American counterintelligence is broken

Published September 24, 2022 12:00am ET



Every few days, a new counterintelligence story breaks in the media. It’s invariably a bad one. Another penetration of U.S. intelligence by a hostile spy service, another cache of industrial secrets lost, more theft of valuable intellectual property. Our national inability to safeguard our governmental and trade secrets is, alas, no secret.

The latest outrage is a private intelligence report that reveals that Chinese intelligence has penetrated Los Alamos National Laboratory, with at least 154 Chinese scientists who gained employment at the laboratory subsequently being hired back in China to develop cutting-edge military technology such as deep-earth-penetrating warheads, hypersonic missiles, quiet submarines, and drones. The lab, famous for being where the atomic bomb was developed, is a very secret facility that does highly sensitive work for the U.S. government. If Beijing has penetrated the lab with a small battalion of spies, what in America hasn’t Chinese intelligence burrowed itself into?

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