President Reagan’s former principal advisor on the Soviet Union warned of a growing threat from China, calling upon the United States to ramp up intelligence operations around the world and contain terrorist threats in remarks at a luncheon attended by about 300 affluent women at the Greensboro Country Club on Oct. 7.
“One of the huge political problems that America is facing, to which many of us are willfully blind, is China,” said John Lenczowski, president of the Institute of World Politics in
Washington. “China is a rising power. China — we all know how much of our debt it possesses. China has the biggest military buildup today on the face of the earth. China has territorial claims on almost all its neighbors, including an entire state of India. China has one of the biggest international espionage operations going. China has 10,000 spies, minimum, in the United States, many of them operating out of 3,000 front companies in the United States.”
Lenczowski visited Greensboro at the invitation Aldona Wos, the former ambassador to Estonia and a member of the Institute of World Politics’ board of trustees. Wos is married to Louis DeJoy, chairman and CEO of New Breed Logistics. The couple raised money for Rudy Giuliani’s unsuccessful campaign for the Republican nomination for president in 2007, and Wos co-chaired George W. Bush’s North Carolina presidential reelection campaign in 2004.
The attendees at the invitation-only event were selected by Wos, who takes a special interest in cultivating leadership among women and encouraging their interest in international affairs. Three tables in the dining hall were filled with students from Greensboro Day School, many of them the children of the women in attendance.
“They have huge political-influence operations,” Lenczowksi warned of the Chinese government. “Political- influence operations designed to distort our policy, and psychologically disarm us and make it so we do things that are in their interests and not in ours. There’s almost no reporting about this kind of stuff. A lot of it is sub-rosa, a lot of it is covert, and yet it is a very important part of our national security policy to have to deal with this. Let me just remind you that the Chinese train their armed forces to fight a war against us and they propagandize their armed forces to consider us as the main enemy. You can draw your own conclusions. You can put your head in the sand about all this, or you can be alert and be aware, and you can realize that maybe we don’t want a cold war with China, but we cannot let down our guard.”
Lenczowski urged his audience to encourage young people with an interest in national security and intelligence to work for the CIA, and particularly to learn to engage in the neglected activities of counter-influence and informational warfare.
“The number-one strategy has to be to isolate terrorists from their recruitment base and from their population support base,” he said. “You can kill terrorists — and I’m in favor of killing those people who have killed innocents; this is war — but killing terrorists isn’t going to solve your problem because the central front in this war is the political problem: And that is why those people become terrorists in the first place . People become terrorists because they hear information about the United States.”
One of the Institute of World Politics’ students is working with the US Army’s Human Terrain Project in Afghanistan, Lenczowski told the audience.
“In order to fight this war in Afghanistan, one has to have what I’ve called a ‘granular knowledge’ of local conditions,” Lenczowski said. “Afghanistan and also these western provinces of Pakistan are areas which have very little homogeneity, and conditions in them are different from town to town. One needs to know what the conditions are in order to win the political sympathies and to protect these people effectively.”
He explained that the Human Terrain Project applies the study of cultural anthropology and other social sciences to the “social, political and economic and attitudinal conditions” from town to town with an eye towards effectively fighting the enemy.
“He went and did the first examination of Taliban and al-Qaida propaganda in six strategic Afghan provinces, and what the attitudes were about America, about democracy, about women’s rights and so on and so forth that had been spread in these villages,” Lenczowski said of his student. “And it was horrific to see what these people thought about us, and how the Taliban and al-Qaida had gotten to these people. After eight years of war, we were not in this business. We were disarmed. We were literally disarmed in the informational war.”
The national security expert added that another former student from the Institute of World Politics is now working in a counterintelligence capacity for the FBI.
“The problem is that the bureau is, unfortunately — God bless the bureau — but it is a law enforcement agency, and it is uncomfortable with going after people who are exercising their First Amendment rights,” Lenczowski said. “It’s not illegal to engage in many types of influence operations. The bureau is comfortable with going after people who have violated the law, who you can arrest and prosecute.”
He drew parallels between the challenges of counterintelligence in the post-9-11 era and the battles he and his Reagan administration colleagues waged during the Cold War. “The problem is that there is this business of influence operations,” Lenczowski said. “There’s only one way to deal with it, and that’s to expose them.”
He told the audience that one of the institute’s alumni “is busy teaching the FBI about some of the things that it did 20 years ago and 40 years ago and 60 years ago that it hasn’t been doing in a very long time. Because of his education at the institute he went over to the FBI library and he dug up an unclassified report that the bureau had distributed publicly on ‘Soviet active measures in the United States.’ ‘Active measures’ is a KGB term referring to disinformation, forgeries and covert political influence operations. Nobody in the bureau could believe that they had ever done this kind of thing before.”
Influence operations can be proactive, not just defensive, he indicated. As an example of an opportunity for the United States to influence a foreign society to accommodate US interests, Lenczowski noted that some grand ayatollahs in Iran have split with the ruling ayatollahs because they have come to see that religion is being used as a means to maintain secular power rather than advance Islamic ideals.
“You don’t support them by making grand public statements,” he said. “You don’t support them by writing checks and taking photographs of you handing the check to the opposition leader. You do it through cutouts and cutouts and more cutouts.
“You give an Iranian businessman here in the United States who himself is supporting the resistance, a contract. And that Iranian businessman gets rich. But you know he’s going to take his money and he’s going to broadcast some good broadcasts to Iran from Los Angeles, which is what some of them are doing. Well, how did he get rich? Well, a whole bunch of different ways, but maybe the US government helped him a little bit. That’s political warfare.”
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