Washington Free Beacon's senior editor Bill Gertz was interviewed on the radio station Talk 1300 AM Wednesday, where he asked China's President Xi Jinping's visit to the U.S. as well as a Russian spy ship docking in the Caribbean.
President Xi's visit comes during the same week as the Pope makes a three-city stop including Washington, D.C. Xi's visit has come under intense scrutiny. Recent reports hold the Chinese government responsible for the cyberattacks on the U.S. government including the Office for Personal Management. OPM also reported today that the cyberattack, discovered in early spring was originally estimated to have affected 1.1 million but has grown to 5.6 million. The hack revealed that fingerprints were among the information that was stolen. Most have called for President Obama to cancel the state dinner.
Earlier in the week, Xi met with business officials in Seattle, Washington and toured a Boeing plant.
"What the Chinese are doing is collecting a large data base and doing big data crunching on all of this to find prospective agent recruits as well as to identify foreign intelligence agents in their country; that is our agents and others. It is a major security issue that is being overlooked largely by the Obama administration, which for months had ignored this, didn't want to name China, and now is getting ready to impose what will probably be symbolic sanctions against China," Gertz said.
Gertz added that the sanctions will not actually bring the people who are behind the attack to justice. In a House Intelligence hearing, it became obvious that the White House does not understand the nature and scope of the threat.
When the Chinese hack into the systems and steal large amounts of data they leave behind what is called sleeper agent software, which can be used in a time of crisis or conflict, and will sabotage or disable that entire network. The sleeper software can also feed the network false information or make the connections to the networks do things that they are not supposed to do.
The radio host asked Gertz about his other piece on the Russian spy ship that had docked on the Caribbean island of Curacao. Gertz said that the piece was a follow-up to a previous article that he broke on the Free Beacon.
The Russian ship was tracked from the north Atlantic as it traveled south off the coast of the U.S. and in international waters.
Pentagon officials believe that the ship was conducting intelligence gathering against U.S. ballistic missile submarines based at Kings Bay, Georgia. The U.S. Navy is keeping a close eye on the movements of the ship.