Kim Hjelmgaard

Thanks for having me.

Yes, you're absolutely correct.

I mean, the kind of mixture of secret and open source intelligence that you mentioned is definitely at the sharp end of intelligence work, I would say.

You know, kind of current and former intelligence officers and spy chiefs say that

as important as that stuff is you know the satellite stuff the ai stuff the human aspect of this work you know interpreting the data forming relationships on the ground all that is equally important and necessary i think in the sort of public imagination you know spy work is all kind of rooftop chases you know a man or a woman with a gun defeating an entire army

But the reality of it is that it's quite processy, slow and bureaucratic.

And you do need humans in the mix there to consolidate and interpret data and see where that all can go.

I think the thing to note, you know, we're talking about honey traps.

These do represent a relatively niche or small subset of the kind of total spying that countries like China and Russia do.

And we don't have a lot of, you know, there's no official statistics or numbers that the intelligence agencies keep all this stuff classified.

So we don't know the precise scale of it.

In general, what spies who are targeting the U.S.

are hoping to do, and this applies especially to China,

is they're trying to do what's called technology transfer.

And this is essentially where their intelligence officers kind of infiltrate American universities, research centers, think tanks, corporations, and they try to kind of acquire or obtain a mixture of proprietary information and open source information that they then push back to their spy masters in Beijing or wherever they might be located.

I think it's fair that it kind of runs the gamut.

You know, our reporting has surfaced some never before seen examples of failed honeypots.

This is where largely where sort of suspected intelligence officers have approached members of the U.S.

military and defense contractors to try to lure them into relationships where like over time they could divulge secrets.

We've also located examples of the U.S.