The Lawfare Podcast: Countering Chinese Espionage

Recently, former CIA officer Jerry Lee was sentenced to 19 years in prison for conspiring to share classified information with the Chinese government. During the time in which Lee was in touch with Chinese intelligence agents, dozens of CIA sources in China were arrested or killed—a catastrophe for CIA operations in the country. What's the connection between this disaster and the Lee case? And what do both mean for Chinese counterintelligence work overall? David Priess sat down with John McLaughlin, practitioner-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Shane Harris, intelligence and national security reporter for The Washington Post whose reporting covered much of the Jerry Lee case. They talked about the case, counterintelligence in China and the impact on the U.S.-China relationship.