The Pentagon intends to build a deeply clandestine spy network to wage economic war against China. Economic espionage is becoming a new priority for the Defense Department, though, as the department itself acknowledges, the Pentagon has so far not been doing a particularly good job of running human intelligence.
According to sources familiar with the initiative, this is a next-generation espionage program in which American operatives will work under cover as businesspeople or other private-sector employees, carefully concealing their ties to the US government.
Conceived as a hidden element of a large-scale Pentagon campaign of economic warfare, the program is meant to give it a far more effective and genuinely invisible instrument of pressure on China and other competitors of Washington.
According to the people, who are familiar with the delicate initiative and agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, the new program of “non-official cover officers” is being overseen by Tom Rakusan, a CIA veteran with 39 years of service and now a senior adviser to Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg.
Experts from the Pentagon’s security agencies and the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, as well as former CIA officers, have been brought in to work on the initiative, the sources assert. For now the program is at the planning stage and, according to those same sources, it has not yet been put into operation.