Threats
Today's D Brief: CIA pivots to China; USSOF, Marines in Taiwan; Record-high suicides for DoD; Russian cyberattacks are escalating; And a bit more.
By Ben Watson and Jennifer Hlad
October 7, 2021 11:14 AM ET
The D Brief
The CIA just launched a new office expressly designed to counter “an increasingly adversarial Chinese government,” Director William Burns said in an announcement Thursday morning, two days after the New York Times revealed the CIA’s recent internal effort to better keep its informants alive across the globe, especially in China.
Langley calls this its “China Mission Center,” and its stated purpose is “to address the global challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China that cuts across all of the Agency’s mission areas,” according to the statement Thursday, which as you might imagine, isn’t terribly forthcoming.
The center will involve more Mandarin speakers, as well as “technicians and specialists in countries around the world to gather intelligence and counter China’s interests,” a nameless senior official told the Washington Post, which noted a similar CIA effort was launched with the Soviets in mind during the Cold War. The Associated Press reports Langley has “fewer than a dozen” of these centers. Two focusing on Iran and North Korea were reportedly stood up under former Director Mike Pompeo. “Those groups will now be folded back into regional centers focused on the Middle East and East Asia” because, as a senior official told the New York Times, Iran and North Korea are now believed to be “best analyzed inside the context of their wider regions.”
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2021/10/the-d-brief-october-07-2021/185923/
