THE INTERVIEW
Cipher Brief CEO & Publisher Suzanne Kelly talked with Miller about how U.S. intelligence is working to better understand what Xi is thinking. Our Subscriber+ interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Susan Miller, Former Assistant Director of China Mission Center, CIA
Miller spent 39 years at CIA as an operations officer, serving nine tours abroad, two as a Case Officer, one as Deputy Chief of Station and six tours as Chief of Station. She also served as assistant director of several mission centers at the Agency.
The Cipher Brief: What do you think it is that the American people need to understand about why China is posing a threat to U.S. national security and how they’re doing it?
Miller: He wants to absolutely replace the U.S. as the world leader, but he doesn't want to replace us as the world leader of democracy. He wants to replace us as the world influencer. He knows that we're going to go to war someday because he absolutely plans in the coming decade, if not in the shorter term, to invade Taiwan. And he absolutely knows that we would come to the defense of democracies around the world. So, in order to give him the edge, he has - not only in America but all around the globe - been able to get into national power grids. Just think, what could you do with that capability in a time of war? You turn off the power. We know he's in power grids in America and Europe and Africa and Asia.
Why? Because companies from the People’s Republic of China underbid other companies. Now that ability is gone. That's something that the previous administration and the current administration both said, ‘we're not going to let anybody get at our current infrastructure’. But can you imagine if we decide to go to war to support Taiwan or we have to do it because something else has happened, can you imagine having no power in California or along the Eastern seaboard? And that's why we need to really care. And Xi Jinping’s plan is to take us over bit by bit. There are some things that we have kind of let go, although we shouldn't have. One of them is that he has taken over U.S. influence in Africa and other developing countries.
The Cipher Brief: China has certainly used its Belt and Road Initiative to moving into these areas and they're bringing money and they're bringing infrastructure and they're making day-to-day life better for the locals – at least in the short-term.
Miller: Yes. They're doing what we used to do with USAID and with getting U.S. companies to kind of sign up and go do this, so that we could make sure we still get important minerals and so that we can make the widgets that we need to make from all of these countries. And then we also provide a platform where a democracy can at least start and maybe not ever be as robust as ours, but at least be better than what they have now. So, that's a real concern. China is stepping into a lot of these roles all over the world. And that bothers me because that should be us doing that.
The Cipher Brief: You’ve also spent a lot of your professional career focused on the threat posed by Russia. Today, when you're comparing the China threat to the Russia threat, how are these threats different?
Miller: Can you name one thing you have ever bought that says Made in China? We all can, right? Have you ever even thought about buying a toaster oven made in Russia? The answer is no. And so I'm oversimplifying this a little bit because the bottom line is that with China, we have an integrated economic goal that might help them not want to go to war with us in a way that with Russia, we have nothing.
I lived in Moscow back in the Soviet days, and my American toaster broke so I went down to a department store and bought a Russian made toaster. I plugged it in and it caught fire the first time. And it is still like that. That's why they don't manufacture stuff. There are other things that they have there. They do have some minerals and some other things. They have a pretty good agriculture system that works not only for their own people, but for that area as well. But the bottom line is that Putin does not have the same kind of leverage over us as Xi Jinping has.
The Cipher Brief: He has nuclear deterrence, but he doesn't have economic deterrence. Everyone is watching to see what happens in the negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, the war that Russia clearly did start, clearly unprovoked. And as everyone follows the slow-moving headlines on this, I'm wondering if you think Vladimir Putin, who was a former spy himself, sees the world differently than a former businessman, which Donald Trump certainly has skills in the business world. But where do you see these two things potentially colliding in terms of how the U.S. needs to be approaching negotiating with someone like Putin?
Miller: Putin is not only a former intelligence guy from Russia. He also served as second chief directorate. And just to explain, first chief directorate spies, like CIA does, like MI6 does. You go overseas, you spot, assess, develop operations and things like that. The second chief directorate, they were the ones that put anybody who dared to say that the Soviet Union wasn't the best thing in the world into gulags. They also tortured people, dissidents, et cetera. And so he came from the nasty side of the KGB. And he's always been a believer in Russia having lost something under Yeltsin. And a guy like him - and there are a lot of them like him, just think of our version of white supremacists or white Nazi or American Nazis, things like that - that's their version. These are the people that support and work in the second chief directorate. So, that's the concern.
He doesn't care about human life. He doesn't care if his own people die in a war with Ukraine. He knows they're dying. And he knows that they're not making much progress and he's mad at his generals, but I can guarantee, in typical Russian – and I don't have absolute evidence of this because I don't have any exquisite intelligence on this - but he's probably underfunding them. They're probably not dressed well. There is still conscription going on there. And they're not that happy either. Whereas in Ukraine, they are fighting for their lives. And that, to me, is what is astounding Putin.
The Cipher Brief: The Cipher Brief has been briefed on reports from Ukrainians that captured Russian soldiers have relayed some of what they have been dealing with as are deployed to the front. A lot of them are reportedly untrained and in some cases, they reportedly didn't know who their commander was. So we know there's chaos within the ranks for sure. But we've seen something since the invasion of Ukraine that we hadn't seen on the world stage quite like this before, and that is this new friendship without any limits between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Does that concern you in a different way than these threats do on an individual basis?
Miller: It does concern me, yes. It is concerning and it is different now that they claim they have this friendship without limits. But does any dictator really have a friend? Somebody they totally trust that they'll tell everything and vice versa? And if Xi Jinping says, ‘yes, of course I'll give you some some terrific bombs,’ and things like that, Xi also has to think about what kind of economic downturn is going to happen inside China if every country that sides with Ukraine - which is a lot of democracies around the world - says, ‘you know, we're going to start boycotting China’. That's one of the things he has to be extremely careful about.
The Cipher Brief: You stood up the China mission center for the CIA, which is something that didn’t exist in this form prior. What do you think that should tell the American people about the importance of China and the importance of getting good intelligence on China?
Miller: I was on my second tour in Israel when then-director [William] Burns came for a visit and during the long windy roads from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, he mentioned that he had been talking with a China specialist at the agency and some others and said, ‘You know, I'm thinking we're not paying enough attention to China as the real strategic threat and even maybe a tactical one’, if you look at tactical being 10 years or less. And he said, ‘What do you think about that?’ I had been chief of East Asia division and chief in counter intelligence, and we had put Chinese spies behind bars. And I told him that we've been saying inside the agency for years, we are not paying enough attention to China. We were still dealing with remnants from 9/11 and Iraq and things like that, so I said, ‘I'm in’.
It took a while for us to figure it out and what we decided is that the China Mission Center owns property, that's going to be its own department. And so that's the China department basically, and Taiwan department at the agency. So that was one. Number two was we needed to look at the worldwide program. That's where we did the basically the external ops. And the goal was not only to work with stations - everything that we always do when we send out requirements - but we also needed to think about how we were going to do it a little bit differently so we had more success.
And so we started what we call STED, which is the Strategic Training and Education Department, which is kind of like TED talks, and they actually do a STED talk. And they're the ones that went out to every single mission center chief and built modules that really helped. So, that was the other thing that we did that was very different.
The Cipher Brief: A fascinating breakdown of how the intelligence community is prioritizing China as an intelligence target.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business.
