CIA director William Burns is in the process of spreading the anti-China virus throughout his agency. He told an audience at Stanford University yesterday that the new China mission center, announced earlier this month, is about to be launched. “We set in motion a sort of more formal review process as well, which produced a lot of thoughtful recommendations...on China, it was to create a single China mission center, as a way of ensuring that since China—and that geopolitical challenge cuts across literally everything we do at the agency—to make sure that we were focusing and integrating that work in the most effective way possible. I will start shortly a weekly meeting just focused on that mission center and on China,” Burns said, reported Sputnik.
While the supposed threat from China is permeating everything at the CIA, Burns, like UK
defense chief Gen. Sir Nick Carter, isn’t taking his eye off Russia. When asked, what is the biggest technological threat to the United States, Burns said, “I think, in terms of broad capacity across the range of emerging technologies, China probably today is.”
“But I would never underestimate … the capacity of this Russian leadership to make really good asymmetrical use of a variety of cyber tools to influence everything from our own political dysfunction in this country to, you know, whether it’s state actors as was the case in SolarWinds, you know, responsible for attacks on, you know, our most important assets, or whether it’s, you know, criminal gangs who happened to be operating not too far from St. Petersburg engaged in ransomware,” he added.
