S10 Ep35: How China Steals America’s Secrets with David Shedd & Andrew Badger

David Shedd served as acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency; Andrew Badger is a former DIA case officer now teaching state-sponsored espionage at Oxford. Together they've written The Great Heist: China's Epic Campaign to Steal America's Secrets . Matt talks with them about how the Ministry of State Security evolved from a backwater service into what they argue is the world's most powerful intelligence agency; how Beijing replaced Cold War recruitment tradecraft with guanxi-based social obligation and what the authors call "crowd-sourced espionage"; how Made in China 2025 functioned as a national collection priority list driving theft across defense, tech, and critical infrastructure; and why Volt and Salt Typhoon represent not an espionage story but pre-positioning for war—with kill switches already embedded in America's power grid and telecommunications backbone.

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S10 Ep35: How China Steals America’s Secrets with David Shedd & Andrew Badger is an episode from Secrets & Spies.

This episode is 60:49 long.

This episode was published on Mar 14, 2026.

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