CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Wednesday said he’s focused on stealing China’s secrets after identifying gaps in America’s efforts to collect intelligence inside the communist country.
Mr. Ratcliffe displayed his aggressive plans for the CIA in testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, urging a change in approach to China.
“I think our collection against China is a hard target. In the prior administration, it was lacking in several areas,” Mr. Ratcliffe told lawmakers. “I would say primarily in human collection and also with regard to the processing of open source information relating to China.”
Failures in America’s attempts to gather intelligence on China from human sources long predates the last administration.
A minimum of 18 CIA sources were killed or imprisoned in China between 2010 and 2012, according to a 2017 New York Times report. Debate about the cause of the disaster ensued, with blame heaped on a suspected CIA turncoat and the potential compromise of the agency’s covert communications system.
Mr. Ratcliffe said more recent espionage problems stem from a misunderstanding of the threat posed by China.
He told lawmakers China is “our greatest geopolitical threat,” not just a competitor, and he’s more directly assigning “all areas of our collection” on China.
The CIA leadership’s new emphasis on China isn’t intended to neglect other missions, however.
As scrutiny mounts on senior Trump administration officials’ alleged inadvertent disclosure of attack plans in Yemen to a journalist, Mr. Ratcliffe sounded defiant about his role in executing the counterterrorism mission of America’s intelligence community.
“My responsibility as CIA director, one of its responsibilities, is to kill terrorists, and that’s exactly what I did along with President Trump’s excellent national security team,” Mr. Ratcliffe told lawmakers. “That’s what we should be focused on.”
Correction: The headline for a previous version of this story had an incorrect first name for CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
