(AP) A longtime adviser to the U.S. Director of National Intelligence has resigned after the government learned he has worked since 2010 as a paid consultant for Huawei Technologies Ltd., the Chinese technology company the U.S. has condemned as an espionage threat, The Associated Press has learned.
Theodore H. Moran, a respected expert on China’s international investment and professor at Georgetown University, had served since 2007 as adviser to the intelligence director’s advisory panel on foreign investment in the United States.
Moran also was an adviser to the National Intelligence Council, a group of 18 senior analysts and policy experts who provide U.S. spy agencies with judgments on important international issues.
Moran, who had a security clearance granting him access to sensitive materials, was forced to withdraw from those roles after Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., complained in September to the intelligence director, James Clapper, that Moran’s work on an international advisory council for Huawei “compromises his ability to advise your office.”
“It is inconceivable how someone serving on Huawei’s board would also be allowed to advise the intelligence community on foreign investments in the U.S.,” Wolf wrote. . . .
. . . . In a policy paper distributed by Huawei, Moran wrote in May that, “targeting one or two companies on the basis of their national origins does nothing for U.S. security in a world of global supply chains.” Moran criticized what he described as “a policy of discrimination and distortion that discourages valuable inward investment from overseas, while providing a precedent for highly damaging copycat practices in other countries.”
The House Intelligence Committee last year said Huawei and another firm, ZTE, posed a threat that could enable Chinese intelligence services to tamper with American communications networks. The committee said it could not prove wrongdoing but recommended that the companies be barred from doing business in the country.
“To the extent these companies are influenced by the state or provide Chinese intelligence services access to telecommunication networks, the opportunity exists for further economic and foreign espionage by a foreign nation-state already known to be a major perpetrator of cyber espionage,” the committee wrote in its report. . . . (read more)
