Many of us don’t think about counterintelligence until something breaks—until a blackout, a cyberattack, a “random” act of sabotage, or a geopolitical shock forces the question: Who saw this coming, and who was supposed to stop it? The quiet weakening of America’s intelligence and law-enforcement capacity is a direct risk to ordinary life. When the institutions designed to detect foreign penetration, disruption, and coercion are distracted, politicized, or hollowed out, the country becomes less safe, easier to manipulate, easier to paralyze, and harder to govern in a crisis.
Spying and covert action target systems: ports, power grids, water utilities, telecom networks, supply chains, research labs, and the shared information environment. A degraded counterintelligence posture creates more room for hostile forces to recruit, steal, blackmail, launder influence, and quietly position assets for the moment it counts. And because the work intelligence agencies do is mostly invisible—built on long investigations, human sources, and coordination that rarely produces flashy arrest numbers—it is easy to starve, sideline, or restructure these efforts without the public immediately noticing the cost.
The report below explains why this complacency is dangerous—especially as China’s espionage and cyber capabilities grow more aggressive, and as the FBI’s mission and staffing are reportedly being cut or redirected toward unrelated priorities at precisely the moment sustained focus matters most.
The FBI Spent a Generation Relearning How to Catch Spies. Then Came Kash Patel.
As China’s spies grow more aggressive, the FBI is distracted and off-balance.
By Derek Owen and R.M. Schneiderman, The Bulwark
AMERICA HAD BEEN AT WAR FOR TWO WEEKS but didn’t know it. The onslaught began with a fleet of store-bought drones swarming a power substation in Pennsylvania, delivering explosives made from common chemicals. They shredded switchgear and control systems, cutting power to airports, hospitals, and nearly half a million homes.
Hours later, a far-right extremist group calling itself “Dark Reich” took credit for the attack in an anonymous video replete with Nazi and occult symbols. The group hailed the blackout as the opening salvo of a campaign to bring down the U.S. government. They urged others to replicate their efforts and ignite a race war.
Over the next few days, copycat attacks cut the power for hundreds of thousands of Americans as summer temperatures soared into the 90s. Nobody could figure out who was piloting the drones. Each incident looked amateurish, yet the pattern worried FBI officials. Bureau investigators began to suspect a foreign adversary might be quietly orchestrating “gray-zone” attacks—covert strikes that offered plausible deniability.
