During the latter part of World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA), seeking an ally in China against the occupying Japanese, found one in Mao Tse Tung. Through his connections, Mao learned from the OSS of the A-Bomb. Upon his consolidation of power after WWII, Mao began looking for ways to build one.
One of Mao’s first acts was a campaign of ethnic nationalism. The Cultural Revolution, as it was called, sought to turn a predominately agrarian society into an industrial one. Having been overrun by the Japanese in WWII, among Mao's top concerns was modernizing China's military. Again, with an eye towards ethnicity, his government actively worked in luring Chinese scientists living in America home. And home they came. In a seismic technological shift not seen since perhaps the American Industrial Revolution of the late 19th/early 20th Century, China has jumped past many Western countries which have been labeled “Modernized-Democracies” since at least the end of the 19th Century.
Engrained, it is, in each successive generation of Chinese official and enlisted man/woman that it is his/her civic duty to think of country and that s/he are Chinese before self. This ethnic-centric outlook took on an ironic twist in the 1990s when the Los Alamos Nuclear Research Laboratory had a breach of security by Wen Ho Lee. Lee had been taking home a government laptop with sensitive information on it. When the news broke about his willful disregard of proper handling of classified materials, the media was all too willing to champion Lee against the “racist FBI”, never bothering to ask if he was guilty: which he was.
The egg was then splattered all over the media's collective face as the case of Katrina Leung entered into societal consciousness of yet another serious breach of security by an agent of Chinese origin. Leung, with help from FBI Special Agents James J Smith and William Cleveland Jr., was able to feed intelligence to China--some of which was on a laptop Cleveland allowed her to see despite protocols. An excuse was given that nothing she saw was of sensitive enough material to make much of anyway.
The level of willful ignorance shown by such a claim becomes staggering when one realizes that it came from agents who both had over-20-year-in-service experience. Each of whom conveniently forgot the Chinese never disregard any bit of intelligence, no matter how seemingly trivial, as it might just be the final little piece that makes the whole puzzle clear. Such a methodology is likened to: “A million grains of sand.” Whereas US intelligence tries to sift out all the bits of data it sees as distractions or, at least, trivial to get to the “juicier” bits of intelligence, the Chinese see all as being connected in some way: whereas the US intelligence excludes, the Chinese include.
Bruce Lee, the Chinese and American icon, is known to have created a form of martial arts before he died--Jeet Kun Do. It is a form that has no form. It adapts itself to whomever the attackers are, using their tactics against them. In trying so hard to give shape and form to all the intelligence it gets, US Intelligence has repeatedly missed intelligence leading to incidents such as 9/11. Also, such myopia has missed intelligence revealing the methodologies of how other intelligence agencies attack the US: from within.
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