The United States today confronts the greatest foreign espionage threat this country has ever faced.

Many countries pose espionage problems for America. Still, China’s spy threat far outpaces all others, encompassing human and technical spying. It’s more dangerous even than the massive Soviet espionage effort against us during the Cold War.

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Last year, former FBI Director Christopher Wray termed Beijing’s espionage offensive against us the biggest the FBI has ever contended with. It was, he said, “broad and unrelenting,” aimed at “nearly every industry in the U.S. economy,” and almost overwhelming in scale.

House Republicans sounded a similar alarm, warning the public about the Chinese Communist Party’s massive espionage-influence campaign against nearly every aspect of American life. They described Beijing as “an untrustworthy, adversarial actor by continually undermining American interests at every turn.” Democrats have been mostly absent in this crucial fight, between former President Joe Biden’s compromising ties to the CCP as well as dalliances between leading Democrats and Chinese spies. 

President Donald Trump’s second-term effort to boot out Chinese students from American college campuses is a step in the right direction. But much more is required. The FBI is America’s lead counterespionage agency, and it’s time to face the difficult truth that it’s simply not up to the task of winning our Spy War against China.

There are many reasons for the FBI’s shortcomings in counterintelligence. For most of its history, the bureau valued its law enforcement mission over national security endeavors. After 9/11, the FBI devoted enormous effort to national security, but that went much more to fighting terrorism than foreign espionage. Simply put, throughout the FBI’s long history, catching spies has usually taken a back seat to catching bank robbers, white collar crooks, and terrorists. 

Neither does the bureau’s new leadership seem up to the task before them. Director Kash Patel lacks significant national security experience, while his tenure as boss has featured lots of personal travel and aggressive hunts for leakers rather than customary FBI leadership activities. Neither has Patel indicated taking the FBI’s major corruption problem seriously. He and his deputy, the Make America Great Again podcaster Dan Bongino, haven’t said much about foreign spy threats, but reports that the FBI is taking agents off counterintelligence squads to pursue illegal immigrants indicate where the priorities of the “front office” are at present.  

Nevertheless, the FBI’s true weakness in counterintelligence isn’t about people or even priorities. It’s the organization itself. The bureau has too many missions on its plate, serving as the top federal law enforcement agency while also being the lead counterintelligence agency. Given the vast extent of the spy threats we now face, that’s asking the FBI to do too much. The bureau is doing a second-rate job at several key missions, all demanding top-rank performance. 

Americans don’t realize it, but the FBI’s position as our lead national law enforcement agency and domestic intelligence agency is highly anomalous. Most Western democracies and nearly all our close allies wisely separate the cops from the spies — by design. Take the United Kingdom’s example, where domestic intelligence is handled by the Security Service, popularly called MI5, which lacks police powers, while law enforcement remains firmly in police hands. Our Anglosphere Five Eyes spy partners mirror Britain in their counterintelligence setup.

Moreover, putting so much power in the hands of the FBI poses enduring risks to civil liberties. Americans are rightly worried about the bureau’s extraordinary power. In most democracies, the people who spy on you, while looking for foreign spies and terrorists, can’t also arrest you, as the FBI can. 

Most of the first Trump administration’s problems with the FBI, including the partisan weaponization of intelligence by the so-called “Deep State” against Republicans, happened because the bureau possesses an excessive degree of bureaucratic power in Washington, D.C. Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s Democrat-directed effort to pin Russian influence on Trump and his entourage, would have been impossible if the bureau had the restrictions on its mandate and authorities which are normal in most Western democracies. 

Neither is the FBI meddling in our politics anything new. Throughout his nearly half-century tenure as the FBI’s director until 1972, J. Edgar Hoover was notorious for intervening in politics, up to and including the White House, based upon his being the boss of America’s secret police force. He “held the files” on our elites. After Hoover finally left the scene, things didn’t get much better, and unseemly FBI intervention in Washington, D.C., politics has happened more than it should. 

For instance, the notorious Watergate scandal, which brought down President Richard Nixon thanks to liberal outrage over a politically-motivated office break-in during our 1972 election campaign, was an FBI smear job. Liberal journalists won fame and fortune by reporting the backstory to the Watergate brouhaha, based on a well-connected confidential source codenamed “Deep Throat” who possessed deep knowledge of what happened and why. 

Deep Throat was none other than Mark Felt, a top FBI official and career bureau man. He hated Nixon because he didn’t nominate Felt to replace Director Hoover. Felt, a conservative Republican, leaked the Watergate saga, which was, in truth, Felt’s personal take on the scandal — hardly the unvarnished truth — to the media as a personal vendetta against the president, which had nothing to do with conventional politics.  

Republicans should have no illusions. The FBI is tempted toward improper and even illegal interventions in domestic politics because it simply possesses too much power. This meddling will continue until the bureau has the national security mission taken away from it, thereby aligning the U.S. with other developed democracies in how we handle the sensitive matter of counterintelligence. 

At present, the FBI owns the counterspy mission, with very little authority vested in the director of national intelligence, who only controls the small and bureaucratically ineffectual National Counterintelligence and Security Center, which amounts to chiefs lacking Indians. DNI Tulsi Gabbard cannot hope to seriously reform the Deep State without gaining the intelligence community’s legal control over counterintelligence by taking that enormously important mission away from the FBI. 

That means creating a stand-alone domestic intelligence agency, charged with conducting counterintelligence and counterterrorism inside the U.S., but lacking police powers. If someone is found to be breaking the law by acting as a spy for a foreign power, the FBI will be called in to effect an arrest. This new agency will report to the DNI and provide strategic assistance and guidance in counterintelligence, assisting the CIA, the National Security Agency, and other IC stakeholders who work together against foreign espionage.  

Protests that such a bureaucratic change is “too hard” are excuses for inaction. Canada did exactly what was required in 1984, when it separated Ottawa’s domestic intelligence mission away from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada’s FBI equivalent, and handed it over to the newly created Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which is spies, not cops.

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The only things preventing similar overdue reforms regarding American counterintelligence are inertia and obstruction. Naturally, the FBI won’t want to lose the national security mission, but, in truth, the bureau is better at its criminal mission anyway. It’s what the FBI is best at and prefers doing. Let it focus on its cops-and-robbers niche while letting others pursue the domestic intelligence mission with more professionalism and less partisanship. 

Republicans have no excuse not to reform American counterintelligence in this fashion. The clock’s ticking. Congress seriously pondered taking the national security mission away from the FBI after the 9/11 attacks — it’s hardly a novel concept. If such reforms aren’t pursued, it’s only a matter of time before the FBI gets dragged into politics yet again, weaponized against Republicans. The next Crossfire Hurricane will be a matter of when, not if.  

John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.