SHOOTING OURSELVES IN THE FOOT WITH BOTH BARRELS: A PLEA FOR SMARTER COUNTERINTELLIGENCE POLICY
The Bush administration is rightly concerned with escalating levels of Chinese espionage against the United States, both military and economic. Particularly troublesome to U.S. officials is the focus of China’s foreign intelligence service on recruiting overseas Chinese who hold American or third party national citizenship. The Chinese are quite aggressive and are already matching the efforts of the old Soviet and East bloc agencies at their peak.
That being said, espionage is a fact of life in international affairs and China’s effort to “swarm” the United States with HUMINT agents is a partial redress for American superiority in SIGINT and IMINT over China. The best answer to China’s efforts is the develppment of a robust, Sinocentric, counterintelligence capability in the American IC. Instead, quite counterproductively, there is a proposal to deal with this problem via a lazy, crude and immeasurably stupid policy of punishing all would-be scientists of Chinese ethnic origin by discouraging their immigration to the United States.
As any competent economist could explain, this proposal, if enacted, will cause 100 times the damage to the U.S. economy and scientific edge that the spies are doing without providing any corresponding national security benefit whatsoever – as China will simply pick up the same information secondhand in Canada, the UK, Australia, Israel, the EU and Japan. Yes, we will cause China’s spooks some inconvenience and expense but the cost to America will be patents not filed, hard science PhDs not graduated, inventions not created and a reverse brain drain – the first in U.S. history- as the best scientists, including native born American ones, go abroad to do first-rate research.
Ironically, if this policy had been in place during WWII it would likely have been Germany that built the atomic bomb and not the United States, as so many critical physicists in the Manhattan Project were technically ” enemy nationals”. Blanket policies are no substitute for cultivating a a cadre of CI officers with the requisite language skills to do the interviews and investigations of suspected spies.
Getting ” deep” language skills is a long term investment in personnel that the Pentagon and the IC would rather not spend any money on as they have ” higher” bureaucratic priorities. So this proposal seeks to fool the Congress and public into believing the espionage problem is being addressed- we won’t increase our competency, we’ll just decrease the number of people who might be spies ! That’ll work ! As if real spies won’t have the patience to jump through the additional bureaucratic hoops to get a visa. Or the Chinese won’t simply start recruiting white guys.
If there was ever the CI equivalent of the “Strategic Hamlet Policy” from the Vietnam War, this one is it.
UPDATE:
Dave at The Glittering Eye has thoughts on China’s Titan Rain PLA cyberespionage program.
November 25th, 2005 at 4:16 pm
Good post, couldn’t agree with you more, Zen. Establising racial profilng in academia at this point in time could in fact be disastrous to our science, research and technology base, which in turn damages our economy that is so dependent on these areas. Numerous research programs in our universities and national labs are running because of the relatively large numbers of foreign graduate students and scientists who decided to stay here…as you know, I have long been concerned with the lack of American students going into the hard sciences and engineering not so much for the short term, but the long-term (10+ years) when a large core of our scientists retire (and we don’t have enough in the pipeline, as a decreasing number of foreign scientists are leaving and taking their expertise home).
– Von
November 25th, 2005 at 5:42 pm
Hi Von,
It’s completely stupid, ass-backwards approach.
This proposal emanates from the bureaucrats because neither MI nor civilian IC agencies want to revamp their personnel policies to make linguistics training a fast-track career move. Mainly because:
1) The mid-level and senior managers of these agencies have no desire to sit in language classes again. Arabic, Chinese, Urdu, Farsi – these are hard languages and require some intense work – which currently our agencies do not reward officers for learning despite desperate shortages.
2) Counterintelligence has always been the bastard stepchild of the IC. A real effort here to do CI right means taking some $$ away from established programs with political or bureaucratic constituencies
November 26th, 2005 at 1:11 am
Mark,
Important post. Thank you.
At both USD’s Computer Science department (where I studied) and UNL’s engineering department, the large majority of students are foreign – with about half of those Chinese.
An attempt to cut-out these people is insane — but maybe not much worse than kicking them out of the country once they graduate.
Why have the best workforce in the world, when we can disconnect ourselves in the stupidest way while protecting jobs that Americans don’t want?
Dan tdaxp