Silicon Valley’s secret industrial spy war

Riskgaming

Silicon Valley couldn’t be farther from the confines of Langley or Fort Meade, let alone Beijing or Moscow. Yet, the verdant foothills of suburban sprawl that encompass the Bay Area have played host to some of the most technically sophisticated espionage missions the world has ever seen. As the home of pivotal technologies from semiconductors to databases, artificial intelligence and more, no place has a greater grip on the technological edge than California — and every nation and their intelligence services want access.

It just so happens that almost no national security reporter sits on this beat. Nearly all cover the sector from Washington, or in rare cases New York. All except one that is: Zach Dorfman. Zach has been driving the coverage of the technical side of espionage operations for years, and his pathbreaking scoops about China’s unraveling of the CIA’s network of operatives in the early 2010s were widely read in DC officialdom. Now, he’s published two blockbuster features, one in Politico Magazine on the FBI’s attempts to intercede in the chip trade between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, and the other in Rolling Stone on a deep-cover agent and the very human consequences of state-to-state skullduggery.

Zach and host Danny Crichton talk about Silicon Valley’s history in industrial espionage, the tricky mechanics of intercepting and disabling chip shipments to the Soviet Union, why the U.S.S.R. was so keen on learning the market dynamics of computing in America, the risks for today’s companies around insider threats, Wirecard and Jan Marsalek and finally, some thoughts on Xi Jinping and how China’s rollup of the CIA’s mainland intelligence network affected his leadership of America’s current greatest adversary.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠