Two former senior intelligence officials in the United States have revealed in their book that the reason the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has achieved astonishing development results in recent decades is due to its epic success in penetrating various sectors in the United States and stealing almost all advanced technologies.
They also warned that Beijing is drawing up a “kill list” of U.S. military bases through a transnational spy network in order to launch a “new Pearl Harbor” missile attack using stolen hypersonic technology to prevent U.S. military support in the Taiwan Strait. They urge that if countermeasures are not taken, the consequences will be dire.
On December 5, the website “The Cipher Brief” reported and introduced a new book titled “The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets” written by former Deputy Director and Acting Director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) David R. Shedd and former DIA intelligence officer Andrew Badger.
The report highlights China’s remarkable progress in the past 50 years since the death of Mao Zedong. Many still remember the footage of Richard Nixon meeting Mao Zedong in the early 1970s, where Nixon shook hands with the Chinese leader known for his indiscriminate killings amidst a backdrop of thousands of Chinese riding old bicycles in Beijing.
The authors of “The Great Heist” reveal through a series of concrete examples and data that China’s development and progress have not been achieved through genuine research and hard work, but through large-scale espionage, fraud, and theft, often at the expense of the United States.
Once viewed as a vast market and money-making opportunity, almost all American (and European) companies were eventually taken advantage of by the CCP, leading to their losses.
The authors believe that Americans like Elon Musk should learn from this lesson: Western companies are invited into China, then stripped of their assets and discarded, while CCP-owned companies absorb all their proprietary knowledge.
An excerpt from the book reveals that in January 2025, the Philippine security forces arrested multiple Chinese nationals in Manila and Palawan, exposing a transnational spy network directly serving the CCP’s hypersonic missile unit.
The spy network’s mission was to precisely map the runways, fuel depots, radar towers, and ammunition depots of U.S. front-line bases in the Indo-Pacific region for the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF). Once a conflict erupts in the Taiwan Strait, these targets will be the first to be destroyed by Chinese hypersonic weapons.
On January 17, the Philippine police intercepted a Toyota RAV4 in the Makati financial district. Inside the vehicle, Chinese citizen Deng Yuanqing and two Filipinos disguised as surveyors used a tablet connected to the global navigation satellite system, high-performance imaging drones, and customized data relay antennas to conduct detailed mapping of sensitive U.S. military facilities nearby.
A few days later, five Chinese citizens claiming to be “tourists from Taiwan” were also arrested in Palawan, only a few miles from key Philippine Navy outposts and U.S. rotation deployment facilities.
The book points out that these actions are not isolated incidents but part of the CCP’s global spy network. The targets are aimed directly at U.S. Pacific front-line bases like Guam, Okinawa, Palawan, and Subic Bay.
Hypersonic weapons with speeds exceeding Mach 5, unpredictable trajectories, and relying on precise geographic coordinates can complete their strike before warning systems can react once launched.
The PLARF only needs to “strike first and strike accurately” to paralyze U.S. Pacific projection capabilities and subsequently, through “intimidation and coercion,” destroy American intervention will during the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict.
The book also recalls that in September 2021, the then-U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall III warned at a U.S. Air Force and Space Force Association conference that China’s precision weapon range had expanded from hundreds of miles to intercontinental and even global ranges, capable of conducting strikes from space. He specifically emphasized that if China were to destroy U.S. military satellites first, it would “blind” American forces before a conflict in the Taiwan Strait erupts.
Just two months later, the PLARF conducted a crucial test: a Long March rocket delivered a hypersonic glider into low Earth orbit, flying around the Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and releasing live ammunition. Despite the missile landing about 25 miles away from the target, this still shocked U.S. intelligence, who assessed, “We had no idea they had developed to this extent.”
When introducing the new book, “The Wire China” website titled it “Harsh Lessons – China’s Successful Theft of Hypersonic Technology.”
The authors of “The Great Heist” point out that Beijing’s rapid breakthrough in hypersonic technology is not accidental but the result of long-term, organized espionage operations. A typical case occurred at the HRL laboratory (a joint venture between Boeing and General Electric) in Malibu, California.
In January 2023, the laboratory hired naturalized U.S. Chinese engineer Gong Chenguang in charge of developing integrated circuits for infrared sensor readouts used to detect and track hypersonic missiles.
Just three months later, Gong Chenguang resigned suddenly citing feeling inadequate in his role. The HRL laboratory’s security department subsequently found that he had downloaded over 3,000 classified documents marked with “Export Controlled” and “Proprietary Information” to personal storage devices two weeks before resigning.
An investigation by the FBI revealed that from 2013 to 2020, Gong Chenguang had repeatedly stolen technical data from former employers and submitted proposals to organizations like the 38th Research Institute of China Electronics Technology Group, claiming he could manufacture high-performance chips monopolized by the U.S.
On February 7, 2024, just days before Gong Chenguang planned to travel to China, he was charged with trade secret theft. Currently, two of his three storage devices used to transfer sensitive drawings for hypersonic missile tracking are still missing.
The Justice Department stated that the documents taken by Gong Chenguang also included blueprints for advanced infrared sensors used in space-based systems to detect nuclear missile launches, track ballistic and hypersonic missiles, and enable U.S. aircraft to detect and counter impending heat-seeking missiles— including interfering with missile infrared tracking capabilities.
Shedd and Badger emphasize that through the so-called “military-civil fusion” strategy, the CCP has transformed all Chinese scholars, businessmen, and technical personnel, and even international students, into tools for espionage, systematically stealing key defense technologies developed by the U.S. at a cost of billions of dollars, with the goal of weakening American and allied advantages in air, sea, and space domains.
The authors document large-scale industrial espionage activities. We are not discussing a few MSS officials stealing a few manuals here. We are discussing numerous cases of clever internal infiltration of American companies that possess the knowledge and technologies China needs. We are discussing large-scale network attacks. We are discussing the Chinese using commercial and academic projects and connections on a massive scale to seize sensitive information.
It is foreseeable that the U.S. technology and intelligence information stolen by Beijing have already tilted the military power balance towards China. The CCP’s hypersonic attack capability now has a deterrent effect.
The authors warn that the advent of hypersonic weapons has made the concept of “distance” no longer a defense measure; the U.S. traditional depth advantage has been greatly compressed. Once China completes the full “kill list” mapping of front-line bases and combines it with space anti-satellite capabilities, any Taiwan crisis could turn into a “Pearl Harbor-style” assault in a matter of minutes — except this time, the targets are not just warships but also satellites and bases.
However, winning a war or threatening to start one involves not only military hardware but also penetrating America’s energy infrastructure, food supply, destroying U.S. satellites, stealing data, and weaponizing it into an unprecedented scale of spy tools, and more.
The authors conclude by pointing out that the CCP’s epic-scale theft operation has been enormously successful and has successfully penetrated various sectors in the U.S. If decisive measures are not taken to counteract this, the consequences will be extremely severe.