Former CIA Boss Talks to Mo News About China War Threat, Pelosi Visit

**This Wednesday edition of Mo News would typically only be available to premium subscribers. But, I wanted to make this issue--featuring an interview with the former CIA boss---available to ALL subscribers. If you'd like to see upcoming editions with more of his insight on other topics and support our work, sign up for our premium content HERE. **

Hi everyone,

We're starting to roll out my 3-part interview with former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell today.

We begin with his perspective on the likelihood for war between China and Taiwan (especially between 2025-2030), what the U.S. role would be in that military conflict, how the CIA discerns what is happening in Beijing, and why the Pelosi visit was likely a mistake. Audio of the full conversation is available on the Mo News Podcast.

• We have much more coming to premium subscribers in the coming weeks:Next Week: Morell will take us inside the White House Situation Room, detailing how the President decides to assassinate terror leaders. [Morell was the CIA’s number two when the U.S. killed Bin Laden]. We also discussed the state of the terror threat to the homeland from ISIS and al Qaeda.Later This Month: We talk all things Putin. He takes us inside the mind of the former KGB agent, and discussed what the prospects are for defeating him and Russia in Ukraine as the war approaches the 6 month mark.

☕️ But first, a few headlines this AM before our interview...

• FBI Trump Raid Latest: For roughly 10 hours, the FBI conducted a search of former President Trump's Mar-a-Lago home and walked out with at least 12 boxes of documents. The unprecedented move by DOJ is reportedly connected to an investigation into classified documents Trump allegedly took with him from the White House to his private residence when he left office in January 2021.How did we get here? Back in February, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) said Trump took 15 boxes of presidential records with him to Florida, after leaving the Oval Office. Those boxes allegedly contained classified information that should have been turned over to the NARA when he left the White House. Since then, the Justice Department has been investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents and it appears they had an indication he was still keeping some in Mar A Lago.By law, the Presidential Records Act of 1978 requires all documents and records pertaining to an administration’s official business be turned over to the archives for preservation. It was enacted in the aftermath of Nixon’s infamous cover-up attempt of his tapes. President Trump signed a law in 2018 that increased the penalty for mishandling classified documents from misdemeanor to felony.Trump argues Monday's search was a politically-driven raid – but the White House vowed it had no idea it was taking place.The FBI cannot issue a search warrant without approval from a federal judge. That means the Justice Department — which is engaged in multiple investigations into Trump and his allies — has probable cause that a crime was committed and that evidence exists at Mar-a-Lago. It doesn't mean that charges are imminent, but going for a search warrant does mean they were concerned about documents being destroyed or not given up.Trump was in New York City at Trump Tower when the raid took place. Overnight, he released a seven-minute long campaign-style video on his social media platform, Truth Social, where he criticizes the current administration for spurring multiple crises.

• A good day for gas prices: Prices at the pump have finally fallen below $4.00 per gallon.The the national average price of a gallon of regular gas reached $3.99 yesterday. It’s the first time since early March – nearly six months ago – that prices have fallen this low. The combination of lower demand and the falling cost of oil is driving the decline.At its peak in mid-June, drivers were spending more than $5 per gallon of gas… and in some parts of California, drivers were shelling out $7+. GasBuddy estimates that collectively, American drivers are now paying $400 million less each day than they were a month ago.Staying with the economy: This morning at 8:30 am ET we’ll get new inflation numbers. The last few months have shown a staggering increase in consumer prices, and gas has been a large contributor to that. We all hope today’s report will show prices beginning to cool.

• The end of an era: Serena Williams, widely hailed as one of the greatest athletes of all time, is stepping away from center court.In a Vogue article, Serena indicates she will compete for the last time at this month’s U.S. Open in New York City. She won her first U.S. Open in 1999.

Serena Williams and daughter, Olympia. Photo: Luis Alberto Rodriguez | Vogue

• “I have never liked the word retirement.” Serena said. “I’m evolving away from tennis, toward other things that are important to me,” like growing her family – which she says is the main reason she’s chosen to tie a bow on her tennis career. "These days, if I have to choose between building my tennis resume and building my family, I choose the latter."

• Important Words: Serena, who will turn 41 next month, highlights the sacrifices working moms must make in their careers – even pointing to the fact that the desire to expand a family is not a career-ending decision for a man. "Maybe I'd be more of a Tom Brady if I had that opportunity.”The tennis legend has been a fierce advocate for gender equality, both on and off the court. She stands as a strong symbol for black women and female athletes. “I went through some hard times as a professional tennis player so that the next generation could have it easier.”73 career singles titles, 23 career doubles titles, and more than $94 million in career winnings later, Serena has etched herself in history as one of the best tennis players, athletes, and champions the world has ever seen. But, she hopes to be remembered for her victories off the court, just as much as her greatest wins on the court. “I hope that people come to think of me as symbolizing something bigger than tennis... I’d like it to be: Serena is this and she’s that and she was a great tennis player and she won those slams.”

Serena Williams competing at her first U.S. Open in 1999 | Getty

• China flexes its military muscles: China continues to engage in large-scale military drills to prepare for an invasion of Taiwan, using US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip as justification for provocation.Last week, Beijing began a series of exercises surrounding Taiwan, ahead of the Speaker’s visit. Taiwan has also launched their own drills to defend the island.In just the last week, China’s army has crossed the median line (aka unofficial border) more than 100 times with its warplanes and warships. China respected the line… until recently.Pelosi defended her trip as “absolutely” worth it. “We cannot allow the Chinese government to isolate Taiwan… They’re not going to say who can go to Taiwan.”But, not everyone agrees with that assessment. I got an expert's insight into her decision when I spoke to former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell. So, let's get to it.

Photo David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images

In this premium edition of Mo News, I speak to former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell.

• He spent more than three decades at the agency, where he served as Acting Director twice, first in 2011 and then from 2012 to 2013. He was also the Deputy Director for three years.

• He worked with multiple presidents, maintaining the CIA's relationships with foreign leaders, among many other duties. Notably, Michael was the only person who was both with President Bush on 9/11, and with President Obama on May 2, 2011, when Bin Laden was brought to justice.

• He is currently the host of the Intelligence Matters podcast and a senior national security contributor for CBS News.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The full audio interview is also available on the Mo News Podcast

MOSH: I want to talk about China, and what we saw out of Nancy Pelosi’s visit. The lessons the Chinese are learning from what's happening in Ukraine. The continuing increase in show of force with the various exercises in preparing for an eventual invasion of the island. Layout from your perspective, what you see playing out right now, in regards to China, especially in the fallout of the Pelosi visit.

MICHAEL MORELL: Taiwan is a significant issue in China. The Chinese public believes, the Chinese leadership believes, the Chinese elite believes...they all believe that Taiwan is part of China. And there would be extraordinarily strong support for going to war, if Taiwan declared independence. So this is a fundamental issue inside China. It's a legitimacy issue for the Chinese Communist Party. If they failed to respond in a way that met the demands of the Chinese public, it would be deeply concerning to them, and rightfully so. So they had to respond to the Pelosi visit. A very senior American official, certainly, you know, a Speaker had gone before, but that was a long time ago, different circumstances.

MOSH: That was Newt Gingrich in the '90s.

MORELL: The Chinese had to respond, and they responded in a fairly significant way.

There were some unprecedented things that they did. They overflew Taiwan with ballistic missiles. First time that's ever been done. They fired live missiles into Japanese waters. First time that was ever done. And by the way, the Japanese quickly came out and said they must have fired them at other targets and they missed their target, and the Chinese quickly corrected them and said, 'No, we intended it.' They actually did live exercises on the eastern side of Taiwan. Obviously, you know, China faces the western coast of Taiwan, but in a in a military situation, in an invasion scenario, China will be coming at them from every direction.

So they had to do this politically. It had two benefits to them. One is it helps (Chinese Premier) Xi Jinping look strong as he goes into his party Congress this fall where he's trying to get an unprecedented third term. Two is that it allows them to practice an invasion. They were able to blame us for conducting military exercises that will sharpen their ability to take Taiwan.

And then, perhaps most importantly, our allies did not react as positively as we would hope. South Korea was the most significant example. The South Korean president would not meet with Nancy Pelosi in the aftermath of her visit to Taiwan. He was scheduled to, and said, 'Oh, I'm sorry, I'm going to be on vacation, I'm not going to be able to meet with you.' He was sending a message to the United States. So our allies in Asia do not want to be put in a situation where they are caught between China and the United States. And that's the message that South Korea was sending.

MOSH: It sounds like you're saying the Pelosi visit was a mistake.

MORELL: Absolutely, it was. And not because there weren't upsides. There was an upside to sending a message to Taiwan that we support you and we support your democracy, and that visit gave it that right. But there were also significant downsides. The media tells us the Pentagon argued that the downsides were much greater than the upsides.

MOSH: One thing that struck me too, is that in addition to those exercises, the Chinese also dropped a military cooperation we have with them. Explain what that is and how important that is.

MORELL: To be talking, to be able to pick up the phone and say, 'Hey, we're doing this exercise next week. It's not aimed at you.' Dialogue is extraordinarily important to managing tensions. And anytime you lose dialogue, and we've lost a lot of dialogue with China over the past 10 years, it has a tendency to make tensions worse, to make it more difficult to manage tensions. It’s worrisome from that perspective.

MOSH: Is it only a matter of time? It’s been 70-ish years since China had territorial control of Taiwan. Are we just living in a world where we're postponing the inevitable? Or is there actually a scenario where the U.S. could successfully hold off, or prevent, an eventual Chinese invasion of Taiwan?

MORELL: There's two things that the Chinese have to look at when they think about invading Taiwan. By the way, this is an extraordinarily risky proposition for them. If they attempt an invasion and they are defeated, that may be the end of the Communist Party.

MOSH: But is there that scenario? Taiwan is the size of Vermont, it's an island, it has 20 million people.

MORELL: Invading Taiwan is a lot more difficult than invading Ukraine. I mean, there's 100 miles of very rough water. There are very few beaches that you can land on. Taiwan is very mountainous. It is the perfect place to conduct insurgent operations. It's not the place for tanks to move around. This is a big challenge, and the Chinese military would tell you today that they're not ready yet. They are not fully ready yet to even just take on Taiwan, even though the Chinese have a conventional military advantage today over Taiwan. The Chinese military will tell you we're not ready, we're probably not going to be ready for a few more years.

The other thing that matters is the military balance between China and the United States, in case the United States decides to join this war that China starts when it tries to invade Taiwan. The Chinese have a huge advantage today. They spent the last 20 years, when we've been fighting a counterinsurgency and counterterrorism war (in Afghanistan and Iraq), the Chinese have been figuring out, 'how do we keep the United States away from Taiwan in a war scenario.'

So that's why they've developed these missiles capable of taking out ships in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They've worked very hard to develop what are called area denial, anti-access weapons - these are weapons to keep the United States away. So today, they've got the advantage in that, but we're working very hard to develop the capabilities that would counter their capabilities, and those could well be in place by the early 2030s.

They've got a window here, say, between 2025 and 2030, where they feel confident enough that they can take Taiwan and keep us away. But by 2030, we're going to have caught up and they won't be able to keep us away. So they've got like a five year window. That's the time period that I really worry about. If China develops the right military capabilities, then I think we're in a very dangerous situation.

MOSH: The assumption a lot of us have always had is that as the U.S. and China developed more ties - the world's largest economies - that growth and that relationship, prevents military conflict and dissuades the Chinese from doing this kind of thing.

MORELL: Both the United States and China are undertaking what people call de-coupling. They're working to reduce their dependence on each other, just because of the potential for war between the two countries. That's something that will increasingly happen, and probably will get reinforced by the war in Ukraine, right? This need to decouple, and this need not to be so dependent on the other side.

MOSH: To what extent would we come into the defense of Taiwan? Would it be similar to Ukraine? Would we go more? We've had this policy, I think it's called strategic ambiguity, when it comes to Taiwan for years. Explain what that is.

MORELL: Strategic ambiguity has been the policy for every U.S. administration since we normalized relations with China in 1979. Strategic ambiguity says we're not going to say with certainty whether we're going to come to the defense of Taiwan or not, it's going to depend on the circumstances. That was the policy because, number one, if we said we wouldn't come to Taiwan's aid, then that could incentivize China to invade. But if we say we will absolutely come to Taiwan's aid, then that could incentivize Taiwan to declare independence, which we don't want them to do. So that's why it's been the policy.

There are people arguing today that we should have strategic clarity, that we should say we will come to the defense of Taiwan, under any circumstance. My concern is that if we were to change that policy, from strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity, or if we were to change our one China policy, and again, recognize Taiwan, that the Chinese would probably need to act militarily. And changing one of those two policies could well result in the invasion of Taiwan.

MOSH: You talked about how the Chinese are looking into the next decade and 2030s. Explain just this long range of history the Chinese have.

MORELL: One of the main drivers here in Chinese foreign policy is to reclaim what they saw as the century of humiliation (1839-1949). They used to be the largest economy in the world. They used to dominate East Asia. And over a period of time (starting in the mid-1800s), they lost all of that. They lost territory. Taiwan was a Japanese colony from the late 1800s to 1945.

So getting back what you lost in this century of humiliation is a big part of Chinese foreign policy. It's actually Xi's intention for China to regain everything by 2050. Vietnam, and some border districts with India. But essentially, Taiwan is really the only thing left on that list. That's why it's so important.

MOSH: How difficult is it to discern what happens in Beijing within the leadership there? What are the unique challenges to getting a sense of what is happening, and what will happen next, in China?

MORELL: Xi has a very small group of advisors. It's a very small inner circle, not that different than Putin. So to really understand what Xi is thinking, and really understand decision making, and really understand decisions that have been made or haven't been made yet, you really need to get inside that inner circle - and that's really hard. As opposed to, you know, a consensus oriented system that China used to have, where decision making was much broader and therefore, much easier to see into.

MOSH: Do you see the CIA recalibrating and taking the issues in East Asia and China so seriously, because we have more bandwidth these days?

MORELL: There's not new resources to focus on China. You have to take resources from somewhere else and focus them on China. They’re being taken from counterterrorism. You can't take too much, because terrorist groups have this habit of bouncing back. They're easy to defeat, but they're also easy to rebuild, if you take your focus off of them.

Collecting intelligence is not an easy thing. It's hard. It takes time. It's a years long process. And we're probably not where we need to be with regard to intelligence collection on China, I would bet.

MOSH: What is the biggest challenge for the agency in the years ahead? What is the biggest threat that should be focused on?

MORELL: I think challenge number one is that the CIA is very insular place. There tends to be a view, outside of the CIA in the U.S. government, that the CIA wants to control everything. This is not true. The CIA just wants to be left alone to do its thing. It's a very insular place, whether you're an operations officer or whether you're an analyst.

I think the big challenge for the CIA going forward is to be much less insular, and much more open to the world outside of it - whether that is bringing in analytic ideas from other places, whether there are other places in the government or outside the government and business and think tanks, or whether it's being open to new technology coming into the agency. The agency really needs to take advantage of it's going to be A) successful in conducting its own operations and, B) make it more difficult for the guys to conduct operations against the United States. So I'd say we’ve got to get over our desire for insularity and open up.

MOSH: For those who want to know more about the CIA, both in terms of nonfiction books, movies, and Hollywood, what would you say are the most accurate?

MORELL: Movies tend to fall into overstating the agency's capabilities, or understating them, or painting the agency as a rogue organization. So there's not a lot of great movies out there. One of the best books ever written was Agents of Influence. It really portrays what the operational world looks like. The Billion Dollar Spy is a terrific book. It is the true story of one of the CIA's most successful penetrations of the Soviet Union, ever. There’s some good books out there, but you really have to hunt for them.

[Top Banner Photo Credit: Taiwan Fighter jets release flares during exercises; Photo by Annabelle Chih/Getty Images]

⭐️ Premium Content: Enjoying Mo News? Want access to more from the CIA Director's interview, extra editions every week, additional content in an exclusive Facebook group and an opportunity to ask me questions directly? Sign Up for our premium newsletter subscription. It will help us grow the newsletter and continue to expand to multiple platforms. Special Deal: 15% off to become an annual member.

🎙Subscribe to our Mo News podcast Apple | Spotify | More Platforms

📰 Miss a day? Check out past newsletters here

📧 Any questions or feedback about this newsletter? Email Us

📱 Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and TikTok