Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

David Ignatius:

The future of warfare, or at least the beginning of warfare in the future is going to be in space. I’m certain of that. I don’t think people really appreciate just how important this domain is, or how much work the Chinese in particular have done to get ready for that future contest.

Preet Bharara:

That’s David Ignatius. He’s been a foreign affairs columnist at the Washington Post since 1999. He’s also an accomplished novelist, having published 11 full-length spy thrillers that draw on decades of reporting on the CIA and other global intelligence agencies. Ignatius joins me to discuss the escalating race between the US and China to control space, how artificial intelligence could influence the future of warfare, and his latest four-part novella published in the Washington Post this summer. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Hey folks, a slight programming change. As many of you know, Donald Trump was just indicted on four counts by a grand jury in connection with January 6th. Yes, this is the third indictment of the former president. My Insider co-host, Joyce Vance, and I recorded an emergency episode about the indictment. We go through the charges and the challenges, and we answer a lot of questions you might have, like who are the six co-conspirators referenced in the indictment and could they soon face charges too? Given the significance of the news, the paywall is down so everyone can listen. In lieu of a Q&A in this episode, you can listen to our analysis at cafe.com/trump. Enter your email address to listen for free. That’s cafe.com/trump. If you already receive emails from CAFE, then check your inbox. I’ll be right back with my conversation with David Ignatius.

For decades, David Ignatius has been a reliable and trusted observer of foreign affairs, which he writes about in his biweekly column for the Washington Post. His latest spy novella was inspired by real life events between the CIA and Chinese intelligence operatives. David Ignatius, welcome back to the show.

David Ignatius:

Thank you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

Do you realize it’s been over four years since you’ve been on the podcast? It seems like 100.

David Ignatius:

Shocking. I hadn’t calculated that, but I’m glad to be back.

Preet Bharara:

My failure, it’s a failure on my part. A lot has happened since we last spoke. What I thought we’d talk about a bunch is an issue that’s near and dear to your heart, both in your journalism, your opinion writing, and in your fiction writing, which we’ll also get to. I want to talk about China and spying. A few months ago, all the eyes of the world, particularly in the United States, were focused on these spy balloons. I haven’t heard a thing about them since. Why is that?

David Ignatius:

I think the main reason is that the Chinese haven’t sent any our way, according to the sources I’ve talked to in the Pentagon. The Chinese got caught. They were embarrassed. These are of limited intelligence collection value, and they decided the embarrassment was not worth the intelligence gain. I’m sure they’ll be back. The Chinese are very interested in what they call near space, what we call near space, not quite in orbit, not quite a high flying plane. Obviously, they have some intelligence collection value, but people I talk to say not all that much.

Preet Bharara:

Did we overstate the significance of these balloons?

David Ignatius:

I think in an ultimate sense, yes, we did. The Chinese had been flying them for some years. We were aware of their balloon program. They’d made a number of circumnavigations to the globe. But when a spy balloon is visible above Montana, and local news cameras can let viewers watch the balloon drift ever deeper into the United States, it almost demands some action. I think it was not handled in the best way. I think when the balloon first crossed into the US was the time to have a conversation and issue a statement. The way in which this seemed to kind of sneak up on the country and on President Biden added to the sense that we were under attack. We weren’t.

Preet Bharara:

Have we understood, or has anyone come to understand what exactly the Chinese learned from those balloons?

David Ignatius:

Publicly in terms of what I can tell your listeners, no beyond the obvious fact that they were collecting signals. They were able to target locations such as our missile silos that they were overflying to get more precise readings. But beyond that, precisely what they were doing, I don’t know. I asked questions of people in the Pentagon at the time. For example, were they releasing tiny drones no bigger than a hummingbird that might then fly to targets and do special collection? I was told no, no evidence of that. The utility of these balloons, why the Chinese have been so interested in them is a bit of a mystery, given their extraordinary capabilities in space. In space, their technology is close to, and in some cases beyond that of the United States.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I want to talk about that, because you have said that’s an important frontier. You have said Beijing recognizes that space is the ultimate high ground, and wants to control it. What do you mean by that?

David Ignatius:

Virtually every aspect of our national defense, and increasingly of our nation’s commerce is linked to assets in space. The most obvious is GPS, which allows us not simply to know where we are, but is the basic piece of technology that makes cell phone communication possible. Precise location of the position of your receiver, your phone, and the satellites that are transmitting signals to it is crucial. Those systems rely on our longstanding assumption that space was a peaceful domain, where you could have commercial assets like that. That’s no longer the case. The Chinese have demonstrated anti-satellite capability going back to 2007. They shot down one of their own satellites in a catastrophic move, leaving all kinds of debris, thousands of pieces of debris.

Preet Bharara:

But that was intentional, that was intentional.

David Ignatius:

That was intentional to demonstrate the capability. They’ve since, the US believes, developed anti-satellite weapons in space that could capture a satellite that they wanted to take out of orbit, that could use cyber attacks without ever actually touching the other satellite. From a kilometer or more away, you can send signals through lasers and high powered microwaves in space that can disable and maybe recode adversary satellites. The Chinese have understood, I think really going back to the Gulf War in 1991, that America’s ability to project power around the world depended on this network of satellite assets.

That this was the key to our power. That if they wanted to really challenge the United States, they’d have to have the capability to disrupt our satellite communications infrastructure. And they developed that capability. They have it now. They use ground-based lasers to dazzle our reconnaissance satellites. We’ve had to reconfigure those satellites, put what amount to dark glasses on them, so they can see even when they’re being dazzled.

Preet Bharara:

Wait, explain what you mean by that. Is that like when people use laser pointers at JFK, and point them at pilots and airplanes?

David Ignatius:

Yes. They have the effect of blinding optical sensors if they’re not protected.

Preet Bharara:

From the ground?

David Ignatius:

Yes. From the ground or conceivably in space, but ground-based lasers are effective, and have been used. The US now has countermeasures. Another simple example, Preet, but one that’s absolutely critical for our defense is our ability to detect missile launches, launches of what could be adversary ballistic missile attacks. Those satellites had been extraordinarily vulnerable to compromise. They were not hardened against cyber or other attacks in space. They’re being hardened now. The US again with this… We own space. We were the space country, and just assumed that we’d have mastery. We had a few very vulnerable key intelligence assets in space that we’d depended on. It never occurred to us that those could be knocked out, that we were as vulnerable as we turned out to be.

Preet Bharara:

Could you describe, if you understand, the way that the anti-satellite weapon works space-to-space? Is it a missile? Is it a laser? Is it a bomb? Is it ground-to-satellite, or what?

David Ignatius:

All of the above, probably. The Chinese, as I say, demonstrated in 2007 that they could fire a missile from earth to space, and hit precisely one of their own satellites and destroy it. The problem is that satellite, which was in low earth orbit, left a field of debris estimated at two to 3,000 tiny pieces of debris spinning in orbit at enormous speed, that could destroy other satellites, if people aren’t very careful about exactly where each piece of debris is and what a satellite’s track is. Another way that the Chinese, or anybody including the United States, could disrupt an adversary is by interfering with ground communications with satellites.

You could do that by having special forces attack one of the island bases where these ground stations are. Or you could do it by having a cyber attack on that ground station that interrupts its ability to feed signals into space. In terms of weapons in space, the Chinese have shown an ability to position satellites very close to other satellites, their own in the tests, but it could have been ours. And use what amount to kind of grabbers to take the satellite and draw it into the same orbit as the attacking satellite, and then carry it somewhere else. For satellites that are in a fixed position above the earth in so-called geo orbit, geocentric orbit, it’s possible to take satellites there.

The bulk of our key communication satellites are in that position. And pull them into what’s called the graveyard zone, which is out beyond geo, it’s in much deeper space, and leave them there. The Chinese have also demonstrated something that I find astounding. They’ve pushed some of their satellites which appear to be dead, finished, give them a last push into this graveyard zone. They’ve stayed there apparently dead. Then come back to life after months or years, and come back into positions from which they could attack.

Then finally, I just would note that everything we know about cyber attacks on earth is possible in space, using these new technologies of high powered microwaves and lasers. Which can inject code through space at an adversary target, perhaps not leaving any trace. It’s really quite frightening to think that the assets you’d rely on suddenly would be disabled in the time you need it the most. There’s a range of these capabilities. One question is, how much of this has the United States done to be able to deter and compete with China? That is one of the hardest things to find out, I’ve encountered in my work as a journalist. It is so highly classified, and you cannot get people to talk about it on any basis.

Preet Bharara:

Have you tried interviewing Donald Trump about this stuff?

David Ignatius:

That’s a good idea. He’s probably-

Preet Bharara:

Just ask him.

David Ignatius:

He’s probably got it in one of those boxes.

Preet Bharara:

He probably has some documents.

David Ignatius:

Yeah, he might well have. I haven’t tried Donald Trump, but I’ve tried a lot of people, and-

Preet Bharara:

That’s free advice, David.

David Ignatius:

Preet, I appreciate it.

Preet Bharara:

There’s something you said a few minutes ago about our ability to detect other nations’ missile launches. Is our ability to detect a preemptive nuclear strike from Russia or some other country predicated almost entirely on our satellite capability, or do we have other capabilities? The reason I ask, if there’s a sustained attack on our satellite capability, does that blind us to a launch, or not?

David Ignatius:

We’re living in a new world in which we’re not dependent as a country on our so-called national technical means, our government’s satellites, but can turn to commercial satellites. There are commercial surveillance satellites put up by companies like Maxar that circle the globe. If you’re in Ukraine and you want a sense of the battlefield, the United States can feed you intelligence, but you can also buy intelligence from these commercial satellites that are constantly orbiting Ukraine and everywhere else. So you have that information. Among the commercial satellites that’s up there are satellites that detect thermal events. A thermal event could be a volcano eruption. You’d want to know about that.

Another thermal event could be a missile launch. This has been extremely valuable, again to Ukraine, in detecting tank fire. They can locate tanks, even when they’re well camouflaged, by the thermal event that’s observable from space of the cannon firing. They can dial down the exact signature. They know what the explosion from a cannon barrel looks like in terms of the heat signature. There are other, I could go through a range of things. There’s synthetic aperture radar satellites in space, commercial satellites that can see in the dark. There are satellites that can see through buildings, see the images through heat. People can buy all this now.

Preet Bharara:

So we’re going to be okay on detecting-

David Ignatius:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

… a launch before it’s too late?

David Ignatius:

The simple answer is that there will be other ways to detect launches. We won’t be blind.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. I was a little… You talk about the capabilities that China and other countries are developing, and some questions about what capabilities the United States has, or is reaching for. Is there any regime of understanding, international agreement about what nation states can do in space?

David Ignatius:

There’s a treaty that bars the use of nuclear weapons in space, but there isn’t-

Preet Bharara:

What’s the point of barring a nuclear weapon in space?

David Ignatius:

Well, it was thought that a nuclear explosion in space would be catastrophic, would destroy any country’s ability to use space because of the debris. It just would pollute that zone. It turns out that many of the same effects resulted from the Chinese hitting just one satellite, and creating the debris field that I mentioned earlier. But there is that basic piece of international arms control. There’s a desire now to broaden that, but a question of how to do that. As with any arms control agreement, you’re worried that you’ll make an agreement, and the other side will cheat. It’s extremely hard to detect cheating obviously in space.

The Chinese worry, to give them their due, that Elon Musk’s nearly 3,000 satellites in lower earth orbit could have modular packages installed that have in a crisis intelligence uses for the United States. That Starlink array connects through a mesh network. It doesn’t necessarily have to go down to earth. They connect in a mesh network in space. It can jump the signals back and forth between satellites, so they’re very difficult to intercept and detect. Could those commercial assets become valuable to the United States in a conflict?

We’ve seen how valuable the commercial Starlink array is to Ukraine. Ukraine commanders in the east in Bakhmut, this terrible siege of Bakhmut, could not have communicated. Could not have received the coordinates for precise artillery fire without their ability to use the wifi system that Starlink provides from space to do their broadband communications and exchange signals. So they’re incredibly important. Thank goodness that Elon Musk has been able to provide this capability. My worry is, what if one day he decides, “I don’t like this anymore. I don’t feel good about the Ukraine war. That’s it.”

Preet Bharara:

Yes. Well, you’ve anticipated my question. On the one hand, we know that there are government satellites, and as you point out, there are also networks of private commercial satellites among them. Some owned by Elon Musk’s company. He’s kind of moody.

David Ignatius:

To put it mildly.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, so what can the government do to protect itself from the vagaries of one guy?

David Ignatius:

There are a growing number of commercial operators that have hundreds, and it’s soon in the thousands, of satellites in low orbit seeking to compete with Musk for providing broadband internet or other things. Amazon is looking to develop a network that could have 2,000 satellites, rivaling Musk’s, that they call Kuiper, K-U-I-P-E-R. It’s not beyond the planning stage yet, but I think they’re likely to do it. It would have great utility for Amazon. There’s a British company similarly that has 1,000 or so satellites.

Preet Bharara:

So you’re saying that the solution in part is to have more commercial satellites from different companies, rather than expand the number of government satellites?

David Ignatius:

I’ve come to think that, if you have enough commercial providers, the likelihood that they’d all go on strike together is limited. I don’t think any government would want to be dependent on the whims of commercial vendors to protect the security of its people. Our government shouldn’t do that either. You’d want to have redundancy. You’d want to make sure that if all the commercial providers quit, or if an adversary’s malware somehow took them out of the picture, that you’d still be able to operate.

I think, Preet, just to underline the basic point. The future of warfare, or at least the beginning of warfare in the future is going to be in space. I’m certain of that. I don’t think people really appreciate just how important this domain is, or how much work the Chinese in particular have done to get ready for that future contest.

Preet Bharara:

Who else is in the space, if I can, of space? You have the US. You have the Chinese. Any other players, Russia, India?

David Ignatius:

Russia and India both have satellite capability. Russia historically was our rival. We forget that it was Russia that had the first satellite in orbit, had the first man in orbit, Yuri Gagarin, before we did. It was a humiliation for the United States. The Russians went through a deep trough after the end of the Soviet Union. Their space enterprise was, like everything else in Russia, looted by oligarchs. Assets were sold off piecemeal.

Preet Bharara:

Did they spend all those resources on having the most magnificent ground army in the world?

David Ignatius:

I think it went mostly for villas in Cannes and townhouses in London, myself. The Russian space work program was stripped. It was notoriously corrupt. But the Russians have come back. They’ve demonstrated an intriguing capability. I’m sure your listeners probably know the Russian Matryoshka dolls, the nesting dolls. Where you have like a bulbous doll, you take it apart, and then inside there’s another doll. Open that up, inside… You can have five or six dolls nested together. Well, the Russians have done that with satellites. They have an observer satellite that’s been detected in orbit getting closer and closer in position to a target. Again, one of their own satellites. Then that satellite will open, and another smaller satellite will emerge. An attack satellite, that has different capabilities that can go directly toward the target, and in theory, take it out.

The Russians are still competing. Russia is such a corrupt side. It has brilliant scientists and technicians, but it isn’t anywhere near where the United States and China are, nor are any of our other partners, sometimes competitors. The Iranians have a primitive space program. The Indians are pretty aggressive, but nowhere near us. Many countries interestingly have their own global positioning satellites. China has a system they call BeiDou, which is Chinese I think for the North Star, which is a very effective, efficient alternative to GPS. Europe has its own system, similarly, that could be a fallback if GPS ever went down. The Russians have a system called GLONASS. The Indians have a system. The Japanese have a system. Everybody sees the importance of space, and wants to have its own protection, but the two biggest players are the US and China.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with David Ignatius after this…

Are satellites mostly a source of intelligence gathering and surveillance, or will there come a time when satellites themselves are capable of launching certain kinds of weapons upon the ground?

David Ignatius:

That’s one of the things I think that concerns our Space Force, the new service that was created by President Trump, and what I should say I think was a good decision by President Trump.

Preet Bharara:

Yep. It’s something that a lot of people made fun of. You write it was, “One of the few solid decisions of his presidency.”

David Ignatius:

I said that in a column. It was much more unpopular when I said it at the time. The Air Force hated it, and the Pentagon brass were all opposed to it. But in truth, Trump and his advisors were right. The Air Force had dropped the ball, and we did need to have this Space Force. One of the things that Space Force commanders say they’re worried about most is Chinese orbital bombardment satellites. These are satellites that would be in orbit, that could suddenly come down from orbit. Imagine a space shuttle that we had suddenly turning into a weapon, targeting a city somewhere, and landing in the middle of that. Imagine what a space shuttle at high speed, an unmanned space shuttle at high speed could do to Washington DC, if it hit on the mall. You get a sense of what these orbital bombardment satellites could do. They wouldn’t necessarily be nuclear. They would be conventional weapons, so you wouldn’t respond in the nuclear domain. How would you respond to an attack like that?

Preet Bharara:

Well I guess I don’t know enough about the math and the velocity and countermeasure issues. Are you saying that, because they’re coming from a space orbit, they would be so fast that they couldn’t be shot down?

David Ignatius:

I believe that the current judgment in the Pentagon is that there is not an effective defense against these. There may be, but you’d have to have an incredibly large, strong attacking missile or beam to have any chance of stopping this. It’s just, I mean again, think of something the size and dimension of the space shuttle targeting a particular place on earth.

Preet Bharara:

Will we be pretty good at knowing that a country was deploying such a potential weapon in space?

David Ignatius:

The Chinese have actually deployed what we call, they call, a space plane. They’ve tested it twice. It didn’t get much publicity. It should have. Because it is, as I say, a new leap in potential weaponry in space. There are other kinds of space bombardment. One thing that satellites are vulnerable to is jamming from earth stations, which send up signals that blur the signal the satellite is sending down, so it’s very hard to receive. But interestingly, you can also do jamming from space.

You can jam the satellites that are way up in this geo orbit, circling the globe at fixed points, by using signals from satellites in lower earth orbit, much further down, that blind or confuse the receivers on the ground. They send signals in the direct line that the signals from the further out geo satellite would be using. I just read a paper by three Oxford scientists that focuses on this. When I tried to ask the officials from Space command about it, they said, “Well, we just can’t talk about it.” “What do you mean? It’s in a journal. Of course you should talk about it.” But again, it illustrates just how serious people are about classification limits.

Preet Bharara:

Is there a little bit of a silver lining here, insofar as this next frontier is so difficult and costly, and requires such an enormous amount of resources and technological proficiency, that the battlefield is limited to just a few players? You won’t have rogue states or smaller nation states that are mortal enemies of the United States, like North Korea and others, playing in this field?

David Ignatius:

Well, I think it does limit the number of adversaries. Perhaps limits that number to one, China. It’s not easy now to see a country that would be a likely adversary that could develop similar capabilities. I think the fascinating thing isn’t simply the reduced number of combatants, but the possibility that conflict could be limited to a kind of game of space chess. Challenging each other’s assets, and achieving what amounted to communications weapons delivery dominance. Then you wouldn’t fight the war on earth, because the result would be almost guaranteed by the outcome of the initial combat in space, the positioning of the battlefield.

Preet Bharara:

We’d have gigantic transformer robots in space? Are we developing that capability, David?

David Ignatius:

Yes. I mean, what’s a satellite if not an robot, an unmanned system?

Preet Bharara:

That’s right.

David Ignatius:

The nature of warfare as AI moves in and thinks of strategies, thinks of ways to disable satellites, thinks of how satellites communicate with each other and what vulnerabilities might be. Does machine learning on every communication that’s been collected from adversary satellites, and then looks for anomalies, looks for holes that could be penetrated by malware. It’s endless. This is an area I think in which the United States is significantly ahead, and is likely to remain so. But even so, it’s… Henry Kissinger, who is amazingly at the end of his life, he’s 100 years old now.

Preet Bharara:

He might have another 100. I don’t know that he’s near the end.

David Ignatius:

Well I wouldn’t guess another 100, but he’s still thinking hard. The thing he’s thinking most about is what AI will do to the future of warfare, and that includes AI in space. He has told me in an interview a few months ago that where early in his career he was focused on the control of nuclear weapons, it’s now the weapons themselves will be controlled by AI. It’s controlling AI that’s the challenge for people who had the dream that he did, of finding systems to stabilize conflict. That’s something we’re trying to talk to the Chinese about. I gather in the recent conversations that Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, and Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, had with the Chinese, there was a little bit of discussion of how to start a dialogue on this issue of AI and emerging technologies, maybe including space technologies.

Preet Bharara:

So what’s more likely, that we will go to war at some point in the future with the Chinese, or we will go to war at some point in the future with our AI overlords? That’s a novella for you.

David Ignatius:

It’s another novella. I’m not in the Paul Revere, “The AI breakout is coming,” yet. I mean, I think AI is still our servant. It’s amazingly powerful. Anybody who’s played with ChatGPT-4 can attest to that. But it’s still basically adding the last word in a sentence. It knows 9999 words-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, but it’s infant. It’s an infant. When I think about it, if you think of AI as having a lifespan, just for the sake of a thought experiment, of a human, of 80 or 85 years, AI is like one day old.

David Ignatius:

I agree with that. As AI adapts, we’ll adapt our ability using AI to control it.

Preet Bharara:

Will we? Will we? Will we, David?

David Ignatius:

I think we will. Yeah. My greatest failing as a journalist, I’ve often thought, is I’m too optimistic. I may be in this case too, but I do think we created… The smartest people in this field are thinking about how to prevent AI Armageddon, and I think they’ll think about controls. The point at which an AI system begins to direct itself, write its own algorithms, optimize what it thinks is best, that’s some distance off. The ability to control for that I think is… Even given what you say, these are infants. They’ll grow up. As we all know, a teenager has a mind of his or her own, but the parental controls can still be exerted.

Preet Bharara:

I said a few minutes ago that maybe a silver lining in the space race is that rogue states, individual small states who want to launch terror attacks can’t really play. Because it’s too cost intensive, labor intensive, and it requires a lot of technology. Do you think AI helps to eliminate that gap for smaller states in a way that can make them more dangerous?

David Ignatius:

I mean I think AI will make small states, individual actors, fanatical groups, potential terrorist groups more powerful. The technology is there. It’s going open source. I mean, when you think about the ability to apply it to engineering. Bio weapons was to me the scariest possibility. It’s a very grim future. So using AI wisely to control AI, I think the best defense against rogue or offensive AI is probably going to be defensive AI. One thing I’ve seen with cyber war in Ukraine is that it turns out the defense is stronger than we thought, I would say, and offense is weaker than we thought. The Russians have really been trying hard to use cyber weapons against Ukraine, with limited success, because of the ability to patch, to quickly alter code, to move things to the cloud. The cloud ends up being a wonderful protection for a country like Ukraine, if it can get its key data into the cloud quickly enough.

Preet Bharara:

Do you have any understanding of whether or not AI, in its current or future forms, will allow smaller states to develop nuclear weapons? I don’t even know the answer to this. Is the main obstacle resources, and enriching of uranium or some other such thing, rather than having the technology of how to make the warhead and how to make the delivery system?

David Ignatius:

The plan to make a bomb has been around ever since Progressive magazine published it back in the early ’70s, I think. There was an enormous fight over the decision to publish that. But how a bomb is put together and works is understood. There’s precision engineering that’s involved that even the Iranians, a technologically very advanced country have not, it’s my understanding, fully figured out. I mean, they could make a primitive bomb that you drop from a bomber, like over Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But making one with the precision that it’s small enough to fit atop a missile is much harder.

Triggering the fissionable material. There’s something they call a neutron trigger that gets at precisely the point of collision to make the reaction possible, is extremely difficult. I wrote a novel some years ago about the Iranians trying to steal that secret of the neutron triggering mechanism for a bomb, when their nuclear program was active. AI will make that process easier, but AI won’t be able to machine the metals to configure the precise package. That’ll still be pretty hard.

Preet Bharara:

Can’t you 3D print that now?

David Ignatius:

I honestly don’t know the answer. Preet, every time I try to give you a reason why it’s not going to be apocalyptic, you come up with a good counter example. I don’t know whether you can.

Preet Bharara:

Well I think you’ve written or quoted someone as saying, “The optimist and the pessimist both die the same way. The optimist lives a better life.” Do you believe that?

David Ignatius:

Well I do believe that, but then I would, because I’m optimistic.

Preet Bharara:

So the glass half full for you.

David Ignatius:

I’ve seen so many terrible things in my time as a foreign correspondent around the world. The resilience of people and countries. I remember going to Vietnam, where I never was during the war, but I sure read a lot about it. I read a book called The Village of Ben Suc, by a New Yorker writer named Jonathan Schell. It was about how this village near the Cambodian border in eastern Vietnam had been obliterated and defoliated, pounded by repeated B-52 sorties. I had always wanted to go there to see what was left of this village. When I went to Vietnam… When I was foreign editor at the Washington Post in 1991 probably, I asked to go to this village, got somebody take me from Saigon. You know what? You could barely see that there’d been a war there. The B-52 craters were all obliterated. The jungle had grown back everywhere. You’d look for people and say, “Does anybody here remember when the…” It was hard to find people who remembered. So I just, it was something-

Preet Bharara:

Look at Japan and the United States, too.

David Ignatius:

Yes. I mean the jungle does grow back.

Preet Bharara:

It’s very fascinating to talk about the frontier of space, and where skirmishes or battles will take place between the US and China. Something closer on the horizon is potential conflict with Taiwan. I’ve asked other prominent and wise guests like you, this question on the show. What’s your view about how China, Taiwan and the US will play out?

David Ignatius:

The honest answer is that I don’t know. You have to guard against creating a war by the ceaseless expectation of it. I worry sometimes that we’re talking ourselves into a war with China, and the Chinese are doing the same. It shouldn’t be necessary. The point that our most senior officials keep making of the Chinese is, the status quo has been really good for both of us on Taiwan. It’s meant to be unresolved and ambiguous. That’s what we agreed basically to do. We accept that there’s one China. You accept that you have no immediate intention to impose a reunification by force, and we live with that. China has prospered in an almost unimaginable way. Taiwan has prospered. Why do you want to mess with that? That’s what our officials keep saying to the Chinese.

Xi Jinping has said publicly that he would like to resolve this issue of the eventual unification of Taiwan with China in his generation, I think meaning in his presidency. That’s scary to people. Xi has instructed the PLA, the Chinese military to be ready to take Taiwan by force by 2027, four years away. That’s scary to people. I was just listening recently to the commander of INDOPACOM, our forces that would manage a conflict with Taiwan. He talks about getting ready to fight that war. There’s no question in his mind that the United States would be involved in that war, even though our policy remains one of strategic ambiguities, as they put it.

I still think that’s the right policy. I think strategic clarity, saying, “Yes, we would go to war to protect Taiwan,” is a mistake. It would make war more likely, not less. But that’s my own view. The consequences for China in terms of their economy, and we have to remember this is now a Chinese economy that’s on a descending growth curve from what it had been. The consequences that were providing better lives for Chinese people, their bargain with the Communist party is, our lives will keep getting better. It’d be catastrophic, and I think they understand that.

So I don’t think war is inevitable, but I’ve visited Taiwan. You can’t visit Taiwan and not be moved by just the passion that Taiwanese people have for democracy. It’s extraordinary. They love it the way Americans love it. They want to be free. I think Chinese people on the mainland feel the same way, but are intimidated from it. The potential conflict is there. A lot of smart people in the Biden administration in particular are trying to think of how to contain that conflict, deter the Chinese, but open pathways to talk to them so that we’ll get through this.

Preet Bharara:

Also fair to say that Xi is more wily and wise than Putin?

David Ignatius:

Xi would not make the mistakes that Putin has made. I’m struck by his ability to reorient policy quickly, when it’s failing. He’s also intolerant of corruption. The deal that Putin made with his oligarchs was, steal as much money as you want, just stay out of politics. Xi decided that corruption was destroying the Communist party, and he was right. Regional and local party chiefs were selling favors to these wildly successful Chinese businesses. PLA generals were selling commands under their authority. The Chinese intelligence service was open for business.

Xi saw that when he came to power in 2012. Unlike Putin, who just let corruption and the oligarchs continue, Xi instituted something called the Discipline Inspection Commission. He began a purge. He has now purged a whole generation of leadership in the party, the army and the intelligence service. They’re all now his people. That’s what you’re seeing. I mean that’s why his authoritarian rule is so much more powerful than Putin’s.

Preet Bharara:

Related, I’m going to go back to your immutable optimism. You’ve said that there are people who are, that some are developing something of a gloomy mood about the war in Ukraine, and you’re saying that’s not right. Why is that?

David Ignatius:

I think there’s several factors. I’m conceding at the outset that, as of the point that we’re talking at the end of July, Ukraine’s progress and it’s counter-offensive, it’s offensive to drive the Russians back has been limited. Even so, you have a degree of disorientation among Russian forces that I think is extraordinary. First in terms of their command and control, we know there was what Putin himself called an armed mutiny by oligarch warlord, Yevgeni Prigozhin, who had been commanding the Wagner militia.

Preet Bharara:

Who as of this recording Monday, July 31, lives.

David Ignatius:

He lives. He operates. He propagandizes. Putin appeared to have declared him an enemy, and Putin is a man who wants to get even with his enemies. And yet he has decided he has to let Prigozhin for now continue to run, to operate more or less freely, from what we can tell. Putin fears that Prigozhin had recruited allies within the Russian military, but also within the security services. As Prigozhin marched toward Moscow on that day of revolt, I think it was June 24, he got so close to Moscow because people allowed him to pass forward. He had help, and Putin knew that. He didn’t know how broad or deep that support for Prigozhin was. So I think he was afraid of Prigozhin. Afraid that cracking out further would rupture the whole system. That’s one thing. That-

Preet Bharara:

You used the past tense. He was, or still is?

David Ignatius:

I think he still is. But this is an area where I have to be honest, my own reporting is so thin. I hear what Bill Burns, the head of our CIA, has said, that there are fractures within Putin’s ruling apparatus. The head of British intelligence, Richard Moore, said much the same thing two weeks ago. They’re describing a Russian system from the Kremlin on down that has fissures now. How deep, how consequential, I haven’t heard anybody I trust answer that question. But you do see on Russian social media evidence of disorientation at the front, anger among the troops, among lower level commanders.

The Ukrainians may not have swept to the Sea of Azov or the Black Sea in this counter-offensive, but they have been day-by-day devastating Russia’s ability to move logistics, to have supplies of artillery ammunition, to relieve forces that are exhausted. They’ve been doing a pretty amazing job of surgically striking particular nodes. The reason they’re able to do that is because of the incredible technology that we’ve given them, and helped them use, that allows them to target things, to use AI. If something’s here today, where will it be eight hours from now, and then go after it. The things that we have done technologically I think have been overlooked, but this is an algorithm more than people realize.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with more of my conversation with David Ignatius.

I have a sort of fundamental question about your craft. You have chosen to cover, in your journalism and in your opinion writing, something that’s very difficult to cover, right? Spying, national security, intelligence gathering. Something you said earlier in the interview kind of has sat with me. With respect to something, and I can’t remember what it was, it might have been nuclear capability, you said that the people you talk to are very, very, very tight-lipped and don’t reveal much. But there are other things that are also supposed to be under the blanket of confidentiality and classification, that by implication you suggested they do talk about. Is it the case that people in government, in your experience, do their own sort of prioritizing of what’s sensitive and what’s not sensitive, that’s separate from the technical classification of information?

David Ignatius:

Well, yes. I think people do that. I think there’s an understanding that, as a top Pentagon official said, so the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff two years ago, it’s impossible to deter an adversary when everything’s secret. Or as he put, when everything’s black. Meaning it’s super classified, it’s in special access programs that just a tiny handful of people know about. Your adversary doesn’t know, so how is the adversary deterred if the adversary doesn’t know you have the capability to defeat them in something they might try to do? You can only-

Preet Bharara:

That was a central issue, by the way. I keep thinking about Oppenheimer, which I know you haven’t seen. I saw it over the weekend. It’s related to the debate of whether or not it was important for the world to see what the capability of an atomic bomb was. Is it a little bit like that?

David Ignatius:

It is like that. I’m familiar. I haven’t seen the movie, but I know the wonderful book by my friend and colleague, Evan Thomas, called Road to Surrender. Which is a detailed look at that precise issue and what targets would be necessary. How big did they have to be to make the Japanese see that we could destroy them? They had to end the war, that they had to surrender. It was extraordinary how lower level people kept putting targets on the list, the most senior people rejected.

I don’t know if this is in Oppenheimer, but Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, said, “We are not going to use our nuclear weapon on Kyoto, the Imperial City, this treasure of Japanese culture. It’s wrong. Japan won’t recover. We won’t be able to pick up the pieces of that.” It kept getting back on the target list. Leslie Groves, who was running the program, thought, “Well, we need to really send a message. Secretary Stimson doesn’t get it.” So he continued to target it. I think that dilemma of how you send messages without giving away secrets, yeah, I mean that’s as old as warfare.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. I have a trivia question for you. What public office did Henry Stimson hold that was more important than Secretary of War?

David Ignatius:

Oh, goodness. Well, I’m going to flunk that one.

Preet Bharara:

You’ll realize how parochial I am in a moment.

David Ignatius:

He was US Attorney of New York.

Preet Bharara:

He was US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. That is a fact. That is a fact, sir. He-

David Ignatius:

That was-

Preet Bharara:

He’s a hero within the Justice Department in the Southern District. The highest award you can get as an Assistant US Attorney, either in the Eastern District or the Southern District of New York. There are two awarded every year to Assistant US Attorneys in one office and to the other. It’s called the Stimson Medal, named after Henry Stimson. Then he did slightly weightier things, like advising Truman on whether or not the bomb should be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But earlier in his career, he had that job.

David Ignatius:

So do I get to ask you a question?

Preet Bharara:

Sure.

David Ignatius:

Do you miss being US Attorney?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, of course. Who doesn’t miss subpoena power?

David Ignatius:

No, but I don’t mean just to be that. I’m assuming that work is pleasurable.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I miss a lot of things about it. Including most importantly the people that I got to work with in law enforcement and in the office, and the staff, who are among the smartest and most dedicated public servants I’ve ever met. But one aspect of it is interesting, that’s related to what we’ve been discussing. When I was on the inside, I had a top secret clearance. We had a SCIF, and I knew a lot of things that were going on. Now, I don’t know anything. So there’s a little bit of a feeling of FOMO.

David Ignatius:

You can be a novelist and make them up, just like I do.

Preet Bharara:

Well, you’re leading me to my next question. What do you and Charles Dickens have in common?

David Ignatius:

Some months ago, my new editor, David Shipley, who replaced the wonderful boss I had for many years, Fred Hiatt, came to me and said, “You’re a columnist and you’re also a spy novelist. Why don’t we combine the two? Why don’t we do what was common in the time of Charles Dickens, which is serialize a piece of fiction, in our news newspaper?” In Dickens’ case, it was magazines. Dickens wrote many of his novels chunk-by-chunk. Readers would read them in one of the magazines of the day, and just would be desperate to find out what happened to the characters, and have to wait until the next installment.

Preet Bharara:

Were you also paid by the word?

David Ignatius:

I was not paid by the word.

Preet Bharara:

I think Dickens was, was he not?

David Ignatius:

He as paid by the word.

Preet Bharara:

And he made a lot of them, a lot of words.

David Ignatius:

That’s one reason Dickens was prolific. Those are very long novels. It’s one reason that they have cliffhangers throughout the books. It’s because the serialized part would end, and people would be, “What happens? What happens next?” Then they would buy the next edition. I’m told that when these novels were just being distributed in the magazine form in the US, the big clipper ships would come across the Atlantic with the next installment. Fast packet ships would sail out to meet them from New York Harbor, to be able to tell the world whether little Nell, a character in one of Dickens’ novels famously, “Little Nell, is she dead or alive?” People hung on every word.

We tried obviously a frail imitation of that. Published over a week right before 4th of July weekend, a serialized spy novel, four parts, one every other day, written by me. Taking something that had happened in real life between the US and Chinese spy services, and then inventing and embroidering a tale around that real fact. I think from the reaction, it was an experiment that worked enough that we’re going to try it again at Christmastime.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, good. But you wrote the whole thing before each installment was published?

David Ignatius:

I did. I did. I was, Dickens used to write-

Preet Bharara:

Dickens was doing it from episode-to-episode, right?

David Ignatius:

Yes, he was. He was winging it. I would never dare to do that.

Preet Bharara:

It’s not clear that he knew where everything was going. I mean, do you outline in advance?

David Ignatius:

I outlined this in great detail. I wanted to know just where this double flip would land. I wanted to think carefully about each episode, how to have a cliffhanger. I’m just not as daring as Dickens, to wing it and kind of figure it out along the way.

Preet Bharara:

Is it more important to you, as some novelists have said, to know where you begin, or to know where you’re going to end?

David Ignatius:

You try to know both. Knowing the voice that’s going to tell the story is another way of saying knowing where you begin. Sometimes, rarely for me, that voice is in the first person, but the third person narrator varies from novel-to-novel, writer-to-writer. You have to understand who’s telling the story, and then how it’s going to be told. What’s the time space across which the arc of the story is going to happen? I’ve begun to experiment a little bit with different threads of time. One is three years ago, one is yesterday, that kind of come together in the telling of the story. Then the story kind of finally forms a tight core.

You understand what’s motivating the characters, and then moves forward in a linear way. I have always been struck, I’ve written now 13 novels, 12 of them published, by the way in which the characters themselves begin to take over. When you start a book, you don’t really understand the character very well. But as the character emerges, the character… This sounds corny, but begins to tell you what they’re going to do next, just in terms of how they’ve evolved. So the book just can’t be the way you initially imagined it, because you didn’t fully understand who the players were.

Preet Bharara:

Do you follow the principle of, I think Stephen King says in one of his great books on writing, that he thinks of a scenario or a situation, and then he just writes down what the characters do. Is it like that?

David Ignatius:

It’s a little bit like that. One thing that I’ve said often about writing is that, in my experience, it’s pre-conscious. That you lay down the frame, but then when you’re in this web of storytelling, the point is really to get your conscious self out of the way. So that this very mysterious other consciousness, that writes your dreams, where the ideas fall into your head when you’re taking a shower, that consciousness takes over. I think writers often try to obliterate their conscious selves to make room for this more creative side through alcohol, drugs, crazy behavior. I think they’re just trying to get it through the conscious.

Preet Bharara:

They’re trying to get out of their own head. Which combination of alcohol and drugs do you use?

David Ignatius:

Oh, that’s classified. No. It would be-

Preet Bharara:

But is it the most highly sensitive type of classified information, David? Or the kind that you would like to share?

David Ignatius:

Happily, I have never been somebody who suffered from writer’s block. I love writing on deadline. I have since I began in journalism.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a little bit insane to me. I was going to ask you the question, which maybe I know the answer to. Which is more terrifying to you, or maybe neither? The tyranny of the blank page when you’re writing a novel, and waking up in the morning and trying to write the next chapter, or the tyranny of the blank page when you have a column due?

David Ignatius:

Neither is terrifying, because I’ve been through it a lot of times. It takes a while for your consciousness to disappear enough to begin writing. I mean, writing a column is the same way. Again, I love deadlines, because the pressure’s just so intense that it just becomes like playing a sport. You’re just in it. It’s just happening. I know colleagues I respect a lot who have a kind of writer’s block problem. I’ve never had that. I don’t know how I’d deal with it. It’s one reason I always like to have a contract and delivery date for each novel, before I start it.

Preet Bharara:

You have neither writer’s block, nor also something I think is slightly different, subject matter block? Do you ever wonder what you’re going to write about? I once had George Will, another prolific writer and columnist, who said he never has a problem. He always has five ideas in his head about what the next column is going to be about. Do you also have a multiplicity of ideas at all times?

David Ignatius:

I do, but a lot of them are bad. Sometimes-

Preet Bharara:

Who vets them for you? Do you vet them yourself, or do you have someone?

David Ignatius:

I’ll sometimes try a column, and it’s just crap. It’s obviously no good.

Preet Bharara:

Are you a good self-editor?

David Ignatius:

Pretty good, but there are columns of mine that have gotten into print that somebody should have stopped. I mean, one problem with having done this for a while, and people respecting you is-

Preet Bharara:

They defer.

David Ignatius:

… they think, “Well, geez. I may not get this, but there must be a reason, or David wouldn’t have written it.” There’s some that, when I look back, I should have just spiked it. I said earlier that creative work was pre-conscious, but you need to be highly conscious and critical when you look at your work, because a lot of it just isn’t very good. It isn’t interesting. It doesn’t tell people something they don’t know. I mean, a column sometimes tells you what other people think about something, that tell you what the columnist thinks. That’s a terrible mistake.

Preet Bharara:

It sounds like a version of something that Hemingway, I think said, that I’ve quoted on the show before, which has always fascinated me. I think he said, “Write drunk, edit sober.”

David Ignatius:

Yeah, exactly right. Exactly the same point.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t want to cause any spoiler issues for folks, but I did read with some interest that you were very critical of the season finale, or I guess the series finale of Succession. I thought it was quite good. What gives, David?

David Ignatius:

I had come a long way with those characters. I thought that it just began to come apart. The problem with that series was that the characters were so unlikable, that making a powerful point is… I mean, I like a piece of drama that I’ve invested many hours in, whether it’s reading or watching, to take me to a place at the end that’s powerful. I had the same feeling about The Bear, the second season of The Bear, that I did-

Preet Bharara:

I just watched that.

David Ignatius:

… about Succession. I just didn’t like where it ended. These were both similar, in that the good guys didn’t win, and who are the good guys anyway?

Preet Bharara:

Who are the good guys? Right.

David Ignatius:

It was that kind of-

Preet Bharara:

I mean wasn’t a disappointing ending in some ways, based on what you’ve just said, inevitable?

David Ignatius:

People have said that to me, and maybe that’s the truest outcome. You wouldn’t want any of the characters in Succession to triumphantly succeed, because they’re all loathsome. That’s really the point. I get that. I’ll just say, I mean I’ve written novels about characters that I hated, but I wanted to construct a story where you end up with a clarity, a takeaway that I didn’t feel at the end of Succession. I think my view is a minority here, but that’s what I felt.

Preet Bharara:

How do you feel generally about the realism with which intelligence officials, and the CIA in particular, are depicted in films and TV? I’m thinking in particular of a show that I watched the first few seasons of with great enthusiasm, Homeland? How do you think about those programs?

David Ignatius:

I distinguish between the James Bond, Mission Impossible school, which it’s entertaining, but it’s junk. I mean, it has nothing to do with what intelligence officers actually do. What they spend most of their time doing is planning, sitting around, waiting for the right opportunity, meticulous analysis of things. It’s just not very dramatic. It’s like watching somebody type. So the Jason Bournes and James Bonds are fun to watch. I thought Homeland was really fun to watch. I thought Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin just inhabited their characters. I thought it was much closer to real life. I was one of many, many people who got to sat in consulting sessions with the two of them and talk about stuff. I got a cool Homeland jacket, that I get to wear. It was my thank you. Maybe that prejudices my view, but I thought it was really good. The best, the best, period, visual TV or cinema take on intelligence I’ve ever seen is the French TV series The Bureau, Le Bureau. I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but if you haven’t, your listeners have-

Preet Bharara:

I have not.

David Ignatius:

Invest the time. If you’re interested in the world of intelligence, there’s nothing as good as this, in my view. Check it out.

Preet Bharara:

Did you see Fauda?

David Ignatius:

I started Fauda. I spent so much time covering the Israelis and the Palestinians, I just couldn’t-

Preet Bharara:

It felt like work?

David Ignatius:

It felt like I just didn’t want to do it, so I stopped it. But people say it’s great. I’m not putting it down.

Preet Bharara:

Putting aside streaming shows and television shows, single best spy movie?

David Ignatius:

I’m a Graham Greene nut. The one that I find consistently entertaining and spooky is The Third Man, set in Vienna. The sound of that little zither playing when the Joseph Cotton character is watching Orson Welles walk, or I guess the woman walk away. That for me just hits every node in a spy drama. It’s mysterious. You don’t really understand what’s going on until the very end. It has a wistful, shades of gray feeling about the kind of moral universe we live in. That would be my number one.

Preet Bharara:

There you have it. Final word, The Third Man. You know the funny thing, I don’t know if he was kidding or not, Leon Panetta once came and visited the Southern District. I think he was asked the question about recruitment at the CIA. He said, “Every time a new Bond movie comes out, recruiting goes up.” I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s a good funny fact.

David Ignatius:

It is a funny fact.

Preet Bharara:

On that note, David Ignatius, thank you for your work. Thank you for your novels, and your new serialized novella. Wish you luck, and we’ll hope to see you soon.

David Ignatius:

Thanks, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, David Ignatius.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics and justice. Tweet them to me, @PreetBharara, with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24Preet. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The CAFE team is Noa Azulai, David Kurlander, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, Namita Shah and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.