by Bill Gertz
As Grant Newsham and Kerry Gershaneck, two former U.S. policy makers, put it, the accommodationist approach has been a disaster. Their evidence was China’s covert, information-warfare-based program to take over the South China Sea without firing a shot. As they stated in the National Interest:
The United States’ approach to dealing with China from the Nixon-Kissinger era onwards resembles a forty-five-year science experiment—an experiment that has failed. In fact, the PRC’s relentless effort to create what might cheekily be called a “Greater South China Sea Co-Prosperity Sphere” belies any notion this view was ever correct. China’s island-building expansion across the South China Sea is just the latest evidence that most of the “experts” got China wrong.
These wrongheaded policies were not limited to the policy makers, in Republican as well as Democratic administrations, who worshipped at the altar of what they regarded as the great China economic miracle, which for decades appeared to produce a workable Marxist-Leninist economic system. Successive military leaders at the United States Pacific Command, based in Hawaii and charged with keeping the peace in the Asia Pacific, swooned at the prospect of regular meetings and exchanges with Chinese military leaders who were keen to deceive what they must have regarded as hapless Americans into believing that such high-level visits and other military exchanges could “build trust” between the two militaries. The U.S. military leaders have been badly mistaken. In the Chinese system, any Chinese military leader even perceived as having a trusting and friendly demeanor toward the American military would be prosecuted for party disloyalty or treason.
Typical of the U.S. military’s self-delusional approach to China was Admiral Samuel Locklear, an ambitious four-star officer. Locklear, in an apparent bid to curry favor with his superiors in Washington, adopted conciliatory postures toward China that sought to play down or ignore dangerous Chinese activities and behaviors. As an example, Locklear suggested in 2013 that China’s growing military capabilities were less of a concern than claims that climate change, based on dubious scientific claims about global warming, will eventually produce disastrous rising sea levels. Climate change was a key policy of the liberal left Obama administration, and Locklear’s suggestion is an example of how politicized the U.S. military, and the navy in particular, had become under Obama.
According to a senior navy officer, it was Locklear’s failure while head of Pacific Command from 2012 to 2015 to assert the U.S. Navy’s rights of free navigation in the South China Sea that historians will mark as a failing that facilitated the growth of Chinese military dominance in Asia.
Lured by the prospect of improved relations with the People’s Liberation Army and hesitant to take any actions that would upset Chinese generals, Locklear failed to press political leaders in the administration to approve any U.S. Navy freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea beginning in 2012. Prior to that, such operations were regularly carried out. However, approval of naval passage operations was put off by political appointees who wanted to avoid upsetting the Chinese government, which opposed the operations as encroachment on its claimed maritime territory. The failure to maintain free and open seas with warship passes within twelve nautical miles of disputed islands, reefs, and shoals turned out to be a major strategic mistake. China’s military interpreted the lack of naval operations or aircraft overflights near the disputed islands claimed by China, Vietnam, Philippines, and other regional states as a green light to move ahead with an aggressive program of dredging and building up the islands—to solidify its claim to own most of the entire sea. The South China Sea is a vital strategic waterway used annually by ships that move $5.3 trillion in goods, including $1.7 trillion in trade bound for the United States. The island-building campaign is part of the key objective of Beijing of driving its main enemy out of the region and gaining complete control over it.
Another significant shortcoming of the dominant establishment China specialists in and out of government is the failure to understand the emergence and dominance within China of a hard-line, anti-American Chinese military and civilian faction, which currently controls the country. That faction was identified by Wang Jisi, one of China’s foremost specialists on the United States, who wrote in 2011 that the pervasive anti-Americanism in China is based on a concept espoused by yet another ancient Confucian philosopher, Mencius (372 BC–289 BC), who argued that “a state without an enemy or external peril is absolutely doomed.” Thus the United States has been demonized as China’s main enemy, along with Japan, to be vanquished through information warfare under a program with the strategic goal of dominating the region. “Its proponents argue that China’s current approach to foreign relations is far too soft; Mao’s tit-for-tat manner is touted as a better model,” Wang wrote in Foreign Affairs. “As a corollary, it is said that China should try to find strategic allies among countries that seem defiant toward the West, such as Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Some also recommend that Beijing use its holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds as a policy instrument, standing ready to sell them if U.S. government actions undermine China’s interests.”
To better understand China’s information operations, the Pentagon produced an important study on Chinese information warfare in May 2013 called “China: The Three Warfares.” For the first time, a detailed study had revealed Beijing’s covert strategy of using legal warfare, psychological warfare, and media warfare. Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University professor and editor of the study, told me the Chinese are far more advanced than the Pentagon in the art of information war. “We’re in a period where it’s not whose army wins. It’s whose story wins, and the Chinese figured that out very quickly,” Halper says. “They’re way ahead of us in this. We’re in an age where nuclear weapons are no longer usable. They understand that. We keep nattering on about nuclear capabilities, and shields and so on, but it’s really quite irrelevant.”
• • •
In the future, an American president must come to the realization that the decades-long policy of appeasing and accommodating the communist regime in Beijing is not just contrary to American national interests, but is in fact advancing a new strategic threat to free and democratic systems everywhere. As I wrote in my 2000 book, The China Threat, the solution to the problem of an economic and politically powerful nuclear-armed communist dictatorship in China is to help China transition its system from a communist regime into a free and open democracy, albeit one with Chinese characteristics. To this end, the use of information warfare tools will be essential to backing the forces for democratic change in China, as represented in part by the faction associated with tycoon and popular blogger Ren Zhiqiang.
Michael Pillsbury, a Pentagon consultant on Chinese affairs for several decades, revealed how a Chinese defector disclosed that Beijing, under supposed reformist Deng Xiaoping, successor to Chairman Mao, deceived the United States into believing China’s communist rulers were moderates on a slow but steady path to democratic political reform. “I was among those perpetuating the delusion that the arrest of China’s party leader was a temporary setback; that China was still on the road to democracy; that this purge was an overreaction; and that we had to protect the ‘moderate’ faction, led by Deng, who would right the ship and keep our relationship sailing smoothly.
“No one I worked with at the CIA or the Pentagon in the 1980s raised the idea that China could deceive the United States or be the cause of a major intelligence failure,” Pillsbury said.
The Obama administration negotiated an agreement with China to halt cyber espionage against American corporations. In September 2015 an accord was reached during the visit to the United States by Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping that stated both nations would abstain from government-backed cyber economic espionage. It was part of an administration policy that argued such agreements would produce new “norms” of behavior in cyberspace and stave off cyberattacks like the OPM and Anthem breaches, or future cyberattacks against critical infrastructures. The effort proved to b
e an utter failure. According to a U.S. defense official, the U.S. Cyber Command produced an intelligence report in early September 2016 revealing that a U.S. software company was hit by Chinese Ministry of State Security hackers to the tune of 1.65 terabytes of the company’s valuable proprietary data, a massive amount of information. The data theft had taken place after the September 2015 cyber agreement reached with the Chinese, and the software company cyber espionage left many American security officials extremely doubtful that Beijing had any intention of abiding by the ban on cyber economic espionage.
China today employs strategic information warfare to defeat its main rival: the United States. China’s demands to control social media and the Internet are part of its information warfare against America and must be resisted if free and open societies and the information technology they widely use are to prevail. China remains the most dangerous strategic threat to America—both informationally and militarily.
* * *
I. Ralph Sawyer, The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
II. Thanks to Michael Pillsbury, senior fellow and director for Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute, for translating Chapter 7 of the report, “Introduction to Joint Campaign Information Operations,” Beijing, National Defense University Press, June 2012. (Military internal distribution only.)
5
RUSSIA
In Russia, President Assassinates You
The very “rules of war” have changed. The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown and in many cases they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.
—GENERAL VALERY GERASIMOV, CHIEF OF THE GENERAL STAFF, RUSSIAN FEDERATION, FEBRUARY 27, 2013
Russia under Vladimir Putin has emerged from the decades following the fall of the Soviet Union as a revanchist threatening power that is engaged in strategic information warfare against the United States and its allies. The attacks strike at the heart of the American democratic system and involve a covert action program aimed at influencing the outcome of the nation’s most important political contest: the election of the president of the United States.
Putin is a former KGB lieutenant colonel who directed its successor agency, the Federal Security Service. As Russia’s president, Putin has been a leading advocate for the use of secret intelligence operations for information warfare, and the most deadly form has been assassination of political opponents.
On November 1, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Federal Security Service, arranged a meeting with two Russians who had offered him a lucrative business deal. They agreed to gather in the bar of London’s Millennium Hotel. As an outspoken critic of Russian dictator Putin and a defector very aware of the deadly capabilities of his former employer, Litvinenko was living an uneasy life in exile. Hours before the planned meeting in the Pine Bar of the hotel, the former FSB officer, who at one time specialized in clandestine assassinations, met with a friend, Mario Scaramella. The Italian lawyer brought distressing news: Litvinenko’s life was in danger. Russian intelligence had placed his name on a hit list along with several other high-profile critics of the Putin regime to be eliminated. Scaramella said radioactive poisons might be used. The information had come from Evgeni Limarev, a former member of the Russian SVR foreign intelligence service. Litvinenko doubted the threat. “If it’s from Evgeni, it means it’s not credible . . . it’s shit if it’s from Evgeni,” he said.
The failure to heed the warning was a fatal mistake. Hours later in the bar of the hotel, the two men, Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitri Kovtun, were waiting at a table with a white ceramic teapot. Both were former KGB agents. British police concluded both men poisoned Litvinenko after one of the men had poured a small vial of an extremely poisonous radioactive substance, polonium 210, through the spout of the teapot.
During the twenty-three days he lay dying in a hospital bed, Litvinenko managed to give British investigators his account of what had happened. Several minutes into the meeting one of the Russian agents, Lugovoy, said: “Okay, well, we’re going to leave now anyway, so there is still some tea left here; if you want you can have some.”
“I poured some tea out of the teapot, although there was only little left on the bottom and it made just half a cup,” Litvinenko recalled. “I swallowed several times but it was green tea with no sugar and it was already cold by the way. I didn’t like it for some reason . . . well, almost cold tea with no sugar and I didn’t drink it anymore.”
Later that night, Litvinenko grew violently ill. When he was admitted to the hospital, doctors were unable to determine what made him sick until hours before his death. A doctor had suspected radiation poisoning and the diagnosis was confirmed by Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment. The poison was polonium 210.
Litvinenko’s death was the direct result of what a special British investigative commission concluded had been an assassination operation—likely carried out by the FSB with the direct blessing of Putin. “I have no doubt whatsoever that this was done by the Russian secret services,” Litvinenko told British police shortly before his death. “Having knowledge of the system I know that the order about such a killing of a citizen of another country on its territory, especially if it [is] something to do with Great Britain, could have been given by only one person.”
And who was the person? “That person is the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin,” the dying man said. Litvinenko signed a statement on November 21, two days before his death, defiantly announcing to the Russian leader, “you may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.”
Moscow made no secret that it favored the defector’s demise. Sergei Abeltsev, a member of the Russian Duma, noted in a parliamentary speech on November 24, 2006, that “last night Alexander Litvinenko died in a London hospital. The deserved punishment reached the traitor. I am confident that this terrible death will be a serious warning to traitors of all colors wherever they are located. In Russia, they do not pardon treachery.” Putin the same day appeared to provide an indirect claim of responsibility, telling state media that “the people that have done this are not God, and Mr. Litvinenko is, unfortunately, not Lazarus,” the Bible character who rose from the dead. A former FSB superior, Alexander Gusak, added that Litvinenko deserved to be executed.
Litvinenko had become an enemy of the Russian state and was targeted and killed by Russian intelligence. His crime was revealing that he had been ordered by the FSB to murder Boris Berezovsky, a Russian dissident, wealthy oligarch, and critic of Putin who claimed political asylum in Britain in 2000. Litvinenko in the late 1990s worked in the FSB’s secret Department for the Investigation and Prevention of Organized Crime, known as URPO, which was in charge of killing political and business targets in what are known as “wet operations.” In late 1997, he was tasked with the Berezovsky hit. Rather than carry it out, Litvinenko went public at a press conference on November 17, 1998, and denounced the FSB. The result was that the FSB chief, Nikolay Kovalyov, was dismissed by then-president Boris Yeltsin. His replacement as FSB director was none other than Vladimir Putin. Litvinenko recalled meeting Putin in July 1998 and described him as someone who “looked not like an FSB director, but a person who played the director.” Litvinenko would be arrested and spend eight months in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison before fleeing the country in October 2000. He first met with U.S. officials in Istanbul, Turkey, but they turned him away. On November 1, 2000, Litvinenko was granted asylum in Britain.
Video evidence obtained by the British commission that investigated the defector’s death included footage of Russian special forces using targets that featured Litvinenko’s face for shooting practice. Litvinenko had been a member of the Russian special forces before joining the FSB.
However, the key element of Lit
vinenko’s opposition to Putin was a July 2006 article the defector had published online in a news outlet called Chechenpress. In it he accused the Russian leader of being a pedophile. As quoted in the commission report:
A few days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin walked from the Big Kremlin Palace to his Residence. At one of the Kremlin squares, the president stopped to chat with the tourists. Among them was a boy aged 4 or 5.
“What is your name?” Putin asked. “Nikita,” the boy replied. Putin knee[le]d, lifted the boy’s T-shirt and kissed his stomach. The world public is shocked. Nobody can understand why the Russian president did such a strange thing as kissing the stomach of an unfamiliar small boy.
Litvinenko went on to explain that Putin had graduated from the KGB’s prestigious Andropov Institute, but unusually was not accepted into the foreign intelligence. Instead, Putin was assigned a junior post in the KGB’s Leningrad Directorate. Shortly before graduation, Putin was discovered as a pedophile as a student at the institute, according to Litvinenko. After becoming FSB director and preparing to become president, Putin destroyed all the compromising material. “Among other things, Putin found videotapes in the FSB Internal Security Directorate, which showed him making sex with some underage boys.”