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Frank Gaffney
Terms Sam welcome to Securing America with me, Frank Gaffney. The program that's a kind of owner's manual for protecting the country we love against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to the glory of God and His kingdom. We're going to spend a very special hour probing with one of the great leaders on national security in general and specifically with respect to the threat we face to the national security from the greatest enemy we've ever faced, namely the Chinese Communist Party. I want to set the stage for topic A for my conversation with Captain James Fennell, United States Navy, retired, by sharing with you some thoughts about what's reportedly about to happen. Donald Trump is reportedly poised to allow hard left British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to ensure the security and continued use of Diego Garcia, an Indian Ocean base indispensable to America's power projection capabilities in much of the world. That would be the same Keir Starmer who was recently in Beijing seeking a new special relationship with Xi Jinping. Xi seeks to end the US presence in the Indo Pacific and wherever possible, supplant us there. Unfortunately, the deal Starmer's government has negotiated with the Africa of Mauritius, which Mr. Trump rightly described last month as an act of, quote, great stupidity, will predictably lead to the Chinese Communists taking over Diego Garcia just as they did our Bagram Air base in Afghanistan. It's hard to believe that this president wants to share such a strategically benighted legacy with his much reviled predecessor. Well, some of my thoughts. For more of them, please check out my writing at xrankafney. Also, the work we do@the usfuture.org Institute for the American Future, you can help make that work possible and indeed this program by donating@usfuture.org I encourage you to do so. Well, Captain Fennell is in the House. Welcome aboard, Captain. It is always a privilege to have you with us, especially for a flight hour conversation about, well, the main thing, as you've rightly called it for decades, namely the threat we do face, and growing threat indeed, from the Chinese Communist Party. Welcome aboard, sir.
- [04:29]
Captain James Fennell
Frank, thanks. Good to be with you.
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Frank Gaffney
Well, thank you for all that you do in this space, Jim. I want to say especially a word of thanks for your incredibly important book, co authored with Dr. Bradley Thayer, embracing Communist China, America's Greatest Strategic failure. Because the leitmotif of what we're going to be talking about, I'm afraid, is a continuing, well, strategically monumental error in that regard, including at least if these reports are to be credited by President Donald J. Trump. I hope to God they won't be. You were part of a team of 80 of us who wrote him last week, as I recall, encouraging him to just say no to this benighted deal. Tell us where you think things stand and why that should be the right response, sir.
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Captain James Fennell
Well, up until yesterday morning, Frank, I thought that the President's truth social post from last week saying that this was a stupid deal and he didn't agree with it in a public spat with the United Kingdom was going to, you know, put enough pressure on the UK's Prime Minister Starmer to, you know, go back and have to pull this off the table. It's in a bill up for a bill to approve this treaty that they signed with Mauritius last year. And so I thought it was dead. And then yesterday morning, the Telegraph from the UK put out a report, an article saying Trump is expected to approve Starmer's Chagos deal that says yesterday morning and it says that there's been an intense lobbying effort by the Starmer regime and it said elements of the US Intelligence agency to lobby the President to go along with it because Starmer said there, there could be security guarantees provided to America that would ensure that we would not lose our access to this base. But everybody who's been involved with this issue, the people who signed the letter last week, as we discussed, we all know that legally, under international law and the treaties that the US has with the United Kingdom, that is not necessarily a guarantee that can be ironclad. And so the idea that we would put, put that at risk, especially after what the President has, you know, mocked Joe Biden for what he did in 2021 by giving away Bagram president openly for four, four years, you know, condemned what Joe Biden did, the stupidity of that. Taking away our advantage over western China. And now to give this away would essentially lock the United States of America out of the Middle east in terms of strategic basing capacities for our air forces and potentially for our naval forces. And we have the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. But if the Iranians were able to hang on and survive and to lock down the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Gulf, we wouldn't be able to get in and out of there except through, you know, having to come from some longer place away like the UK or someplace like Singapore, which may not be assured anymore either. So it would be monumentally a mistake for the President to do this. So I don't know the validity of what this UK Telegraph or a conservative paper over there. So it may have some credibility. But there's no, there's no statements, there's no poc, there's no rep from the United States that's quoted in this. So this looks to be another British effort to try to get around and manipulate information. But what's interesting is this is in, you know, this is in a right wing, right leaning paper in the uk. So I would expect the Guardian or another paper to, you know, have this kind of report, but not necessarily the Telegraph. So I am concerned about it. It says Secretary of State Rubio has previously criticized the deal and he's asking his lawyers to look at it, but we don't have anything more than that. So I think it's going to get down to some legal Examination of the agreements, the treaty agreements and alliance agreements of the US and UK have. And would those supersede any kind of an agreement that the UK would make with Mauritius? And maybe somebody in, you know, international law can tell the President that that would occur. But what, what is driving the UK to do this? Not only are they giving away the strategic territory, but they're also having to pay billions, 35 billion to Mauritius to give them something that was never, ever Mauritius, ever in the history of the world. There's no, there's no, there's no geographic, there's no indigenous population connection. There's nothing. The only thing is, is when the British Empire was an empire, they said, hey, we have a big administrative base in Mauritius and we have holdings throughout the Indian Ocean. And so when it comes to the, the Chagos Islands, we'll, we'll let any disputes be administered in Mauritius. That's not any kind of historical claim by any stretch of the imagination. So there's something going on here. And what really compounds it is the fact that Starmer is now under intense pressure in the UK. In fact, just in the last 30 minutes, I just saw an expost that said Keir Starmer's come out and publicly apologized to the victims from Jeffrey Epstein for his association via Lord Mandelson, who he appointed as the UK's ambassador to the United States. And this Mandelson's up to his eyeballs with Epstein and you know, who knows what, what will happen to him legally. But by all accounts, it sounds like he was involved in some kind of pretty shady, very bad business that, you know, was abusive and vile to women. Young girls are now women, so there's going to be accountability there. And Starmer is the guy that put him in position. And if you recall what happened to Boris Johnson during COVID the British government and the British press were relentless against Boris Johnson and drove him from number 10 Downing street simply because he had an office party at Downing 10 Downing street with, you know, during COVID And they weren't supposed to do that. So hardly even close to the same kind of criminality, potential criminality that Starmer's involved with. So I think this is really something that the President should not kowtow on or back off on. He should press.
- [11:14]
Frank Gaffney
Amen. Jim. We have to take a short break. When we come back, I want to get into this idea that the intelligence community thinks this is a good idea as well as the rest of the national security establishment. Be right back, folks. Stay tuned.
- [11:40]
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- [13:21]
Frank Gaffney
We're back and we are visiting with Captain James Fennell, United States Navy, retired, one of our nation's most distinguished and I think astute naval intelligence officers. Though he is now retired, he has very much continued his public service to our country over the space of, I think some 30 years or so of that service in uniform, much of it spent raising an alarm about what was coming, what he forecast would be the decade of concern as the Chinese military becomes, well, a peer competitor, as people euphemistically like to put it. If not superior to us in many ways, militarily at the least. Captain Fennell, as I mentioned earlier, you've written a tremendously important book on this subject, embracing Communist China, America's greatest strategic failure, and countless essays and articles on all manner of things, many of them at American Greatness. I want you to Explain to us as best you can how it could be that the intelligence community in which you operated for so long could be telling the President of the United States, at least this is what's reportedly been going on, that it's absolutely bankable that Keir Starmer, a radical leftist who is, I think, presiding over the demise of his country, and it's, it's seeming adopting a vassal state status to Communist China based on his appeasement of the CCP during his recent visit to China. There seem to be so many things wrong with this deal. But if that is, in fact, an intelligence assessment, it suggests to me that we've got a even more serious problem with our intelligence community than I thought. Explain what's going on here, if you would.
- [15:32]
Captain James Fennell
Yeah, Frank. Well, for the last 40 years, we've had unwritten policy, since we switched recognition in 1979 from Taiwan to the People's Republic of China. There is essentially grown in our governmental system, especially its State Department, but also in the bowels of the Pentagon and in the intelligence community, Langley and other places that says it really is important to engage with China, because if we engage with them, you know, they'll be brought into our system and they'll slowly adopt the system in some form or fashion, maybe not completely, but it'll be better than confrontation, because confrontation will lead to immediately to thermonuclear war. So, you know, that's kind of the short description of how the mentality is. And so over 40 years of that mindset that was only first broken in Trump's first administration, we're still battling against people that have, you know, went to college and got their degrees, got into the government, went to think tanks, went and got advanced degrees, went back into the government, got their PhDs, they wrote books, they were invested in going to China for conferences and being hosted by the Chinese Communist Party through their various think tanks. And they have hundreds of think tanks in China compared to the handfuls that we have.
- [16:56]
Frank Gaffney
By the way, Jim, if I understand this correctly, you can't get a visa to go to China, let alone do all of that schmoozing there. If you are in disfavor with the ccp. Is that right here, too?
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Captain James Fennell
Yes. There's a whole cadre of people that have been denied visas whenever they spoke out. One of the most famous in academia is a guy named Perry Link, Dr. Perry Link, and he was a China expert, and he made some critical comments about China, and he. He was banished from China for the last 30, 20, 30 years.
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Frank Gaffney
So which is bad for your reputation as an academic among other things.
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Captain James Fennell
Well, he survived, Dr. Link survived and is well respected in America but he has not been able to go back. And so they hold this over people. Not they don't come up and say it to you but it's all known and people know that. So it affects what they say and we see it in the analysis. So I'm not surprised that somebody inside the US intelligence community is advising the President from two angles. The UK NATO angle, which is saying, hey, we've been too hard on NATO and we've said too much about Greenland and the Panama Canal and what we did in Venezuela. So we're going to lose Europe. So this would push them over the edge, so we better not do that. And then you have the China hands, the engagers in the IC and in the China side that says don't worry about it, it's not a threat. There's all these legal hoops and treaties and obligations and things that there's no way they could get it, so don't worry about it. And that's the same crew that said don't worry about the Chinese navy. It's never going to be more than a brown water navy. Today it's the largest navy in the world. I have the same feeling about in the economic arena. We have people in the economic arena, the so called China hands, experts in economics that have told us for 30, 40 years, don't worry about the Chinese currency, it's never going to overtake the US dollar.
- [18:49]
Frank Gaffney
Can't possibly happen.
- [18:51]
Captain James Fennell
Right. And we're on that path. And so I've seen this, I've seen this before. This isn't my first rodeo. So when I hear somebody tell the president, hey, don't worry about it, you don't, you're not going to lose Diego Garcia. I instinctively say no, that's not, that's, let's not, let's just not take that on good faith. Let's hold our cards and keep what we have. There's no, we're not abusing anybody. We're not hurting anybody. The place is pristine. We up and keep it up. There's no pollution, it's fine. So there's no reason to give it up. The people of Chagos, they have their disputes with the United Kingdom. That's something that they can take up separately. United Kingdom's let in hundreds of thousands of immigrants already. So if they want a few more, they can do that. But that's not our business to get involved with. So I think it's a strategic blunder. If we just pass on this, and I think it'll be an albatross around the President's neck and it will be used against him in the 26 midterms and in the 28 election against the, you know, the GOP, which is a secondary concern. But it is something. If you want to maintain a strong national defense, and you know that one party isn't inclined to do that because they have a past track record of gutting our national defense, then you, you may not want to allow that party to have such wide ranging controls against.
- [20:15]
Frank Gaffney
Jim, let me ask you about two particular aspects of this deal. And we're talking about the Chagos Islands writ large. But specifically Diego Garcia, of course, is at the center of this controversy about the British deal. One aspect of it is you alluded to this. They're going to have to spend billions of dollars to lease this island base from Mauritius. Last time I checked, the Brits are not exactly awash with cash. And our friend Cleo Pascal, who has done wonderful work along with you and Colonel Grant Newsom and others, has pointed out that if you miss one payment, you're late in making a payment to Mauritius, the deal is cratered and they can use that as a pretext to kick us out. Is that so, sir? And again, how could anybody possibly think this is a sensible arrangement?
- [21:15]
Captain James Fennell
Yeah, Frank, I've heard those arguments made by Cleo and I'm not a legal expert, but that sounds about right. Other folks that we know, like retired Captain Brent Sadler from the Heritage foundation has talked about, you know, we would need an actual new treaty signed between the United States and the UK to specifically state that this base could not be given away. It would have to be approved and ratified by the Senate in order to make sure that that could not be twisted on us in the case that the Brits missed a payment. And we're already, you know, we, we are, we are up to our eyeballs with the Brits in Aukus. The Aukus agreement, Australia, UK US Defense Agreement, which is largely focused on building nuclear submarines that will be deployed out in the Western Pacific with Australia. So we, we're counting on the Brits to be able to come through with some, some serious money that we're not sure about. And now they're going to sign up for a 35 billion dollar giveaway to Mauritius for a base that we already have possession of.
- [22:21]
Frank Gaffney
I'm just going to tell you that ain't going to happen. There will be at least an interruption in these payments. And that would be a pretext again for ensuring not only that this base is no longer available to us, but Jim, I'm convinced that the ultimate play which Keir Starmer seemingly is all about is, you know, appeasing China. And there it will wind up in the hands of the People's Liberation Army Navy. There's one other aspect of this, Jim, that I want to cover with you as well. Going to have to take that up on the other side of the very short break. I hope you'll stay tuned for more of this incredibly important conversation with Captain James Finnell, United States Navy retired. Be right back. We're back. So is Captain James Finnell, a dear friend, a valued member of our committee on the present Danger China and one of the country's preeminent experts on matters involving the Chinese Communist Party, born of years of studying them and working to counter them in his role as a naval intelligence officer, excuse me, ultimately rising through the ranks not only to Captain, but as the chief of intelligence and information operations for the US Pacific Fleet. He was intimately involved in again warning about this decade of concern. We're in it now, folks, and the question is how soon does China lash out in a kinetic way? We'll get to that in a moment. But Jim, just a final thought on this whole deal about Diego Garcia. As I understand it, Mauritius is a signatory to one of these nuclear disarmament ideas that would, if they have sovereignty over Diego Garcia, preclude the United States Navy from storing nuclear weapons on that base and would allow the Chinese Communists the right to inspect to ensure that that isn't taking place. Again, all of this is seemingly just unbelievably, you know, dangerous as well as strategically benighted, self imposed errors. Is there something I'm missing about that aspect of this deal?
- [25:14]
Captain James Fennell
No, Frank, that's spot on. That's reporting again out of the UK There's a African Nuclear Weapon Free Zone Treaty which Mauritius is a signator to and it allows for the inspection of those African territories that are a part of that agreement. So, and the Mauritian Deputy Prime Minister here in this last few months or weeks has said that they've declared that the UK and the US will not be allowed to store nuclear weapons at Diego Garcia. So they've already told us ahead of time that they're going to take that trip off the table for us. So if we, if we allow this to happen, then it's not through ignorance, it's through malice forethought. I just cannot put it any other way. It's absolutely incredible that we would allow that to happen.
- [26:02]
Frank Gaffney
Well, Jim, I want to commend to our audience that they take a look at this letter. I guess it was only called a public statement that you and I and Cleo and Grant Newsham and some 76 others recently signed on the grounds that this idea of surrendering, as we did, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to Mauritius, let alone to the Chinese Communist Party, the island base of Diego Garcia, is so absolutely reckless in terms of the national security interests of the United States and those that we support with our power projection capabilities, that it must not happen. And I pray that Captain Sadler is on something here that at a minimum, the Senate would insist that it have some say in this decision, if in fact it goes that way. Unfortunately, I'm seeing in a number of places it's not just the Guardian any longer or the Daily Telegraph, I guess you said, but it's all over that the President is about to make this decision. Perhaps by the time this program airs, he will have done so. I pray not. And we will be very much talking about it in the days to come if he does. But, Jim, let me pivot to this other issue of the day with China. And you have been very actively engaged in the debate about what exactly is going on with Xi Jinping and the military of China. It's generally described sort of generically as purges that he's been engineering among senior military officers. And you have been deeply skeptical of the idea that this is all evidence that he's losing his grip, that he's in fact now no longer capable of projecting power himself, himself, notably against Taiwan. Give us your current read on what's going on. And they say that the debate about it, sir.
- [28:20]
Captain James Fennell
Well, Frank, the G last or a few weeks ago, a couple of weeks ago, removed the last two of seven members of this Central Military Commission. One of them was a vice chairman, General Zhang Yushi, and he was 75 years old. He was the elder, most senior PLA uniformed officer, greatly respected for his service, long service. He was a princeling. His father served along Mao, just like Xi Shi Ping's father served long. Now. So if your father was somebody that went through the Long March and was part of Mao in establishing the People's Republic of China, you get a special dispensation in place in the Communist Party and you are, you are touched, as they say, you've got a blessing over you. So he's been in that system in the PLA and greatly respected and fought in their Last combat operation against Vietnam in 1979. A completely different world, a completely different combat operation, ground warfare, and a completely different age with different weapons systems, things of that nature. But over the course of the last 13 plus years that Xi's been in power, he has been selectively removing people that have been identified as being corrupt. And we know that the Chinese system, especially in the military, there's corruption there, whether it's overt corruption to cash in on weapons sales and things of that nature, or it's open corruption for your promotion. So various forms of corruption. And Xi has made it a point since he came in that he was going to purify the party and the PLA to make sure that there was no more corruption. And he has been about transforming the PLA from what it was when he took over command of the Chinese Communist Party and as the chairman of the central Military Commission in late 2012. And over those 13, 14 years now, he has done some dramatic shifts. For instance, transforming from seven military regions, which were stovepipes, into five theater commands that are joint, run by joint staffs, that are answerable to a central military commission that is now joint and not run just by the army. And so we now see some of the theater commands led by Navy admirals, some led by Air Force generals. And we've seen the raising up of the army or the Air Force, the Navy and the Space Force, and also the creation of the Joint Logistics Support Force, the Joint Information Support Force, so that they have the things that are needed to be able to be truly combat effective in any operation that they were assigned. And then we've actually seen the procurement of these major weapons systems. I focus on the Navy. So as I said in the previous segment, The Chinese navy, 25 years ago, 30 years ago, they were a brown water coastal navy. Today they are the largest navy in the world. And they are certainly by far the most largest navy in the Western Pacific with the largest number of surface combatants, submarines, aircraft carriers now, and advanced supersonic and hypersonic anti ship cruise missiles that can be launched from aircraft, surface ship submarines and shore batteries. They operate in what they call complex electromagnetic environments that Xi has instituted. And all of that has been going on under Xi. And in fact, just today, they just announced they rolled out another type 052 Delta, you know, 10,000 ton destroyer of the Lu Yang 3 class. This is almost their 40th one in the last about 12 years. So at the same time, also today, there was an announcement that China removes three lawmakers with the defense sector who had ties to these top generals. So what G is doing is he's purging the military from people that are corrupt. Yet we continue to see the PLA grow and operate not just in what they have, but in what they're doing. For instance, their operations around Taiwan. In the last five years, they have increased air operations around Taiwan by 15 fold. 15 fold in five years.
- [32:41]
Frank Gaffney
If you look, including crossing that center line between the center lines.
- [32:46]
Captain James Fennell
Another thing, this is around Taiwan 15 times greater than it was five years ago. And the center line, up until 2020, they'd only crossed it four times. Now they're crossing a thousand times a year. So. And they're, they're training.
- [33:01]
Frank Gaffney
All of which is part of what has been described by. As rehearsals for the invasion of Taiwan. No.
- [33:08]
Captain James Fennell
Right. And G's been purging for this whole time that he's been in power. So the idea that his purges have made him weaker and have less control over the pla, it just, it doesn't pass observable evidence of what we're seeing from the pla. And then you add in the diplomatic arena, where Xi has just hosted, you know, the Prime Minister of Canada, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the prime Minister of Finland. He's got the chairman, chancellor coming up, the head, the prime minister from Uruguay. He is hosting all of these things. And he's putting out, you know, cognitive warfare propaganda that says that Xi and the Chinese Communist Party are leading the world in terms of diplomacy and engagement and that they are the. The most rational world leaders. And then you look at their economic growth. They continue to make inroads with the belt and road and their currency. And so across all these fronts, they continue to show demonstrable pieces of evidence that Xi, if he's not in power, then I would hate to think of what it is if he is in power, because right now, they are on the rise and we are not recognizing it. And so this is my concern, is that there's a group of people that are in the diaspora from China, people from other groups that are looking at this and say to themselves, oh, this is proof that he's not in charge. And so we're going to push that narrative. And it has been pushed everywhere. In fact, it's so effective that it's impacting analysis from people that should know better. And that's my great concern.
- [34:46]
Frank Gaffney
The threat inflators, as you call them, Jim, along with the fellow travelers, the captured elites are the enemy within. It seems to me, Jim, we have to take another short break. We'll be right back with more with Captain James Finnell, United States Navy retired, co author of Embracing Communist China. We mustn't continue doing that. We're back. And so, I am delighted to say is Captain James Funnell, United States Navy retired. He is these days a senior fellow with the Geneva center for Security Policy. He is the co author with Dr. Bradley Thayer of a marvelous book, Embracing Communist China, America's Greatest Strategic Failure. He is also an essayist of considerable renown at American greatness. Much of his essays appear there. I urge you to check them all out. And Jim, I wanted to just ask you, based on something you touched on in several of your previous comments about what's going on with our friends so called in Great Britain and our friends so called in Canada and even in Australia, despite that Aukus deal, in all three of these countries you have hard left, if not downright, you know, communist leaderships that seem ever more aligned with the Chinese and engaged in ways that are, well, absolutely contrary to our vital interests. Don't know about New Zealand. It might apply there too. It certainly has in the past. But these are the Anglophone countries, as they're called, who have made up with us the so called Five Eyes intelligence sharing arrangements. You might speak a little bit about the importance, importance of the kind of intelligence that we do share with those allies and the implications of what's happening here not only with respect to Xi's obvious efforts to divide and conquer, but also perhaps obtain access to some of the most sensitive secrets of our nation.
- [37:24]
Captain James Fennell
Yeah, Frank, the Five Eyes Sharing Agreement, Intelligence sharing agreement was born out of the Cold War. And as you said, it was the five Anglosphere countries, US included. And because in the post World War II environment, you know, we were the first ones to get satellites up in the, up in the space. We had a great advantage in our capacity to do a collection from space. They're called national technical means, but because our allies, like the UK was the British Empire, they had listening stations and human intelligence assets around the globe. Just like Australia gives us access to different kinds of telemetry information in New Zealand as well and Canada in the north, we work with them in NORAD to protect our northern tier with radar and things of that nature. So we had this system arranged where we basically it was unimpeded. We shared like we were one nation in a sense. Not everything, but I'd say a large, large percentage of, of intelligence is shared amongst those five nations. And never before would anybody ever suggest to disrupt that for the reasons that you just stated, because there was always this belief in the IC that, well, you know, this is separate from politics, this is national security, and we don't want to disrupt that. But when you start asking yourself, what are our allies doing, who's running those countries and what are they doing with the information that they have? I mean, there's even rumors about how did they use this Five Eyes, in our own election system, we can't spy on our own people during elections. But if we ask our allies to spy, there's nothing that says they can't do that. So I'm not going to say they.
- [39:12]
Frank Gaffney
Did do that in 2020, if I'm not mistaken.
- [39:15]
Captain James Fennell
Well, there's a lot of people that are suggesting that, and there's some evidence to that. So my point is we need, it's time for us to reassess where we are with the Five Eyes agreement. We have a strong, strong ally in Japan right now, and we've had a strong ally in Japan, and Japan is on the front lines facing the main thing, the Chinese Communist Party. And we don't have the same kind of alliance or information sharing agreement with them that we do with our, you know, the UK and others. So why, why is that not that way and what are we doing about it? So I would say just depoliticize it. Have the Secretary of Defense and War and the Director of National Intelligence, Central Intelligence. Let's, let's reconsider all of this. It's going to get political and there's going to be intense pushback and resistance to it. But we have to be concerned about our national security. And if we're allowing people to see signals intelligence data and other kinds of data from us and how are they using that and who are they sharing it with? We used to have an assurance that it wouldn't go outside of that Five Eyes. We don't have that necessarily anymore. And now we find out that the UK is going to allow. Starmer, is going to allow the PRC to build what they call a super embassy in the middle of London that's going to have an underground cavernous facilities with several hundred rooms, over 200 rooms that is really close to critical underground cables that, you know, could be containing our intelligence. So people need to wake up and make sure we're not, you know, letting them get inside our lifelines.
- [41:02]
Frank Gaffney
Yeah, well, and again, it further reinforces the point we've just been discussing of why on earth would you rely on a government that is behaving this way to assure your continued strategic power projection capabilities over much of the world. It's, it's absolutely insane. Jim, one other thing that I did want to ask you about, I saw it, I think, in one of the incredibly important reports and analyses and news stories and the like that you circulate through your Red Storm risen Google Group. It's a grand, a very important public service the Chinese are making noise about. I'm not sure it's coming from the official Chinese government entities, but their surrogates that there will be war in our hemisphere if President Trump persists in trying to get China extracted from it. It's deeply penetrated Latin America, as you know, Jim, both physically and you know, through their business entanglements and their belt and road initiative and so on. And they don't, I think, have any intention of going anywhere, notwithstanding the loss of Maduro in Venezuela, one of their key assets and allies. What do you make of these threats? Are they credible, as you see it, that we could find ourselves in a shooting war with China over our efforts to re establish the Monroe Doctrine or some call it the Don Roh Doctrine and our hemispheric security policy?
- [42:46]
Captain James Fennell
Yeah, Frank, I think right now what I these, these discussions and these articles that are coming out in PRC press, I haven't seen anything officially from the PRC government, but what's coming out in Global Times and others is this idea that the United States.
- [43:00]
Frank Gaffney
Jim, I'm sorry I have to interrupt you. We got to take a short break. We'll get the answer on the other side of it. Stay tuned, folks. Be right back with Captain Jim for now. We're back for this final installment of a very, very informative and, well, frankly distressing conversation with Captain Jim Fennell, one of our leading experts on the threat we face from the Chinese Communist Party. We're proud to have him as a member of our committee on the present Danger China and to collaborate well weekly on this program, among other ways. We're deeply, deeply grateful to you, sir, for your continuing service. Let me just finish this thought you were responding to a question that I put to you about China in our hemisphere. Had to interrupt you due to the break, but finish your answer, if you would.
- [44:05]
Captain James Fennell
I think, Frank, that the PRC is responding through their surrogates and in their press like Global Times, to kind of put out their feelers in response to what President Trump has done with this hemispheric defense policy and the fact of what he's having success in it. For instance, with what's just happened in Panama this last week where the Panamanian Supreme Court said that CK Hutchinson, this Hong Kong shipping group that owns both ends of the Panama Canal for, you know, control of the, essentially the Panama Canal in terms of the waterway and the locks and all that, they have now been said that they're not allowed, that was an illegal deal and they're going to have to turn over this to I think initially Maersk as a temporary administrator of the canal, which is there from the Netherlands. That's quite interesting until there's a new arrangement made. And so I think China is now recognizing that they've invested by some estimates. I saw an estimate today from Lichtenstein based analysis that said that China's invested over the last several years several billions, close to a trillion dollars in into South America across all these countries, whether it's 5G with Huawei and other telecom installations, port facilities like in Peru and other investments in the economies of these countries to get iron ore and lithium and natural resources. So China's been fully working under the radar over the last 20 years in pushing themselves into Latin America. And now the President has said no, that's not going to happen anymore. And so they're rightly, not rightly, they're, it's in their minds they're rightly upset about this and so they're going to try to push back on it. But the idea that they're going to launch combat operations in Latin America, I think that's a stretch. Today they have other fish to fry in terms of Taiwan in the Central Pacific, Japan and disputed territories with India. But let's just assume that the decade of concern goes their way and they're able to gobble up Taiwan. You can guarantee between 2030 and 2049, China will be much, much more, the Chinese military will be much, much more active in Latin America than they are right now because they'll have restored China to what they believe is their rightful territory and that it'll be an open field for them to operate in Latin America if President Trump and his views go away.
- [46:46]
Frank Gaffney
This is absolutely predictable, it seems to me. And the Chinese are giving themselves the option with what are inherently dual use infrastructure developments in many of the nations of the region. It's something that President Trump has got to stick to and implement and his successors as well. Jim, let me turn to one last item with you. There's a lot of talk at the moment, as you know, about ice, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement team that is trying to remove illegal aliens. The worst of the worst, we're told. My view of this is that if you're really serious about the worst of the worst. You've got to be thinking about and taking action against what by some estimates are tens of thousands, thousands of Chinese soldiers that were brought into this country illegally thanks to Joe Biden's open borders. And this has made all the more dangerous. This worst of the worst, truly worst of the worst threat is by virtue of something that our colleague Sam Faddes has called attention to, as have you, namely that we found another biological warfare laboratory like the one in Reedley, California, down the road from a key naval installation up there now in Las Vegas. And there are reports that they're suspected that there may be as many as 20 other of these labs scattered around the country. Something specifically warned about by the Select Committee on China and the United States House of Representatives. Jim, I guess my concern is several fold. One is that's a formula for utter disaster if those soldiers marry up with the vials of deadly pathogens that Sam says could kill 60 to 90% of those exposed to them. And on top of it, we don't seem to be prioritizing the, the detection, let alone the removal, neutralization of these soldiers. Give us quickly two minutes. Your thoughts?
- [49:02]
Captain James Fennell
Yeah, Frank, when we exposed or we didn't expose, but when we talked about the Reedley in the San Joaquin Valley near Fresno Biolab that was found two years ago, I mean, it was a big deal for me because I had served at Naval Air Station Lemoore, which is the master jet base of the US Pacific fleets West Coast F18 Hornets and their carrier Air Wing staffs. And I'd lived there, worked there, and that that place is less than 30 miles away, that they found this. Now I find out, we find out that there's another bio lab in Las Vegas near Nellis Air force base, within 20 miles of Nellis Air Force Base. If there's another 20 around or more, where are they? Unless somebody needs to start doing their intelligence work and start mapping these locations out to see if they're next to our military installations. And if we find another one that's even close in the 20 mile radius of a military installation, then we have a problem. We have a problem. But it will be undeniable. This should be the top story in the country today, but my fear is, is that what's going to happen is that there are going to be whisperers, China whisperers that are going to come to President Trump in the dark of the night and, or in tweets or whatever and they're going to tell them, don't Worry about this, Mr. President. This is something that's been created to disrupt your economic deal that you're going to try to cement with Xi when you go in April to Beijing. And so he's going to be told that this is all something about nothing, and it's just a bunch of, you know, far right people trying to stir up things to get back at China because they're the China super hawks and they don't like China. And if I could tell the President anything right now, I'd say, sir, you cannot doubt what China says they want to do. Read Unrestricted warfare. Understand their intense hatred of us.
- [50:52]
Frank Gaffney
Yeah, and not that. Not least their plan, according to Deng Xiaoping, to use bioweapons to depopulate the United States so it could be colonized by China. Jim, we have to leave it at that. Thank you so much, Captain. You are a national treasure. Come back to us again soon, if you would. I hope the rest of you do the same next time. Until then, go forth and multiply.
- [51:24]
Podcast Host
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [51:27]
Frank Gaffney
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