The Sixth Bureau Episode 6: Nothing Is Holy

20:04Jordan Robertson:But not everyone feels that way, even other spies. I was disappointed. No, I was more than disappointed. I was angry. James Olson, former CIA clandestine officer and counterintelligence chief. By releasing Xu and his co-optee, Xi, I felt that much of their work was for naught. By letting him go free, this trial, all that hard work, this brilliant operation that Bradley Holt pulled off had no lasting impact. And some people aren't sure exactly what to think. Yeah, I was unhappy with that. Art Cummings, former head of security at GE. He was very unhappy with that. Why is that? I just think it sets the wrong message again.

20:52You know, but again, I'm contradicting myself a little bit because he was actually a representative of their government. So I don't like the fact that it was kind of a paper tiger moment. Yeah, he made all that effort, and now bye-bye, he's back. Kind of like, wow, really? But at the same time, is he a loyal Chinese citizen? I mean, yeah. I always draw the equivalence. A CIA officer is lured to Europe and then extradited to a country and then put in prison. We would be out of our minds.

21:31Jordan Robertson:Art's saying if the situation was reversed, we would do everything we could to get that CIA officer back. And that's basically what China says they did. In a press conference at the time, right after the swap, a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs made their message clear.

21:52Jordan Robertson:Through the unremitting efforts of the Chinese government, three Chinese citizens wrongfully detained by the U.S. have returned safely to China. It once again shows that never, ever will China give up on its citizens. The motherland will always have their back.

22:14So, once you're back in the motherland, what does that actually look like? Well, when it comes to Ji, we know a little. He had a life in the U.S. He made personal connections. And he hasn't totally abandoned them. He just told me about how he was, quote-unquote, rescued from the China-U.S. prisoner swap. Naomi Lyman met Ji Chao Choon in Chicago when he joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This isn't something he seems to have discussed much with either his real or fake MSS handlers. But it became a very important part of his American life. And so was Naomi. I only ever saw him being gentle and kind.

22:55He would sit next to people on the train who just looked lonely. And he would just talk to them. Just in a loving way. Just, how's your day going? Where are you headed to? They were really close friends. Ji was at Naomi's wedding and was the only person she invited into the Mormon temple for the ceremony. My best friends weren't there. I had nobody in there with me that I chose except for Chowchun. A month after the wedding, Naomi got a message from a reporter asking for comment on Ji's arrest. That's how she found out about it. I got this message asking to be interviewed because they could see that I knew him really well based off of Facebook.

23:41and I was just shocked and really confused. I went on to Google, and I just typed in his name, and then arrest, and started reading article after article after article that had been published about him, and watching all the videos, and I honestly was so devastated. She put those feelings into a long letter, and sent it to G while he was in jail, awaiting trial. And they did not let him read it because I didn't write it on white paper. And so they sent it back to me. And this was, it was like a 10-page letter that I poured my heart out to him in. And I was so distraught, I didn't even rewrite it and resend it to him.

24:24But she kept wondering how he was doing. Every once in a while, I don't know, maybe every other two or three months, I would go and Google his name. And then six years later, still doing her Googling, something new finally pops up. I saw that he had been released in a prisoner exchange program. And it was really just a week later that he messaged me saying hi and that he knew that I sent him a letter, but he never got to see it because it wasn't on that white paper. And thank you for writing me a letter, even though I never got to read it. He also told her a little bit about what he was up to.

25:07Let's see. I'll look at his messages right now. He said, I'm doing great. I'm in China now, just enjoying my time with my family. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. We'll go to work in July, which we know where he's going to be working at because we know who rescued him. So I did ask. I did ask. I was like, where are you going to be working at? just to see if I would get an answer. But there was no response.

25:40Jordan Robertson:As for Xu, we know even less. He didn't live in the U.S. He didn't make friends here. And there's really no way of knowing what happened to him when he went back to China. But we can speculate. I don't know. On the one hand, he was loyal. You know, he could have come knocking on our door and saying, hey, I'll tell you everything I know. he didn't. Former federal prosecutor Matt McKenzie. On the other hand, he was a catastrophic failure, an epic, epic failure for them. The amount of information that we were able to gather about how China actually operates is mind-boggling, and it's all because he was sloppy and greedy, and we were able to catch him.

26:25And now the whole world can see how they operate because we put it all out in a trial.

26:30Jordan Robertson:So I think you have to put him in a back room, give him a decent paying job, but don't trust him with anything because, you know, he can't be trusted. He's kind of incompetent. No iPhones. Right. Yeah.

26:46Jordan Robertson:It's easy to laugh at Shu's carelessness and his mistakes, but we all do stupid stuff, don't we? We all cut corners. Most of the time we get away with it. And most of the time Shu did too. Spies are people and people are lazy. It's absolutely a truth throughout all espionage cases. And I've got this little thing that I keep on me. At this point in our interview with Alan, he pulls out a piece of paper. I don't know if you're a George Smiley fan. It's a quote from Smiley's People, a John le Carré novel that's part of the same trilogy as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Alan keeps this quote with him the way someone else might keep a scrap of scripture or a pocket constitution.

27:26For the longest time, I would have a copy of the book, which is behind me on my shelf, dog-eared. And I was just in a Marriott at one point, and I took a piece of Marriott stationery, and I wrote this quote down. This is the kind of a counterintelligence geek that I am. He keeps it close as a kind of reminder, a warning. So this is a quote from Smiley's People. It's referring about a truth throughout all espionage cases. Is it OK if I just share this part with you? Yeah, absolutely. He knew that sometimes old spies, even the best of them, were little like old lovers. September 20th, noon, peach.

28:06As age crept up on them, they began to cheat out of fear that their powers were deserting them. Teacher Gal, maybe you can head back first. Thank you so much. They pretended they had it all in the memory, but in secret, they were hanging on to their virility. In secret, they wrote it down, often in some homemade code, which if they had only known it, could be unbuttoned in hours or minutes by anyone who knew the game. June 22nd, flew to Paris. Names and addresses of contacts, sub-agents. June 11th, met G. Chao Quing. Nothing was holy. Routines, times and places of meetings. Let's try our best to meet in Europe.

28:43Work names, phone numbers. John rejected meal receipt today. I will have my revenge. Even safe combinations written out as social security numbers and birthdays. Send me the name of the coffee shop. We're here. In his time, Smiley had seen entire networks put at risk that way because one agent no longer dared to trust his head. I put a USB drive in the eyeglass box in the middle of the bookcase. If something happens, someone will come to you and tell you the password. And to me, that is exactly what espionage is. If people execute flawless tradecraft, they will never be caught. But because they're people, they will always be caught.

29:27Your Honor, I'm just an ordinary Chinese citizen who knows nothing about politics, nor do I know anything about secrets. I stand by my innocence. Thank you.

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32:49China is still behind the U.S. when it comes to aviation technology. GE's jet engine is still the most advanced out there. China's engines are 5 or 10 or 15 years behind. But they're probably not going to stay there. I mean, there used to be similar gaps in other sectors, like electric vehicles, but not anymore. Yeah, so 20 years ago, things were very different for China. This is Juliana Liu, a global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. She's been covering China for over two decades. 20 years ago, nobody expected Chinese EVs to be the world beaters that they are today. I think it wasn't even that long ago when Elon Musk was laughing.

33:27Jordan Robertson:And as you're familiar with BYD, the ramping up production of their electric vehicles, Warren Buffett owns 10 % stake in that. Why do you laugh? We already have trying to compete. Why do you laugh? Have you seen their car? I have seen their car, yes. Like literally laughing at BYD during a Bloomberg TV interview? Well, they're on a different... Tell me why you're laughing. You don't see them at all as a competitor. No. Why is that? I mean, they offer a lower price point. I don't think they have a great product.

33:59Elon Musk may have considered the Chinese electric car maker BYD something to laugh about back in 2011 when he gave that interview. But BYD is now one of the fastest growing car companies in history and ranks among the biggest automakers in the world. They're not a joke. They're a threat. Which is why the U.S. government has made it basically impossible to sell them in the U.S. The Biden administration slapped a 100 % tariff on Chinese EVs. So most Americans have never even seen one in person. Yeah, I mean, I haven't. And I have, but that's because I live in London. where there are plenty of BYDs driving around.

34:35China's getting so good at so many things, quickly, EVs, AI, drones, that they're starting to have their own fears that their tech will get poached. In the case of BYD, it had kind of long expressed a desire to open up a factory in Mexico. And about a year ago, there were reports that that permission was being delayed by the Chinese side because Beijing was concerned that this technology would be kind of diffused out of Mexico and into the U.S. into the so-called wrong hands.

35:13Recently, the Chinese government has started taking steps to guard intellectual property in other realms, like AI. The government now discourages top Chinese AI researchers from traveling abroad, warning that they might potentially be targeted in some way. It's also recently launched an investigation into a deal between Meta and the Chinese-founded AI firm Manus for potentially putting Chinese tech secrets at risk. Maybe for the first time in kind of modern history, the shoe's on the other foot. It's not a very comfortable position to be in, but at least U.S. officials are being pretty honest with you about how they see the current situation.

35:50Good morning. Today, the Select Committee on China meets to examine the rise of China's auto industry and what it means for America's economy and national security. The release of DeepSeq AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win. In just five years, China has gone from a minor exporter to the world's largest auto exporter at below market prices that U.S. and allied automakers cannot match. They've already exceeded our military capabilities. They have more planes, more ships, more submarines, more Bissells, more bombs, more soldiers.

36:33They have the ability to build ships 230 times faster than we do. They have an air force that outnumbers ours. Previously, it was a technological gap that we were able to depend on. That technology gap has evaporated. And I would imagine the rationale is not that different from the Chinese side, right? The rationale that kind of supported the kinds of acts that you're reporting about. It's a mirror, right? It places a mirror to what China has allegedly been doing and what the West may be willing to do.

37:07Jordan Robertson:But what is the West willing to do? Everyone we interviewed for this series has insisted over and over again that we don't do what China does. The U.S. government does not steal trade secrets. Companies might spy on other companies, but our intelligence services do not spy on foreign firms to steal their tech. Governments spy on other governments. Our governments should not be using the state apparatus to steal trade secrets for commercial purposes. and it's just, it's outside the boundaries. Can I just ask why? It's kind of like Omar and the wire. You know, you got to have a code. We're trifling, basically.

37:48Killing everyday working man and all. I mean, don't get it twisted. I do some dirt too, but I ain't never put my gun on nobody who wasn't in the game. A man must have a code. Oh, no doubt. And the code is, we don't steal trade secrets for commercial purposes. We're here to spy on each other for the needs of our state. Everyone has our state purposes that we're going to be conducting espionage, but there are certain lines we don't cross. You don't see the NSA out there stealing secrets to help Coke or Pepsi. It's just not how we do things. And the Chinese just blur all those lines. We in the CIA do not do industrial espionage.

38:28We do not steal foreign technologies. That's not our job. We don't do that. So that is a major distinction. In fact, many, many foreign intelligence services, Thrend and Flo alike, do have that responsibility of acquiring technology that they cannot get in any other way. But no, we don't do that. At least, not since we became the world's dominant superpower. But if that changed, would we? What lines would we blur? Well, we're already blurring plenty of them. The government is taking ownership stakes in different companies, inserting itself into the private sector in ways it hasn't before. The leader of Venezuela was taken from his capital city and is now sitting in a Brooklyn prison.

39:12The FBI and DOJ are being used to investigate the president's perceived political enemies. So honestly, what's so precious about trade secrets? Why wouldn't the U.S. start sending out spies to try to steal them? Especially if it had a new motive. To catch up.

39:29Jordan Robertson:And let's not forget, the U.S. has done it before. Earlier in the series, we mentioned how the United States, back when it was a very young nation, paid people to smuggle loom designs out of Great Britain, the global industrial power of that age. The question is, would we do something like that again today? We wanted to ask our espionage expert, James Olson, who spent three decades in the CIA, the one who took the stand against Shue, who was crushed by the news of the swap, who you just heard say, We in the CIA do not do industrial espionage. We wanted to know what James thought about this, about whether the U.S.'s official approach, its code, if you will, could change.

40:11Jordan Robertson:The last thing I want to ask is just whether this insistence on our spying being sort of defensive rather than offensive is a luxury of the fact that we're the sort of preeminent superpower in the world. Do you think there's any evidence or likelihood that if the United States were to lose that position, whether there's any possibility we'd change that stance, whether we would resort to more offensive spying in the way that China and other countries do? I think it's conceivable that if the United States lost its preeminent position in the world, that we would be more offensive in our intelligence efforts to strengthen ourselves at the expense of our adversaries, rather than the primarily defensive mode that I think we're in now.

41:02That's conceivable to me. I hope that day never comes.

41:27A huge thanks to everyone who made this possible. Our production team, editors, engineers, composers, translators, voice actors, voice coaches, fact checkers, the many people we interviewed, on and off the record. and everyone at Bloomberg and beyond who contributed to and supported this project with their advice, suggestions, and time.

41:48Jordan Robertson:And again, please share, rate, and review our show if you liked it. If you're still listening, then you should also check out our homepage, where we have two print pieces and a video documentary that we made about the boy spy, Ji Chao Choon. That's at Bloomberg.com forward slash The Sixth Bureau. Thanks so much for listening. Bye.

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