It started with a strange email: an unsolicited invitation for host Terri Wu to become a “senior geopolitical analyst” for a shadowy “defense advisory trust”—confidential, decoupled from her reporting, and sent from a personal Gmail account.
Then came the Five Eyes “Safeguarding Our Secrets” bulletin, warning that foreign intelligence services court exactly the people who get pitches like that: journalists, academics, clearance holders, and military personnel.
In this episode, Terri Wu brings the puzzle to two veterans of the China file—former Department of State, Department of Defense, and CIA officer Nicholas Eftimiades and former State Department diplomat Jim Lewis—to map the CCP’s “whole-of-society” playbook: the recent agent prosecutions (Thomas Pauken, Eileen Wang, Linda Sun), the overseas police stations, the quiet pivot to state and local politics, and why Beijing is betting it can simply wait Washington out.
