[CLIP] Michel Juneau-Katsuya: Inside the CCP’s Network of Dormant Spies

They're very, very patient. They're very, very patient, they have time on their side, and they will take time to work and do what they need to do. And that can take years and years and years. But their determination and their focus is remarkable. Remarkable. And that makes it extremely difficult. There is a category, and the Chinese have a lot of very poetic names to name certain things, like the sea turtle for the Chinese who lived abroad for many years and now are returning to China, or the bottom fish feeder. The bottom fish feeders are basically people who are sent from China to come and work in the Western world, or live in the Western world. And for the first years that they will be there, they will do nothing, absolutely nothing. They have to be perfect citizens for five years, for 10 years. And then one day, they receive a phone call, and boom, they are activated. But for five or 10 years, they've done nothing, not even getting a parting ticket. They probably got their security clearance. They probably went up the ladder into their company or into the government. And suddenly, they are activated. When the security service or the police try to sue to do a background check, they find absolutely nothing. So they are extremely, extremely deep undercover agent in that perspective. And that makes it really, really difficult. And again, mind-boggling for the Western agency to try to understand that they would put so much effort and commitment in staying in the role as a double agent for so long. But they do. How did you establish that these people exist? That's what I'm curious about. Lots of information came from Defector, for example, where we had a Chinese intelligence officer who passed on our side and shared with us their role, their training, what their function was about, what their purpose was about, and the methodology that was used by the other side. Some, occasionally, we discovered ourselves because they made mistakes. And they basically reveal what they were doing. And after we started to watch and pay attention, we concluded that, yeah, these guys were actually agents. And we saw their past, what they've done. So every time we find a spy or we find somebody who have been collaborating for a foreign country, we try to analyze as much as possible their behavior, their life, their modus operandi, their methodology, how they came to be where they are now. And can we learn from that observation in order to catch the next guy? Where do you think the effort should be put right now in terms of understanding what the CCP is up to and countering it? I had the privilege to work in that field for over 30 years now, specifically on the Chinese issue. I've seen it change through time. Right from the get-go, at the beginning, I had to justify my work. I had to explain to my own counterpart and with my own organization why the Chinese were different and stuff like that. And no, it was not a racist perspective of mine. It was really an intelligent craft to understand how they were operating, try to understand the methodology. Because in the field of counterintelligence, where I come from, the counterintelligence needs to understand the operation of the counterpart. It needs to understand the way to operate that will sort of define a little bit, potentially, their next move as well. And help me, maybe, to discover the next guy, that next spy that will come. So a lot of study, a lot of analysis is done to try to understand the way they think, the way they act and everything. But now, as you pointed out rightly, a shift has sort of started to take place. Because even if we were aware and we were informing our government, they were ignoring our things for a multitude of reasons. Some were because some of the politicians were literally corrupted or brought to work with the Chinese for even partisanship or for personal interests. But now, it's kind of coming out more and more and more people. Because I've seen the work done by many American committees. And information was brought to them a long time ago. And they were paying attention a long, long time ago. But it wasn't necessarily serving the foreign policy of that administration at that period of time. It was not serving, necessarily, the commercial interests of the country at that period of time. Let's remember one thing. The Chinese were very, very good at promoting the fact that they are a huge market. And they became the manufacturer of the world. And for a long period of time, when people were going, or various countries were going through economic hardship, we were very, very glad to go to China to be capable to have Chinese workers pay $0.25 an hour, rather than to pay several dollars an hour here, our workers. So we built that monster. We fed that monster. And now, that monster is well fed, bigger than us, and very, very, very well established with tentacles everywhere within society. And now, we have to try to undo this? Not an easy job. So there's a certain level of consciousness that needs to come from collecting evidence, collecting stories, collecting testimonies from people who have witnessed within the community, within the business community, or the political sphere, and understanding exactly what's going on. And that is not always easy, because some people don't want to hear it. Because again, it doesn't serve, necessarily. But what is different lately is with the new leadership, Xi Jinping, currently, he has been much more bold, much more audacious, much more gambling, more than the previous leaders, which were much softer and letting themselves seduce and receiving delegations from the Western world, who were trying to sort of gain access to that fantastic market and hope that it will benefit their own nations and China, with maybe, maybe, in the back of their head, the idea that maybe if we're nice enough, they will understand that they should change and maybe become a little bit more like us. But in reality, they never intended to change. Even if they were gentle, nice, polite, receiving you with the red carpet and nice ceremonies and everything. But at the end, they didn't intend to change anything. With the current leadership, it's way, way, way different. Because now, we said, I don't care. I'm going to show you and be in your face and simply do what I want to do, sort of impose myself the way I want to impose myself. And that is probably a mistake from his part, not being as you quoted Sun Tzu a little bit earlier. He's not subtle enough. And he's basically awoke a certain awareness on the Western world. And then the Western world is trying to realize now that, OK, these guys have been quite good. They planted themselves in Africa. They were capable to conquer a great part of Africa because Africa has a lot of resources. They were capable to go into the Western countries like Europe or North America because it has a lot of technology. There's a lot of research and development. We can steal that research. And the return on investment, if I'm capable to steal the intellectual property, will help me.