CIA director nominee John Ratcliffe said Wednesday that American spies must stop foreign adversaries from winning the race for top tech, including through operations aimed at undercutting enemies’ supply chains.
Mr. Ratcliffe told Senate Select Committee on Intelligence lawmakers considering his nomination that the nation’s top intelligence agency must view technology as both a tool and a target.
While the U.S. works to become less dependent on foreign suppliers of semiconductors and other key tech, Mr. Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman who was director of national intelligence for part of President-elect Donald Trump’s first term, told senators that the CIA can cause headaches for other nations, too.
“CIA has to play a really important role in disrupting our adversaries’ technologies in terms of trying to get ahead of us,” Mr. Ratcliffe said. “… We all know the issue that relates to Taiwan and that 95% of advanced semiconductors are there. We’re trying to address those supply chain issues, but we can do things and the CIA must do things to disrupt how our adversaries are dealing with their supply chain issues in regard to that.”
Mr. Ratcliffe did not identify the type of disruptive operations he had in mind. The panel also questioned the nominee in a closed-door classified session after the public hearing was conducted Wednesday.
A deadly supply chain attack by Israeli intelligence against Iran-backed Hezbollah captured international headlines last year, when booby-trapped pagers exploded in the hands of suspected Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon. The lethal attack provoked debate about its propriety and the U.S. denied any involvement, but Western voices are increasingly calling for a new emphasis on supply chain operations and resilience.
Historian Calder Walton and Kevin Quinlan, a supply chain management company executive, wrote last month that it “may be time for the U.S. government to revisit the existing embargo on conducting industrial espionage.”
Mr. Walton and Mr. Quinlan also wrote in Foreign Policy that China’s government appreciates supply chain sabotage more than the U.S., and it is time for Washington to pay closer attention to the problem.
“The U.S. government would benefit from a greater appreciation of the forms of sabotage that worked successfully in the past, and of the changes in supply chains, and the tactics of their adversaries, that have occurred in the interim,” Mr. Walton and Mr. Quinlan said. “Those lessons from history offer valuable guidance on how the United States can better protect itself against hostile state supply chain exploitation today.”
Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the outgoing intelligence committee chairman, told Mr. Ratcliffe on Wednesday that the CIA needed to collect better intelligence on its adversaries’ technology.
“One area that I’ve been particularly concerned about is the ability for the [intelligence community] to monitor technology advancement,” Mr. Warner said. “I think historically that has not been the case.”
China and its race for new technology is a top-of-mind concern for Mr. Ratcliffe. He told lawmakers that the CIA’s main collection and analysis effort must be focused on the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
“Specifically, CIA should prioritize intelligence collection and analytic capabilities to uncover and track China’s programs in emergent technology, which is likely to be decisive in determining the global balance of power,” Mr. Ratcliffe said in written answers to lawmakers questions.
In response to Mr. Warner, Mr. Ratcliffe identified quantum computing as a particular technological area of concern.
“If China gets to quantum computing before we do, that causes a real problem,” he said. “We’ve got to win the war, the race on technology, stay ahead of the technology curve.”
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