out of the city. In 1935, the special Services Section was a polished and this is about the time the dome started to have concrete, Strong Influence over intelligence operations and his focus was enemies within. If youve studies chinese, youve heard of the 1931 32 when he purged a great deal of the red army of everybody who was opposed to him and this was one of the first of what chinese call left deviations. They all say these are all germans by himself but they were. Those other three left deviations that are acknowledged today, the Salvation Campaign in 1943 and of course the cultural revolution. In between those, 1955, theres a gigantic purge of intelligence people when he decided one of his chief spies was actually trigger because he hadnt reported a meeting with an age agent, a big agent. That left a legacy of purchase to solve problems. We see that today, even though he declared the age of political campaigns is over with, when he ascended to become chinas paramount reader what today we see the Corruption Campaign being used to purge the enemies and hes left many others intact but the point is these purchase of individuals going on now, intelligence people and indeed these different purges i just mentioned, each have cleaned out the ranks of Chinese Communist intelligence and had very severe temporary sets. Part of that legacy, too, that we see today is areas during the revolution or control with Chinese Communist and pupils were public, is a toxic environment for people who wanted to come in and spy on the current government. This was a continual drive in it was nearly impossible to penetrate eastern china during the beginning of the prc regime, notable exception was the ambush on 25 october 1961 in an army column by gorillas. That resulted in the capture of 1600 pages of classified information which you can find in your libraries today but that was the exception to prove the rule that was today. It wasnt on china. So this strong toxicity for counterintelligence toxicity that stops the prc from being a normal environment to infiltrate and spy, has made it easier, interestingly, for the prc to recruit foreign spies themselves because people who go to china in a study chinese, people who are tourists, theres a baseline of surveillance, which we discussed in the book for people who do business there. As a baseline of surveillance that everybody goes through and indeed, there are clear triggers that lead to focusing on an individual if theres any indication that there is any suspicions like if they are working for what the chinese call the don way, a sensitive unit, sensitive company that has technology. Or if you are weaker. So it is easier to spot and recruit foreigners in china under these conditions. I wanted to do a footnote to the two fbi videos that people made fun of but they are very much. There called game of ponds and company men, we see a dramatized version of the cyber case and company men, we see a dramatized version of industrial espionage and the difference between the two is the game of ponds, we are looking at professional operation. And company man, espionage case, a state owned enterprise following an amateur program to try to get some industrial secrets. So with that, ill say one more word about influence operations because that question always comes up. Theres always a mixup in case ep history between the other ground in the intelligence people. By 1938, 39, intelligence had become a core operation. Core business of the party along with propaganda, military work and organizational work. Is an example of a successful influence operation. And who is involved in that no buddy less than being who at that time is not only trying to influence people to see the benefits of the communist revolution but also one of the chief contacts of local agents was an agent of the special Services Section agent woo. With that i will conclude you must do some questions. So first just a couple of followup questions based on what you talked about. That you mentioned bureaucratic politics. So the first question broadly there is a system operating under a political system which will give it particular characteristics. So what is it like to be an Intelligent Service operating under the communist party of china cracks and how its bureaucratic with modern democratic systems quick. I think there are two that i can speak to that come directly out of the research from this book. The first is if you read the news of what is taking place in hong kong with the Chinese Press and what they say about it or the spokesperson for the ministry of affairs. They have painted all the disturbances is coming from the United States we attribute this to paranoia but its logical outgrowth of the system the Chinese Communist party has unique grasp of historical trends that gives unique policy insight to craft policies that are scientifically adapted to the trends at the time. And if something goes wrong then it wasnt the theory or science or analysis, somebody must have done something. So that mentality creates a drive on the Intelligence Services to ask paranoid questions. But the difference is not a question of what is taking place but where is the interference happening cracks who is interfering quicksand they are searching for a piece of evidence that may or may not exist. They said they had good sources they tell us nothing like this is taking place. But because of that ideological system is difficult to do. The second piece that is interesting is when you look at the minister of state security i am aware or have founded anything of trying to build up with these people , there is nothing there that says there is an analytic bureau. Or they were closely resemble the open source enterprise than cia. In that absence of analysis, i was told by a former Intelligence Officer by the United States that in his service un analysis was done with ministerial with the vice Ministers Office for someone who was in the office for a long time had the personal protection of the level of vice minced minister thats where analysis could be done. So what happens at a more practical level you can see these cases that are discussed in the book people who are academics, journalist, and other kinds of investigators and people ask why would i be pitched cracks because you can talk to people. If you write a report to say this is my assessment no state security can pass that up to say we are the messenger the analysis is from the source not asked dont blame us for what he says. I just want to follow up on that and read from page 21 language ate chinese intelligence uses as revolutionary heritage lexicon suggest with former officials who have routine contacts that they are bastions of faith in the ccp but is that an asset or a liability cracks . Both. You dont get a lot of defections. But the question is reading through the book over the weekend the evolution of intelligence but what i found interesting was that reform opening. If they can see he is times man of the year cocacola blue jeans what is happening in terms of Intelligence Services are they becoming more cuddly and friendly or is that a misnomer seen today as logic and as a hero is the person who made the speech advocating the founding to talk about all the enemies coming into china indeed if you step back a few years to 1973 there was a party of congress that affirmed the goals of the cultural revolution everybody who was brought in from congress was brought in with underground passages and the reason they did that seem to be by that time the hotel was full of americans and others and they could see people coming into the great hall and they wanted to keep that Congress Nice and the secret. As more foreigners come into china this is a turning point that was then followed in 1985 by the defection which was a big problem big trader on the chinese side. So now in the introduction to the book you talk about this. 2010 through 2012 where the United States found suddenly the chinese assets went dark and you say in the book its because they had been compromised upwards of 20 chinese agents working for the cia were executed. Were you covering some of the cases that are now prosecuted in the United States . Because it is the case of jerry lee who was just sentenced in prison a few weeks ago to seven years. So talk about the case and why its important and if you could hazard a guess between jerry lee and this disastrous intelligence failure of 2010. This is an important case of a long time former cia officer charged pled guilty and conspiring to give classified information to the Chinese Government. The connection to the sources for the cia is not totally clear but at his sentencing a few weeks ago prosecutors made the case he had the names of eight sources written in his notebook that he kept with him and had with him in the United States and they also made a case he had gotten around 800,000 in cash he had deposited into his bank account in hong kong over 50 or 70 deposits. He could not explain who gave him the money and why he got it so prosecutors were alleging that he must have given the information about these sources at least another information to get that much money from them. His attorneys denied he did give them any information. So the connection is not clear. The attorneys were saying the government never gave them a harm assessment into their knowledge the sources he had listed in his notebook were not actually harmed. We dont know if thats true or not. The government said they dont perform harm assessments until after the cases are closed. So the actual connection is pretty catastrophic so it is a little unclear but there is a link between the two. So what you see coming out of the Us Government is a question for everyone. And with your thoughts on the 2010. Is this because we see an uptick in actions by the chinese and a number of these cases that are now prosecuted . Is this an uptick or do we just know more now and Pay Attention to chinese intelligence . There seems to be an uptake in the number of cases lately and some concern it was in part of chinas specific efforts to get information about American Government employees and combine that with credit card information and they know who to target. They all had financial problems they were all targeted with cash. So there is a big concern that china has gotten better about figuring out the pressure points in the system and who might be vulnerable but i dont think they can draw a very clear distinction between the two. I would save more sophistication and more money. It is a fairly significant part of chinese intelligence practice if you choose to use the word doctrine to build up a massive database of people of potential interest. This is the original way to describe the political mobilization influence of social affairs. In the 1930s that meant mapping Chinese Society for journalists, academics, other intellectuals who had a public platform so how do you influence them . Who are the ones who keep things working quex and and dealing with the United States they were cut off so what are you not know that necessarily familiar with . And to know what it is. Where before they worked on retirees as a key focal point because they are not going through another security background check or reporting their finances or go through serious scrutiny. This is the way they could get that same understanding. It is a slow process. In taiwan they have 70 years to do it. Whereas dealing with United States asset when you take the compromises of opm and the company that holds the largest federal insurance a breach is a much different data set of people and act have it on activities and you can map those employees of course they dont hold the personal data inside opm now you have to match that against what is available you can identify who they are and where they were. Once you have that mapping its a lot easier to go out and start chasing. Next a question not only about chinese intelligence operations but this is the attention we seem to have with an open society but also protecting National Security and one that has been identified in particular is chinese scientist. You have been working on this as well. Want to get your thoughts with the current state of debate in terms of how big the threat is. What actions are being taken . Have we accurately calibrated the risk quex are we still into overreaction. But the efforts of the use Research Universities is the biggest concern you saw the fbi get at the Senate Hearing a couple weeks ago to say they were slow to understand this threat and they wish they had recognize the scope of it because you dont see them usually come out to acknowledge any missteps. So that speaks to just how big of a threat they do think it is. The past couple years they have spent time going out to us universities and not quite calibrating the message correctly talking about concerns about threat theft and what is this theft with what we do is for the public they dont want to get into specifics but then talking past each other we see them how to recalibrate and getting other Us Government agencies to take the lead to be talking about it more as conflicts of interest and Research Integrity that is one of the biggest concerns fbi director ray has talked a lot about. Following up on that. What solutions do you hear the fbi or Us Government giving two universities to fix the problem . Just tighten up the ship or is there a practical solution they can implement quick. I think as a baseline they are asking them to have a full accounting of the Research Funding all professors and scientist are getting and to be up front what funding they may be getting from the Chinese Program because that was not disclosed previously. Thats a baseline that they are starting with and escalating from their. You have any ideas how we could balance or is that even the right tradeoff . The infrastructure set up by the chinese is apparently very extensive. It includes recruitment efforts for scholars who are in the middle of research. Besides professional operations there is a great deal that are entrepreneurial in nature. So when is that way and looks less suspicious. The key element that i hope is developed further when a Government Agency pays for research that it is made clear to the researchers they should not be doing anything that runs against the contract. I will just say from my perspective are in a better place than we were ten years ago that the us can talk to outsiders about this. The fact so much says trust us. I dont think that fits well because there is a lot of this information thats completely available from classified sources. And that data is not presented in concrete terms whats taking place. Thats a very significant shortcoming in there simply are not easy answers how to handle a visa for example and then to ask universities to take a look at who is coming the University Says you gave them the visa but if you know how the process is done , thousands of these are flagged as potential problems. Out of the 350,000 Chinese Students in the United States they will automatically flag is around the 80000 range there is no human way to follow that up its being put on but those with fulltime jobs to say look at a handful of these. We have that presumption of acceptance. But if we are in this place where people throw up their hands to say we will not even bother now a presumption of denial now all of a sudden tens of thousands just go away may be fairly many probably not. So that system is a flawed system. So we need to have a medium in that conversation. I dont think were quite there yet because if we were the Us Government could talk about the nature of the programs and was taking place. s are still an interagency process to object or say nothin nothing . Im not entirely sure. One final question the quotation is good but to bring up the influence operations with russia and china a qualitatively qualitatively different feel russia is the hurricane that comes in fast and hard china claim Climate Change is long and slow and pervasive. You can ignore the russia part of this but on the china side is that accurately describe what we are dealing with is that the static way to think about this looking forward or is there an evolution how china will look at the us especially now they are more volatile and fractious. That is a new permanence for a while. Ive been asked the question more than a few times how to compare and contrast china and russia. On the intelligence front i do like the distinctions are small. There are little differences of tradecraft but then you see all the traditional motivations that are exploited people who were paid a lot of money if you are doing that you want results because you think you will get something someday if you are putting that kind of money down you think youre getting value. So thats not necessarily a ten or 20 year vision to get something out of it on the influent side the issue of political influence these services played a much more Important Role that the executors of the policy played a crucial role and to push those ideas out there. On the chinese side who have to say the ministry of state security or the Intelligence Departments is held up more senior levels in the party directly at the Central Party departments you can see ministry of culture and Foreign Affairs and education to contribute to this work in part because they had capabilities that they would not have but they are not the designer of the policy in the same way you could see. The only time the Chinese Services ever acted like the kgb and other than that they are under strict Party Control although mss has been involved. Parting thoughts . Lets go into q a. I want to come back to the late seventies or eighties. And ask because thats when the United States and china were engaged in very specific intelligence cooperation afghanistan and cambodia had to set up a missile tracking system so my question is to what extent does the us help like bill casey makes secret trips to china so what extent does it help of chinese intelligence technically or to manage a new ss . I can only give a limited answer. On the technical side there was help from the us indeed i do believe they always kept in touch but i dont think the us has ever trained like they have. So you said earlier they have worldclass capabilities so can you explain by what you mean of worldclass is or Something Better that we cant do quick. I would define worldclass and to undergo a security checkup to do some serious scrutiny and to do that in a hostile environment that their proficiency is not limited specifically to a geographic place that there is a global scope maybe not everywhere all the time but ended different context and on the issue of mingling human and technical to think of the way you get to the air gap network and then can carry a device across to either deliver to program themselves or to conceal that activity. Theres a couple of cases where the chinese intelligence have shown they could do that. Im retired from department of energy in the Nuclear Administration where i worked outside of Nuclear Weapons part of the time and now i work with some Chinese People , scientists working on the Nuclear Weapon side. The security clearance information was stolen twice but it is clear the people i work with have never seen it so im interested how to use it are they as compartmentalized as we are . Like we are yes and no in part because i dont think we have a clear grasp how things are shared across the entire system. If they had dealt with chinese interlocutors they have seen something that has been prepared there is sharing of that kind of information but when you look at the classics of chinese negotiating behavior there is discussions how the chinese side seems to be prepared and they tried to survive the details. That is shared across the system that we dont know what that classification is if they are talking about information is that shared with someone you come in contact with . Or if you are meeting them in china who is very well in instructed so there are things that if you take amateur policy system its likely that information is shared quite closely because all the Different Party departments share a cover organization and the Political Warfare can also be in the same organization so to presume they could be sitting in some of the same spaces to be shared readily and what that means if it wasnt true they were integrated it could be anyones guess. So the chinese side has a history of denying everything. [laughter] if one of your interlocutors was given that information they would say dont hint if you know this. I am a reporter at axios so as the biggest defector in australia right now. There are a few things to keep in mind there are a number of arguments that the Intelligence Officer would not do these things or act like this at first he never claimed to be an Intelligence Officer and that the people would be called a coop d the staff adjunct to be picked up by the Intelligence Officer themselves so thats the key part so what we know from other cases with these types of people to be involved in operations but not the bureaucratic information goes back to the services themselves with the have access to is what takes place around them he could have been keeping an eye also to discuss what he personally was involved in. So that is an important piece to understand who he claims to be. Second the questions that have been raised former Deputy Director of intelligence the argument was because of the Intelligence Services it was an impossibility that mister wong was connected in any way. It becomes very clear they are not operating along a single line one person along the chain knows what is there that could have been the revolutionary era or a feature of other sensitive cases that we have other examples that the state department where its clear one of the people worked for the Security Bureau the other was a business person who provided the services or the resources to chip in. You cannot say those operations and to be handled by the service that this part of the story does compare favorably on those taiwanese things and then have a very close read we dont necessarily know the claims about australia because those are taking place in the last year. The truth was ruled out on my bowl so if you are of age why would you put specifics in their quex we dont need why there was a connection or what it is. And the quick final point is if the person is knowledgeable about intelligence operations and services we would know if you went strictly to the Australian Government he would go back in do this a couple years and then come in because its much better to have somebody running in place then only able to capture a certain moment in time. And if you want to get out why would you try to keep it quiet . Its not a clean answer but similar the things to think about because we dont have access to everything he said we cannot interview him we dont have full visibility into the way the Australian Government performed to look at him. I dont think they are babes in the woods there are people inside and outside government that know how to do this work so we have to wait and see what we just cant discount it. I know the unique part of this espionage is nontraditional actors. D think this has to do with the Chinese Government prayed washes the people with the patriotic so serving the country is serving the party so this influence and the majority of those are from chinese media. So what are your thoughts . We will think about that and come back to that. The ministry of Public Security from Intelligence Services and the pla what role do they play and what role will they play . After 1949 they were the primary Intelligence Service and those elements were carved off in 1983 and it does not become a National Organization until the 19 nineties and they were removed as departments change. So its hard to figure out what the massive Surveillance System in china . Those are primarily owned so it gets to that question of bureaucratic coordination of how much they share and how much they get along brekke on that could be something that changes based on locality but if they slowly control those resources they have the incredibly important capability of counter espionage so they would be taking a more significant role. They were involved outside of china the ministry of Public Security trying to track down the perpetrators of october 2011 where the river sailors were killed through the nps not the pla. For those that are on the ground contributing. And the anticorruption investigation its clear the ministry was also there if there is a comparison to russia it could be similar the ssp is internal the other is external but it is moving around quite a bit. Sometimes there is a clear distinction of who actually gets jurisdiction. I once worked on the case where mps officer demonstrated to me he had a knowledge of and assess arrest of an american businessman by sitting behind his desk at his computer just to dial it up. When i asked him he said we are the ones responsible for taking care of the foreigners in our district so we have to be here at a certain level indicates that they talk. Countries of the existential crisis what does the history of intelligence of how chinese Item Research with the most existential crisis of us china relations in hong kong . I dont think we have a good sense of how fast that takes place. One of the points that matt raised with a strong Counter Intelligence serves as a basis for foreign intelligence and of those examples that are out there we only have two that are public where the recruitment and the handling was done so that is it necessarily good in a way i would interpret that and this is the primary means to get out. But the loss of the cashmere princess in 1955. And during that time the whole prc government but taiwan was indeed behind it. [inaudible conversations] i want to ask on the more corporate side and that they could add required to hand over data or spy but if there is any clarity on clarity what they have done. The propaganda by the New York Times the cartoons and videos indicate one should never hold back any information from state security that it is a party committee. But what comes with that and then to find that conceptually impossible anyone tries to push back that push back but quite frankly. I had a visit or a discussion with the China Institute contemporary national relations. Which is one of the mss bureaus. And with those International RelationsTraining Program and with that security and then to have a discussion five years before now to say at your turn to speak but what you need to understand is it puts into law but was already a rule and this is the way it worked implicitly. Its very easy to prosecute somebody. So you had mentioned earlier that analytic bureau and then and quite contrast to the Intelligence Community and how this relationship is between state owned enterprises and what they collect with that analytic capability. So congratulations by the way of the book is timely and overdue in some cases. And what is the Priority Issues that should be addressed. I just retired from Us Government i got your book one week ago. It is phenomenal and very insightful. The fbi says they have investigations of chinese espionage for all the states it is a vast array of chinese espionage how many chinese spies would you estimate are working currently for the Us Government more than 500 or thousand just stay range or a gas . Thats how the mccarthy era started by the way. [laughter] more than you can shake a stick at. We used to fill that analytical gap what gaps do we have moving forward and then the last question how many in this room . [laughter] i will not guess. This is something you have to be quite careful. So that there is a hard center if you will. There are a lot of questions that come up with the Chinese Communist party for underground work and intelligence work its much larger and for those who are back are one of the biggest splits in the party from the fifties up until today and this is where you have to remember that history that there is a level inside the party that isnt a trusted bureaucracy and what do we know about the formal system and those pieces that come across the minister state security and all of the open source discussions with former officials said there is something there for the generation reports that also in the Security Department case with an Intelligence Officer and is employing people to hack into ge aviation to develop the requirements because thats a customer so in this case it seems to be a direct connection know if that was formally sanctioned and said your job is to figure out how to work with these guys for months available in those at half that are customer driven. And talking about intelligence analysis. That distinctly american invention they didnt pick that up as the us Intelligence Community. Add that chinese abroad so i live in san jose the restaurant situation has vastly improved because of all the chinese and the people that live there with his over 35 and studied here and involved in Chinese Student associations to have the same experience younger people do with chinese official in their business. And then to harness the influence of Chinese People they dont have to be brainwashed because i was based in beijing my daughter was in chinese schools and she heard all about how the americans were responsible for the opium war. And that which is conducive to harnessing their influence. And as what were doing on our next book beijing if you are listening we dont yet have from you a Chelsea Manning or an edward snowden. We need that. We need those documents. [laughter] [applause] any final thoughts . This may be the spark. Thank you to everyone up on the stage and who came. Although not the exit tax we are selling the book outside. You can leave without purchasing it although we will make it difficult. Peter will be downstairs in the lobby looking at your expectantly. But we do encourage you to buy it i dont know if you can hang around to sign copies. Thank you and hopefully we can have them back in 12 months when they publish the next book. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] they put things in hiding and then to say to a friend and with those brett is sure french is something that i have. Should i strip that lace or washington . And how many horses with the carriage. And it seems trivial and goofy but on the other hand and that is a stylistic decision with the toad in the character that sets precedent but it seems trivial but on the other hand that in of itself is interesting. [applause] ladies and gentlemen welcome to the national constitution